DOWNGRADING THE IMPORTANCE
Downgrading the importance
of who I was yesterday
to see who I might be today
there’s no window
there’s no mirror
there’s no mind
that retains a trace of me.
I am trashed like a kite on a mountaintop,
torn up like the blueprint of a flawed constellation
that might have made things better
for anyone born under it
like a thirteenth house of the zodiac
that’s open all night to the homeless.
Time makes windchimes
out of the skeletons of young poets
and I can still pick out a few of mine
trying to untangle themselves
from the downed powerlines
of their defective voices.
Born on an island
I stood by the sea
and made choices.
I was young
and wanted to live like life
beyond my means.
And this day forty years later
is just as much a part of then
as now is,
so there’s just as much to spend
and though the features have changed
and the stars been rearranged
to marquee different names,
the seeing remains the same
and the wine is just as sweet
in the cracked
as it is in the whole cup.
I sit down with the moon
and we both drink up
at the backdoor of the asylum
neither of us could save
until we’re both hilariously empty,
knowing, the way life flows,
we’ll never run out of ourselves.
But I don’t let the chooser
talk to the chosen
in my voice anymore
and if the odd road
still barges through the door
now and then
to track thresholds all over the floor
like a painted dance for war and rain,
I’ll still shed a few feathers of light
from the black hole of my brain
to commute the cause.
It’s important to heed the blind
but a true noetic cosmology
is the heretic of its own laws
and doesn’t leave anything behind
that could be construed
as a relic, a derelict, or a sign.
No window.
No mirror.
No mind.
PATRICK WHITE
