SPARE ME

SPARE ME

 

Spare me the inky, thinky glue

and matchstick rafters of your philosophy

piled like a pyre to proposition a corpse

or I’ll show you what a snappy Zippo can do.

And don’t pour honey all over my head

trying to turnpike a tarpit

into an asphalt highway with a toll booth

when you know there are all kinds of extinct species

I like to keep like memories to myself

and I don’t have a sweet tooth for candied stars.

There are dark truths in the night

that keep the light to themselves,

occasions of insight

whose light has never fallen upon anyone

who could see.

The sun at midnight

isn’t blinded by its own lucidity.

And when reality sits down to play with me

there are no eyes or mirrors up its sleeve.

Average out the crucials as you wish

and believe whatever you want to believe,

order the trees to pull themselves up by their bootstraps,

conceive and be conceived by life

like the dawn of a book you haven’t written yet.

Wash the night off your butterflies like soot

changing shifts at the small factories

they’ve adapted to like pollen

or pin them like poppies and medals

to the chests of the fallen as loss requires.

Who knows?

You might make a choir

out of the orchard in winter yet

and raise all that roadkill like a messianic vet

alone in the wilderness

listening to the bush wolves and racoons

like angels and demons

howling in the bowels

of the maggots and turkey-vultures

attending to caloric conversions of their own.

But you can’t add to the lustre of the dark mirror

whose clear light is the eye of the void

by washing mud off with mud.

It’s one thing to see things in the light

but it’s wholly another

to see them illuminated

by the light within the light

that is their dark mother.

Anyway, it’s not really crucial

whether you have the eyes for it or not,

because the way things come together here

where we stand in unknowing wonderment before the stars

like rootless trees still swinging from our own branches

of feeling and thought,

is all ways at once.

So it’s as good a medium as any

to express yourself

by going into hiding.

Deus absconditus.

Gods do it to conserve energy.

As it is to go off like the Big Bang

and squander yourself like atoms

on the minutiae of creation.

There are infinite centres in the eye of the void

falling through space

like uncradled angels of rain right now

to give birth to the boundless circles

that are growing you like a tree

by expanding your radii

all at once in every direction

like a pulse, a star, a wave, a snake, an insight

riding its own sentience like the sea

that finds it one and the same

to walk on stars

without burning its feet

as it does to walk barefoot on water like you

leaving your shoes on land

where all journeys end in their own beginning

like mangers of fallen fruit.

Whether you’re looking for God

in the spirit’s lost and found

or the the true undemonized nature

of reality and mind

behind the veil of a faceless dimension

that mans and unmans the measure of all things

in the lightmirrors it takes a thought to cross your mind

from the perennial beginning,

haven’t you noticed how the needle of the compass

you’re using to grope the curbs of your own coasts

like a blind man witching his way with a stick

across a street when the lights turn

keeps pointing back at you

like a crosswalk following the maps

you’ve laid out to explore the topography

of your own used thresholds?

 

PATRICK WHITE