I DON’T TRY TO ALLAY THE INEVITABLE
I don’t try to allay the inevitable as much as I used to.
Let it come.
All my efforts are exhaustive and absurd.
I checked it out.
I’m not on the agenda.
I didn’t make the honour roll
and no matter how you dress the worm
maggots don’t turn into butterflies.
The important thing
is to wake up from conciousness
without dreaming you know who you are
or that there’s any right road to anywhere
that comes with a star.
If you want to shine,
you’ve got to learn to shine up
through the roots of everyone alike
as if there were no purpose to the light
or meaning to the flower that opens its book to the night
as if it were looking for a publisher.
I have died and died and died again
to empty myself like mirrors and rain,
focussed myself to the point of a pin
until space was the last balloon of my lonely skin
before I exploded into oblivion
to begin it all again
like an interminable birthday party
that keeps presenting me with a brain
like a watch on a gold chain
that runs too slow
to keep up with the accelerated pace
of my exponential afterlife
running like stars ahead of the light.
You can make constellations
out of anything you can see,
and franchise them all along the ecliptic
like truckstops for the longhaul planets
but the thirteenth house of the zodiac
is the only one where you can live in the moment
beyond your own future,
and before history.
You can live in clarity
with the unbegotten
of a generous mystery
that gives your life back to you
like something you might have forgotten.
You know how to be
a grain of sand in the universe,
and count yourself small and trivial
but you know nothing about
conducting yourself like the universe
in a grain of sand.
So you wash yourself
out of your own eyes in tears
and go on watering mirages in a desert
that never blooms.
You case your own house like a thief
looking for a way to break in
that doesn’t alarm the windows
that can see you coming
from a long way off
like the back of your eyes
and like the woman in the mirror
you broke into a million images of you last night,
your face reflected in a million lockets of water
that broke like a womb,
how can you be fooled
by your own disguise
and pretend there’s no one here
in this long line of mugshots
taken of you as a loser
you recognize?
You want to know how to win?
Collect on the bounty.
Turn yourself in.
There’s a price on your head
more precious than life to the dead.
PATRICK WHITE
