I STAND UPON NOTHING
I stand upon nothing.
I stand for nothing.
And yet I stand.
I don’t know
if I’m holding anything up
like a torch or a flower
or taking it all in like quicksand
but the cup of the moon
breaks like feathers and stone on the water
whenever I walk like time alone through a desert
to the well at the end of the world
to take a drink.
Yesterday about two in the afternoon
among the tactical squirrels and birds
at the bottom of an ocean of trees
and the breeze cool fire on my skin,
I watched a thought resolve itself
like water in water,
breath on the wind
and for a moment
my mind seemed
like the loneliest of elements
without a place at the table
even below the salt,
infinitely disappearing into itself
like space, or a wave, or a solar flare
that puts its fire out in fire.
No thought. No mind. No one there
like a hidden secret
to seek illumination
in the shadow-waters of the trees
that have washed me out to sea
like another eye in the ocean,
rain in an empty boat,
seeing without a seer,
the mirror that drowns in the mirror
looking for clarity
like water in water
worlds within worlds
or a jewel that burns like a heretic
for its inexhaustible rarity
in the fires of its unwitnessed purity.
I watch the array of greens
the sunlight mixes
on a low-hanging palette of leaves,
the ruined kisses of the purple tulips
bluing their blood in the unweeded garden
beside the yellow lilies
and there’s paint all over my fingers
like pollen on a bee
but the colours my eyes can see
are not the clear colours of my senses,
six waves of the same reality,
so whatever the mind paints
on the black mirror or the white,
is the same eye of inconceivable night
ripening the light in its seeing
like a drop of dew
at the end of a blade of stargrass
heavier than a bell, an arrow, an apple, a word
with the unreserved sweetness of being.
PATRICK WHITE
