IF YOU EVER FIND YOURSELF

IF YOU EVER FIND YOURSELF

 

If you ever find yourself swimming like a fish

through the long shadows of significant moments

swaying like the hands of supple clocks in the mindstream

or an underwater garden of comets

that traded their orbits in for roots

remembering one insight

that has given you pause forever

may it be a night like this

when your breath on the window

is not the patina of death

but a nebulous manger of stars again

breaking into light

like an effusion of lightning and fireflies

into the new myth of an old constellation

down to its last dry match

in the penumbral afterlife

of a broken windowpane.

I remember looking into your eyes

as if they were the alpha and omega of things

the myriad unperishing ends

and unborn beginnings of things

I couldn’t understand at the time

like the stray threads of waterless lifelines

the moon wove into an overview of fate

that kept on changing like you over the years

until there was more lime than moonlight in your tears.

And every chance I’ve had to forget ever since

I’ve not turned away from your image

but raised my skull like a full flagon

to knock my head against yours

like a boney knuckle on the door of the dead

I’m trying to answer on the inside.

You may have been one of the galactic brides of life

but you came to bed like a candle

that shed more light on the vastness of night

than the darkness could handle.

All your radiance focussed in a single firefly

like the sea in a drop of water

like a universe in its motherless atom

filling the whole of space with things

no god had ever been before

you showed up like a rose in a dream

and I showed up like an eyelid.

Sometimes the living are summoned by ghosts

back to the places where time died for awhile

and eternity was left as unresolved as a repeating decimal

spinning its wheels in the starmud

like an offroad vehicle without a winch.

And there may be as many meanings as birds

in your sacred groves at night

but there’s one insight more penetrating than the rest

that holds your third eye up to the light like a jewel

and reveals the whole of everything you thought you knew

about the way things are

to be no more than the universal hunch

of a star with flaws

that can’t be cut by the rule of law

like the ecliptic by the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure

to tailor any constellation to a myth

that isn’t the way things look through the eye of a fool

that’s got a Buddha-mask on.

But now is not then

and this is not Zen

to crack the koan of the answer

with an enlightened question

that steps like a moment of darkness into the light

like the spirit of another night long ago

when I looked into your eyes

and saw everything I ever needed to know.

 

PATRICK WHITE