DON'T KNOW WHERE I'M GOING

DON’T KNOW WHERE I’M GOING

 

Don’t know where I’m going.

Don’t care who I am.

No place I need to be.

No face I’ve got to see.

Don’t care if I’m loved.

Don’t care if I’m not.

What arises arises mindlessly.

What business has it with me?

Imagination’s just another word for free.

Free, free, free at last

I’ve let my people go.

I walk without a shadow.

There’s nothing about tomorrow

that hasn’t already passed

and yesterday’s a prophecy

of what isn’t waiting to come.

One thing suggests another

and worlds are arrayed before me

like the stillness

of the lost feather of the moon

on running water.

I endure my own weather like the sea.

The lightning strikes itself like a match

to take a look

but there’s no one to witness the clarity.

I don’t taunt my ghost like a man

who’s going to live forever.

If I flower I flower.

If I shine I shine.

Whatever appears

in the black and white mirrors

of the infernal or divine

may or may not be

the meaning of my roots.

My affirmation refutes

what my denial ordains

and the cause doesn’t

account for its effects.

I am the perfection of all my defects

so enlightenment and ignorance

are two waves of the same awareness in me.

The fool and the sage speak with the same voice.

Desire beatifies my heretics

like lies I’ve told to the stars

but their election was never a choice

and my wounds don’t seek the truth

in the afterlife of my scars.

The old man does not say I am old

nor I am young the youth.

Autumn is not older than spring

and spring isn’t apprenticed to fall.

I can hear my own footsteps

coming down the hall like time

to meet me after all these years of looking

through everyone else’s eyes

but even when I take my face off

at the end of the day

like a tired sky

and point to the stars the light concealed

my self-portrait is always a disguise.

And nothing is revealed.

 

PATRICK WHITE