I SWALLOWED MY OWN
I swallowed my own personal mystery
like one snake swallows another
or a dragon swallows the moon
to make it rain on its own flame
as if it were quenching a sword
in wounded water. A sane man
wouldn’t risk his ignorance
but a madman gambles
with enlightenment
by betting his eyes
on an uncertain insight.
Pain was a kind of physics
I had to take off like shoes
at the doorway of my own singularity
if I wanted to transcend
the incidental origins
of all the momentous thresholds
that parted and drifted away from me
like the wake of an empty lifeboat.
I ate my own personal history
like the bitter bread
of dead stars in a black hole
and time burned
like the temperature of the world
and the feverish dreams
that broke like blisters
and the aloof, cool moons
that sometimes dropped
their eyelids like blossoms
as if one thought shy
of assenting to my lunacy,
afflicted me alike
with caustic decisions
that made me weep like sand.
I was trying to put down new roots
in a mystic desert
that bloomed in mirages at night
and longed with every grain
and breath of its being
to turn its salinity into light
and for once
astonish the stars.
I wanted to honour human suffering
as something noble
and I was willing to labour
at living in vain
to believe in my aspirations.
But I drew pain down upon me
like the sea its own rivers and rain
and my heart imploded
like the black dwarf
of the wormwood star of Chernobyl.
Space turned to glass,
I was swimming through glass,
and the trees glowed at night
in the violet light
of a moon without eyelids.
And there was no one to talk to;
not even the silence would listen.
Oblivion looked into oblivion
like one blank mirror into another
and went on replicating itself like a word
in the mouth of a voiceless forever.
Night after night passed
like a species of used-up life
looking for extinction in a tarpit.
I’d fix my seeing
like an astrolabe to a star
and go down with my ships
like a navy in quicksand
whatever course I set.
I sought shelter
in the shadows of myself
as if the darkness
could contain me like a loveletter
someone forgot to send
but I was indicted by a wound
that even the emptiness couldn’t mend
for a lack of content.
I deluded myself that if
my innocence cross-examined itself
truthfully, eloquently, long enough,
the jury was certain to hang itself
for all the things I haven’t done.
I entered a fingerprint from my childhood
into evidence as exhibit A,
but my identity
was considered as irrelevant
as yellow tape at a crime scene
where the victim lies wrapped like a gift
to the god of Halloween
whose candles burn down
like a temple on a birthday cake.
Until only one unimploring pillar
is left standing
with nothing to uphold
but the great black flame
of the indifferent sky
that sweeps people and stars
like dirt from the stairs
and among the grand
and tiny dreams of creation,
bluffs an uncanny dignity
from the silence that falls
like eyelids and night
over the homeless faces
of the mindless graces
that inspire our devastation.
PATRICK WHITE
