THE ONES I LOVED THE DEEPEST AND THE BEST

THE ONES I LOVED THE DEEPEST AND THE BEST

 

The ones I loved the deepest and the best

turned into strangers and enemies

or worse, friends.

Now I’d trust evil

before I’d trust stupid

because stupid will get you killed faster than evil

almost any night of the week

when I’m out with my demonic acquaintances

like a gangland constellation

that wants to burn the house down

to get even with the astrologers

who talk too much

about the eloquent future

they see in our illiterate past.

And it isn’t as if

I’ve been emptied of human content

and I don’t care

if I feel anything or not

about the unspooling

of my emotional life

as just another way of breathing in and out

or the indifference and separation

that has passed between me and all these people

like a knife looking for something holy to wound.

Sometimes the river

just tears the roots of things

away from the shore

in a torrential downpour

that wakes the desert up

and a judas-goat tempts a bad messiah.

Compounded of too many different parts

to belong solely to any one of them,

a bag of starwater punctured

by nine black holes

that haemorage like an oilslick

that’s trying to pretend

it’s just another eclipse in passing

and endowed at birth

by the black beatitude

of an intensely acquisitive intelligence

that approaches knowledge like a Mongol,

I put a Zen finish on the agony of my solitude

and hold my ground against the approaching abyss.

What does it mean to be a human?

What else but this?

Just this as it is and isn’t?

The river flows by the skull of the swan

and the bones of its wings

that once swam upright

like a harp on the water

and played to the moon in tears

slow songs about the stark beauty

in the sadness of passing things;

the river flows by extemporaneously

true to the nature of water

going along indifferently

with what’s missing by the mouthful

when death rises from the bottom

like a snapping turtle

to the lunar surface of things

and hunger’s the only meaning in life

that satisfies the doubtful.

The opposites engender each other

like predator and prey.

If I didn’t know you were listening

I wouldn’t know what to say.

The words may be male,

stars on a lonely night,

fireflies and lightning bolts

but the voice is the dark female

behind all this commotion of light

raising waves on the ocean of life

like thresholds and sails

that cling to the coasts of their thoughts

for fear of drowning alone in their tears

like a lifeboat

all tied up in the nets and knots

of the last navigator

that swore he’d send a continent back

to look for them

as soon as he made landfall

like a dove from the Bible.

What’s the meaning of an open door

when you approach your own house

as if it were the house

of someone you once knew

who doesn’t live there anymore?

That’s what the stars feel like

denuded of light

like the meaning of words

in an expanding universe

driven by the engine of dark energy

into the strange empty spaces

older than light

of the black muse-mother

that keeps out of sight

of her offspring inspirations

so they can exist on their own

to look for the meaning of her absence

when they get home

like thieves

on the backstairs of everywhere

who don’t know where to go

or what to steal that’s real.

Who stole the moon from the window

of the cosmic view

I used to take

of my human relationships?

I put a finger to my own lips

and listen to the silence

rolling over like hard evidence

there’s no truth in facts or words

that isn’t a complicit witness

to the crime-scene

that chalks the sidewalks of my mind

with the ghosts of old friends

outlining where they fell

when the past caught up with them

like someone they once knew well.

I drink the eyes of yesterday’s lovers

like wine from my own skull

and fall down drunk in the doorway

of a stranger’s afterlife

as if it were the gates of Eden

hidden like the petal of a dream

that clung like an eyelid

to the vision of the black rose

that only revealed its mystery

in the dead end of the light.

How could I help it

if I kept falling in love over the years

with women of the first magnitude

always a night shy of shining?

And it didn’t matter

what shape of darkness

I took in their minds

to enhance their outlook by contrast

they weren’t any brighter for it

by the time they left

and I wasn’t any less blind.

And it’s hard to say

who got the best

of whose worst

but I always thought of it

as my last loveletter

to what they were

and would never be again

if they left first.

Life and love

like the food of angels

who don’t eat

because they’re above all that

goes better with an earthly appetite

and a clean place-mat

in an allnight restaurant alone

looking out through the window

like a rogue constellation lost

in the artificial glare of things

like a bottomless cup of coffee

or a blackhole

where the moon used to be

before they fenced it for money

and the cow ran away with the spoon

like the Milky Way with a lean junkie

she suckles like baby Zeus

snorting stars from the mirror

of a stone-cold Titan

that wants to eat him like a cannibal Dad.

I’ve learned to feel sad about things

the way the mad do

when they wear they’re feelings

inside out like skin and clothes

as if nothing were weird or strange

about living without fear of a straitjacket

that’s been bruised and abused by bad tattoos.

The impersonality of life

that shepherds my memories like moons

through these echoless valleys of death

that have disembodied my voice

in the vastness of an unanswerable space

like a bird disappearing into the nightsky

crying like a wounded thing

struck by the cold stone of the moon on the wing

can’t be expressed in a lot of sentimental boo-hoos

that run amok like the ink of a loveletter in the rain

and stain the last known address

on the rainbow envelope

like the name

on the watercolour

of a miscarriage of the moon

framed by a family album

like a face at the window of an empty house.

So I don’t raid the tombs of the dead

as if I had no respect for bones

or couldn’t keep faith

with the sacred whims of chaos

that makes pyramids

out of the dust of our afterlives

as if we were pharoahs

aiming our souls at Orion

like long-shot snipers

through the wrong end of the telescope.

I’m an enlightened cynic.

I take the shot

with the hollow-point

of a higher calibre of hope.

 

PATRICK WHITE