DON'T NEED TO KNOW WHO I AM.doc

DON’T NEED TO KNOW WHO  I AM

 

Don’t need to know who I am

as much as I once did

when autumn was more of a child.

Suspect I’m nothing in a good sense

though that could be just the illusory spin

I put on my growing intimacy with zeroes.

The one-candidate democracy of a tree

loses its votes like leaves

and retires into its roots.

Radix, radish, radical,

the old causes still cling to my boots

like starmud that won’t wash off

and I still comb out the hair

of comets that have yet

to fall from their haloes

and wake from their comas

to find me waiting there

right where they left me

in the wake of their light like a comma.

Don’t want as much as I once did

when I thought I was needy

and the way I take

looks more like sharing with others

for my own sake

than a scumlord evicting welfare mothers.

Love, poetry, clarity, wisdom

compassion, darkness and light

still creep into the apple

like night while I’m sleeping

to sweeten the green star in my chest

that looks over these mangers like seeds,

but more and more now

I’m a magus of the wind

who doesn’t lead or follow

anyone anywhere further than my next breath

though I’m sometimes weirded out

by the boundless shapes and Burgess shales

of my own uncentered circumference.

But chronic excitability

isn’t the same thing

as creative flare

just as indefinability

isn’t proof that nothing’s there

and I try to avoid both

without breaking

like the wishbone of a road

by taking the third extreme of the path I am

and going off in all directions at once

lightyears ahead of my own eyes like a star

that doesn’t know it’s shining.

So it’s always a little early for myths

to start connecting dots in the darkness

that will grow like cataracts and starmaps

over the clarity of the view

that is each one of us

without anything on

long before we were born

musing in our protean potential.

Ultimately what’s the difference

between a face

you can’t say is crazy

and a face you can’t say is sane?

And if you’re like me

and like to get off your throne

and wander incognito

through spaces in yourself

where the mirrors don’t recognize you

because there are no eyes in the darkness

that are your own,

and the seeing shrugs off

the stone-yoke of the bridge

that was erected between the seer and the seen,

and the dark matter of the black rose of being

isn’t templed in thorns

around the eye of a needle

we will all pass through eventually

like light through a gate as wide as the mind

that left it open,

if you’re like me and grow

by giving up much to hold on to more

than you could ever deface

in any scale of loss and gain

then you’ll throw your chances into the pan like dice

knowing there are no odds 

to weigh them against

except the last feather of life

you just breathed out.

And when they ask you where you’ve been

and what you’ve seen

by giving up your eyes

you’ll run down the mountain of the world

like the tears of time into eternity

and there won’t be a sea on the moon

you can’t fill like Atlantis in the empty lifeboat

you made of your mind

when you threw yourself overboard

in a sudden squall of stars

in the last act of the mystery

that negated your personal history

like a torch going out in a painted cave

to enlighten the night

by plunging its stars

like words on a window

into the eyes of a deeper darkness

than the light has ever known.

 

PATRICK WHITE