MAYBE I'M DOING SOMETHING THAT MATTERS

MAYBE I’M DOING SOMETHING THAT MATTERS

Maybe I’m doing something that matters.

Maybe not.

But having chewed off my last leg

to be free

and drunk my blood

down to the last black hole

that took it all in like an eye

without an iris,

it’s ironic that there are nights

when all I seem to be able to do now

is lie here like bait

in a trap that’s coiled like lightning

to catch something

I don’t even know exists.

Worlds within worlds,

subtleties within subtleties,

it’s difficult to assess

how many labyrinths

have lost their way in me,

but I am humbled by the vastness

of my incomprehension

when I look at the stars

through a clearing

on a backcountry road

seizing their existence out of space

and returning it like a river of light

to the darkness.

I am staggered by the magnanimous silence

of the sheer weight and wonder of it all

that I should exist to be this

as if there were no eyes

between the vision and the seer

and I was not the delinquent mirror

in an uninhabited holy place

that had forgotten my face.

PATRICK WHITE

HARD TO FIND MY PULSE

HARD TO FIND MY PULSE

Hard to find my pulse, my heart sometimes

in all the mundane commotion

of the gateway circumstances

that keep shuffling along like refugees

well past the last embassy

that might have been able to identify them.

Imagination sets the scene

and empathy peoples it

with lonely miracles of transformation

that liberate us like emotions in a dream

and for awhile, it’s peace to be who we are

with everyone else in the same lifeboat

breathing in and out

as if we were all rowing

toward the same star.

Then the moment slips out of that sky

like a snake shedding its skin

and I’m confounded

by all these new constellations

blowing around on the wind

as if they revelled in their homelessness.

Yesterday they were traffic lights,

myths, street signs, lighthouses and beacons,

but today they’re all gypsies and fireflies.

Reality is not the basis for understanding

because it is wholly without characteristics

and the black sun of noon

and the white sun of midnight

are inherently blind

in the midst of their own radiance

just as your eyes that see everything

can’t see themselves

except as simulacra and reflections.

Your eyes can’t prove to your eyes

that they exist

just as you can’t prove to you

that you don’t.

In the tiniest thing,

the vastest expanse,

no seer, no seen,

space is the seeing

that animates being spontaneously

like this poem out of my better lies

or a mushroom turning the pages

of its book of gills

like an earthbound moon

looking up at itself like a lost sea

it holds in its arms like a small madonna.

More and more I am becoming everything

as I descend through my own facelessness

and the emptiness opens its eyes

to be astonished everywhere

by its own likeness in the nature

of the aeonic myriads of the forms it sees

rising and falling like waves and weather

on the dream-tides of the living ocean

that inconceivably conceives

the inexhaustibility

of its reflective awareness

in every drop of water that falls

from everyone’s eyes at the same time

though this one calls it a tear

and that one already tastes the wine

that gushes like a grape in love

hoping I’m already drunk enough

to believe it.

PATRICK WHITE