LONG SAD THOUGHTS OF HOME

LONG SAD THOUGHTS OF HOME

 

Long sad thoughts of home.

Hello is blue.

Farewell shifts toward the infra-red.

Do the stars ever feel

they don’t know where they belong anymore?

I’m a direction looking for a compass.

I’m a map of the rain.

None of my constellations

know how to connect the dots

into the improbable myths of my longing

I tell to the blind in braille

wishing they had eyes

instead of these square skulls of dice

with empty eye-sockets

that stare back at me like black holes.

I try to shine

but I don’t know where the light goes

and I feel the sky is always disappointed.

My face ages like a stamp on a loveletter without a return address.

My heart is a bell that keeps on tolling away

like a labour of sadness

that doesn’t know what else to say

before the mute stark brutal truth of human suffering

waiting for a mouth like a wounded abyss to scream.

My life has always been the exception

of the dream I thought I was having at the time.

The one in which I seek and do not find.

I’m an exile when I’m romantic.

I’m an exclusion when I’m not.

I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t unique

but people en masse are obvious

and I do not seek what they seek

though that makes me feel arrogant.

Everything’s got to be out in the open and on the level

often enough not to go straight to hell

like a plumb-line to the devil

at the bottom of a dry well

that gave up crying years ago

when damnation turned into indifference.

I take everything to heart.

I don’t miss a detail.

I think I’m too smart

to be taken in again

by the blameless orphans

the night left on the stairs of my homelessness

but I’ve always let compassion make a fool of me

when occasion arises

even though I’ve long felt

the heart of the human condition is our helplessness.

It’s one thing to lament the state of people’s souls

but it’s a whole other universe

an heretical shape of space

on the other side of your eyes 

to feel sorry for what happens to their bodies

as if matter and mind were just two modes of roadkill.

Frogs in the rain on a highway

in high and low beam

and ghosts of water turning into fog

inverted clouds of unknowing

with more corpses in them

like crushed popcorn than mystics

or T-Tauri stars breaking into light

that doesn’t care which side of the blind it shines on.

I may well be just a bag of water

chemicals with glands

a sky-minded telescope with nine apertures in it

scanning the heavens for any sign of divine intelligence

that wasn’t as alien to me

as I am to most of you

and I still don’t know why

I am the way I am

and there isn’t a lie

I’ve been able to make fit me like skin

I don’t eventually outgrow like a phase of the moon

when she’s looking the other way

and it’s a curse to try to prove what you imagined

before you began to speak

and I still don’t know what it is I truly seek

or if I’m just looking for the hell of it

but I’ve always hoped somehow

without my even knowing

whatever I saw along the wayless way

as I left the solar system

like a comet with a long track record

of making bad things come true

was a measure of healing

was an antidote

that could be extracted from the feeling I have

whenever I consider what’s up ahead for all of us

like salmon leaping upstream

against the flow of things

back to our mysterious origins

to propogate ourselves among the dead

after all these long far gone years at sea

I followed the sirens who sang to me like rocks

thinking they were muses

I just couldn’t live without.

Now I think of death as a galaxy

that has crossed over its own event horizon

beyond the speed of light

that puts it out of sight of the rest of us

but doesn’t notice the slightest bit of difference

when it disappears like a wave into water

as if nothing had changed.

I am so far from home

I am remembering my way forward like a prophecy

of things to come

that have already happened

and there’s nothing in my past

that doesn’t lie before me like the future.

There’s no coming or going in now.

And when I take off all these masks of space and time

like a windblown orchard by the sea

and reveal there was never anyone there behind them

they could hide from me

I return to a town

that has followed me for years

like a complete stranger

and everybody recognizes me somehow.

 

PATRICK WHITE