INTIMATELY BLEAK SATURDAY MORNING
Intimately bleak Saturday morning.
Dirty snow all over the ground
like fog that took itself too seriously,
like me at this desk here by a window in Perth
blurred and zoned out by the greyness of everything
as if all these soft forms saturated with space
and arrayed before me were just
more of the habits of life,
smoke from the hilltop watchfires
warning of another approaching desire
dipping its candles in a black mass.
I keep coming to these intersections of life
where any road’s as good as any other
and I stand in a moment of realized stillness
wanting to want something again,
for one direction to seem more urgent than the rest.
But I don’t mean to sound as if
I’m just a voice and a breath shy of the urn;
I’m not; I still burn, but the fire lives on nothing
and though I am forever transformed
into people it takes me a while to get to know,
I am never consumed.
PATRICK WHITE
