THE LILIES WERE OUT
The lilies were out just a moment ago
but they’re already wilting like parachutes
hung up in their own powerlines.
They’ve gone underground
into the skulls of their bulbs
with thoughts of resurrection.
Beauty thaws and is gone in a vapour
and all that is left to attest to the passage
is an ambiguous lament on brown paper.
You can’t cry, eat, drink, dream, laugh, think,
drug, con, deal, steal, fight or fuck your way out of death.
And no matter how many times
I’ve tried to look death straight in the eye
I was always the first to blink.
No more wine of awareness to drink up
your body lets go of the cup
like a moon that’s turned its last page
or the open hand of the drunk slumped in the alley
where his fist disappears,
or your heart stops by the roadside
like a shoe that’s been missing for years.
Lately I’ve been cultivating a feel for emptiness.
Not the something was there and now it’s not kind,
and now I’m lethally depressed
by the postpartum effects
of an ontological miscarriage kind,
but looking deeply into space
as more a mirror of my face
than the light and the dark
that play upon it now
and realizing
the mindlessness of mind.
Somedays I carry the ashes
of my old self around
in the urn of a my skull
just to be respectful to the dead,
or I scatter myself on the wind, on a wave
from the precipice of some microcosmic abyss
and let the long sentence of the last word
disappear into a blackhole.
I’ve lost count of the worlds I’ve passed through
only to slough like the skins
of this serpentine dimension
whose chameleonic physics
makes my eyes break and run
like drops of water
leaking from the lenses
of an enlightened telescope.
And then there are times
I turn into a divining rod
just to taste the lightning
on the tip of my tongue
as if I were horned for it
by the crescents of the moon
to harmonize a mystic snakepit
with a heart that’s out of tune
with its own string theory of everything
like the dunce of a guitar in the corner
that hasn’t been played in years
because no one has the ears
to listen to the light.
I imagine myself after I’m dead
out there in the night somewhere,
invisible and aware,
mingled in the darkness
like salt in the sea
or stars in an eye
that’s given up looking for me.
Could be a ferry, an ark,
could be the pharoah’s moonboat
or the Flying Dutchman
or a raft of bones
that doesn’t float,
the black sail of a lunar eclipse,
or maybe even a sunken wreck
that makes it to the other side
but the only ship of death
I’m clinging to these days
is the solitary plank of a scuttled compass
drifting through the fog
like an empty lifeboat
toward a voice
that’s stopped calling
like a bird on a hidden hill.
You can’t turn death’s eye
like a jewel in the light
the way you can life
and expect to find your way back
over the last event horizon
that just blew you out
like a birthday candle
with your first breath
but I don’t blame anyone
for letting their eyes relax
until they stop looking at things.
Sometimes the facts are blood
on one too many blossoms
falling like ruined eyelids
and skies torn off the branch
who weren’t up for the dream
and couldn’t contain the scream.
It’s not much different from being born.
Still, I like to bite deep into the apple
not to enhance some original perversity
I yearn for like a heretic
his unwitnessed martyrdom
in the sacred fires of the night
burning like a religion he hasn’t grounded yet,
but to hasten the glow of life in the gathering sap
by adding my eyes to the mix.
I want to taste clarity
like an intimate dimension in everything.
And even if I am as lost and startled
as anyone ever has been,
still, what’s that
if not a chance to explore
the mysterious fear
of standing before an open door?
Who knows? Maybe it will be me that answers.
PATRICK WHITE
