CHERISHING THESE FEW HOURS

CHERISHING THESE FEW HOURS

 

Cherishing these few hours of the morning

as an intimacy

I am not compelled to indulge.

It’s raining. Washing

the dust of the road off the car

freaked by silver rivers of silt.

Painting on the easel.

Poem on the go.

They happen as they will.

Shapeshifting views of turmoil

in a bag of skin.

It’s tricky coaxing snakes to dance.

I look out the window.

What do I know?

I think the windows are crying

but it’s hard to tell the water from the glass

and no one’s saying anything

but even in daylight

when the morning is not beautiful

I’m still a soft fossil on the moon 

waiting for its oceans to return

with news of other places to live

though I know I am only

romantically enhancing

the quality of my hopelessness.

And all contradictions and aburdities aside

I’ve learned to live amicably

with advanced modes of ambivalence

that leave me suspended in space

like a quartz crystal in a dreamcatcher

that never caught anything

it didn’t immediately throw back

after it tore the moon out of my mouth like a hook

or a German syllable.

And it may still be my voice

but you can’t reseed a burnt forest with a book

and I don’t try anymore

though the ghosts of a noble aspiration

are hard to ignore when they summon the living

to answer the dead.

You may think

you can approach madness

with a level head

and your feet firmly planted on the ground

and a graduate knowledge of precedents

that drinks from the mouths

of what other men have said

but you’re only building Taj Mahals

on cornerstones of quicksand in a dream.

Things are and are not what they seem

and the stories you tell like smoke

are just the history of a fire

that hasn’t fully consumed you.

And even when it does,

who’s left to say anything anyways

as a million blades of grass

put down their swords

like hostile witnesses

and the oldest galaxies in the multiverse

are suddenly looking back with longing

through their lost dimensions

at you

as if you were the source

of something true

they could rely on.

I offer them my emptiness like space,

my voice like time

and light like a face

to conceal my darkness.

 

PATRICK WHITE