WATERCLOCKING MY WAY
Waterclocking my way like a cloud
into a bigger sky
or trowelling away the stars
that cling to my bones
to get back to the unvarnished marrow
of my myriadic origins,
I realize I am as lost
as a rootless tree
or a voiceless echo
in a mausoleum of transformations
that didn’t wait for me to happen first.
So it’s anyone’s guess who I am now
and I’ve cleaned out all the oceans
of all possible life-forms
on the way to being me
to clarify the mirror
so I could see
but now, even the mirror
has run out of ontological notions.
But lately I’ve begun to suspect
that life isn’t motion or entropy,
neither still nor active,
not here now like me
nor coming to be,
not my next breath
nor a death that can’t be forsaken,
nor the space beyond these sexual opposites
engendered out of their own mutuality,
but the immensity of the godlessness that secures
my own unattainability,
and realizing the impossibility of being
I am no longer marginalized by existence.
PATRICK WHITE
