BEFORE THEY TURN SPACE INTO REAL ESTATE

BEFORE THEY TURN SPACE INTO REAL ESTATE

 

Before they turn space into real estate

and someone copyrights the seventeenth century

why shouldn’t I wander through the wide open spaces

of my own mind like a savage mystic alone with the moon

who keeps a place for me in a lonely locket of water.

If I drink from my own skull

down to the lees

of my homely archaeological remains

when I lived on posts

beside interglacial mountain lakes

like a spider that taught its webs to fish

thousands of years ago

what’s it to anyone

that I get homesick now and again

for a less contractual kind of pain

that I haven’t felt since nineteen sixty-six

than that inflicted by these corporate wasps

who lay their eggs

like logos on your forehead

to eat through your brain

as if you were always the host

and they were always the guest

and whatever was said

whatever was written

whatever was thought and believed

whatever you could feel

without ever reaching bottom

whatever you acted upon

whatever you were ready to live or die for

were just a way of holding your fork?

The polyp glued into the Great Barrier Reef

always thinks the fish is mad

to risk so much

to swim freely away as it wants

to explore the life of the sea

that gives birth to its own water.

If I’m a man rooted in my homelessness

like a face turned toward time

what crime could it be

to crawl out of my straitjacket

like a dragon-fly with a coat of arms

and tilt at windmills

in a crusade against the wind

where I’m always the champion of the infidels

who gets blown away by Saladin

at the gates of Jerusalem?

Let the lackeys of common sense

lick their block of salt

like dairy cows

in a close-cropped field

on their side of the fence.

I don’t look for tits on the Milky Way.

There’s a place in the world for potted plants

but as often as not

I’m off like a weed that no one wants

hanging around their windowsills

or plotting conspiracies of new life

that upsets their view of the garden.

So I keep to myself

in out of the way places

high above the timberline

of the world mountain

I’ve shrugged off my shoulders

like boulders of an avalanche

and howl at the moon alone

in the lucidity of my solitude.

And when I want to shine like a star

I take off my myths of origin

and walk out into the open

as skinless as they are

and just let things grow their own way

like hydrogen and helium

into anything they want to be.

Let the winners and losers

put rungs on a ladder of water

or argue over their place in the periodic table

about who sits above and below the salt

like Carthage and Rome

or carbon and silicon.

I’ve got a constellation of my own

that never wears the same myth twice.

I’ve got a muse that’s immune to advice

on the dangers of inspiration.

When she isn’t playing with me like fire

she’s an urgent intensity of radiation

that burns blackholes in my will to live.

Sometimes my eyes aren’t brave enough

to look upon

what she keeps hidden from the light

as I pass her dark window

like a stranger into the night

unenlightened by his own seeing

knowing his metaphors won’t last any longer

than the untimely fireflies of the last generation

that thought they saw her ghost.

But she’s not wired like a doorbell to a bride.

When you push her buttons

she’ll leave you standing in the doorway

not knowing if you’ve arrived on her threshold

like junkmail with a return address

or return to sender

scrawled across the envelope

of the last loveletter

you wrote to her in your blood

like lipstick on the mirror of a famous suicide.

She’s the kind of door

you’ve got to knock on from the inside.

 

PATRICK WHITE