WHEN ALL YOUR STARS ARE TRASHED
When all your stars are trashed
and the mirrors are bleeding
and the water’s turning back into wine
and your heart is just another cruel event
in a vast space
where the black holes
that eat their own placentas
when they give birth to the galaxies
are not always immediately evident
and to judge from the way
they can turn the place inside out
like the features of a human face in pain,
the womb and the tomb
that consumes what it creates,
the baby and the corpse
summoned out of the darkness
by the same lure of the fire
that is the first and last breath of desire,
ignorance and enlightenment
all rolled up into one stark insight
that lays you out like the anti-Christ
in a volcano for a manger;
to judge from nullity of this,
there’s no place you can conceal yourself,
and no point to the expanding circumferences
of the way you keep trying to reveal yourself
like water to water when it rains.
When all your stars are trashed
like black dwarfs on a roll of the dice
and hope is a cowardly virtue
that won’t look you in the face,
and your sorrow is an unsuccessful séance
trying to call back a dream that died young,
and there’s nothing to let go of
because everything’s been torn out of your hands,
don’t look for illusory cures
in the heart of illusory diseases,
dipping the other wing of the fly in your milk
to counter the taint
or try to stand back from yourself
to clarify the grain of the view
as if you were a mirage of cubist pixels
hovering over a desert like a mirror on acid,
or apply hot poultices of suspicion
to the gangrenous wound
of the swollen moon
that has become of your heart
to draw your friends out like an infection,
and if you’re still a novice
dissembling in your emptiness
before the great impersonality
of the endless, catatonic space
that has freeze-dried your face,
don’t try to stand your ground
like a lonely cornerstone
when gravity falters
and you’re looking for lifeboats
in the spirit’s lost and found
because there are waves all around
but no shore,
no islands in the storm,
no continents in the offing
that haven’t already sunk
that could survive you.
PATRICK WHITE
