I WON'T FORCE MYSELF

I WON’T FORCE MYSELF

 

I won’t force myself to say things

that are tender and loving about life

though there’s much that you can say that is true.

Perhaps it’s no more

than a preference for an illusion,

but I like to see things clearly as they are

as they arise in me

spontaneously out of the void.

I don’t cramp space with my own amplitude

when I add myself to everything like zero.

I am the wholeness of a timeless solitude

that pierces my heart

with a cold spear of existential grace

I almost fear to feel again and again and again

when I embody the longing and the pain

and taste the agony of the beauty and the power,

the burning mystery and the dangerous history

of everything in creation,

suffering my own awareness

like a wounded gift

in wondering if I was born to know

why I am this and nothing other.

The black mirror lies down like a midnight lake

to feel the stars walking across its skin

like long-legged spiders on water.

A doe steps out of the woods

like a constellation into a clearing

and drinks warily from her own eyes.

And where is there an end or a beginning of this?

And when you realize

there are no lies,

that everything is as it is,

what need to seek the truth?

Or delusion with delusion

make up things to enhance your ignorance

of everything you already are

if you could only see your shining

through the eyes of the star

that saw you coming a long time ago

like the dark abundance beyond the lamp

the bright vacancy of the light could grow into

even as it does now.

Sometimes I ache

with the mystic specificity

of this strange effloresence in time

I pretend I know is my mind

when it pearls the world from a grain of sand

that doesn’t understand

the cornerstone that it’s become

and what in the vastness of space upholds it.

And how it sheds itself like eyes of water

streaming down the cheeks of the rose

to clarify its beauty

in the river it scooped the moon from

to wear in the world as a face.

It’s the life of meaning

that goes looking for the meaning of life

and it’s the life of meaning

beyond the scratched shales of the oldest book

it ever gave itself to like inspiration to a theme

glyphed out of its own fossils

that is the first to find it

and the last to look.

Things are what they seem

if you include the seeming in the way you look

the way you play along with children

who dress up to try on who they are.

See the world as a smile.

See the world as a scar.

A firefly in a lighthouse.

Lightning in a jar.

 

PATRICK WHITE