MY EYES ARE GETTING BETTER

MY EYES ARE GETTING BETTER

 

My eyes are getting better

as I get older

despite the sunspots

and leggy eclipses

and when I look back

I can see further than I ever did

except it isn’t the light

that illuminates things any more

it’s time

and that’s a whole other palette

with colours of its own

wavelengths faster than light.

When you see things with your eyes

the past may be red deepening into black

and the future a furious white-blue

that pushes the darkness back

a T Tauri star or two

but when you see things

with the whole of your being

it isn’t time that’s passing

it’s you

and it turns out linear perspective isn’t true

and things in the distance aren’t blue

because there are as many farewells

in the foreground

as there are the prophetic yellows

of intimate tomorrows

that haven’t happened yet

way at the back.

Memory isn’t the distilled essence of existence

you can swill in your hand

like a glass of brandy in front of the fireplace

to keep warm when it’s cold outside.

Memory doesn’t drink out of a glass

like sacrificial blood out of a thermometer.

It scoops the moon out of the nightstream

and drinks with both hands.

It revels in its madness

like Li Po’s poetry

not the prose of a vain Narcissus.

It isn’t the pale reflection

of what was once vital.

It walks with those

who haven’t been born yet

as easily as it talks to ghosts

without changing the subject.

I’ve got future memories

I’ve carried around inside myself for years

like the embryos of what’s become of yesterday.

There are sorrows up ahead

I haven’t endured yet

that I’ve already cried for

well in advance of my tears.

Is a river the past

or the future of the sea

and which one’s the prophet

and which one’s the prophecy

that didn’t come to pass?

Does the man head back to the boy he used to be?

A couple of earthquakes

it was hard to stand up to

and the cornerstone of my youth

sank through the quicksand of my maturity

like a California sabre-tooth

that won’t be discovered

until thousands of years from now

when archaeologists start looking

for missing links in the fossils of the truth.

Tomorrow’s late

and yesterday can’t catch up

but the thing that I like best about now

is that it never hesitates

to be where it will when it wants

without worrying about where everyone else is.

At least that’s what I tell myself

when I can’t stop thinking about you

like someone who will never happen again

the way love first said your name

as if a word

were destined

to become more famous

than the voice that said it

like an afterlife

reclaimed from the lost and found.

Where are you now

who came like a deathwish

to the geni in the lamp

of an unknown constellation

who wouldn’t give you what you wanted?

Did you ever forgive me?

Sometimes it’s more dangerous to be deceived

than it is to be haunted by a truth

you never believed in.

You wanted to live in the moment

as if time were the homogenity of space

and I tried to tell you that it wasn’t midnight everywhere

and somewhere the sun was still shining

but there are some clouds

that prefer shrouds to happy linings

and I don’t remember which one of us died first

but to this day

when anyone rubs me the wrong way

I grant them three curses.

And of the three.

Loving someone unconditionally is the worst.

And neither of the other two

are much better than the first

when you’re asked to decide

between truth and compassion

as if you were tasked

to divide the baby

between two mothers

and you suddenly realize

how hard it is to choose

which one of your eyes to put out

in the name of the other

like a candleflame with a forked tongue

that sees everything

as if it had two shadows

and one of them was longer than the other

like the short and the long straw

of a subjective risk

that couldn’t  bridge the gap

between the cool lucidities

of the fireflies of insight

that tried to make constellations out of everything

and the way

you kept splitting the tree of knowledge

like a wishbone

down the middle

between my uncertain intensities

and the unlikely absolutes

of your pre-emptive lightning strikes.

Caesar may have accidentally burned down

the library at Alexandria

where seventy-two imminently isolated scholars

wrote the exact same Septuagint

to prove the divinity of its revelation

but a greater loss

than the amassed wisdom of the past

is the way your intellect

wouldn’t take the lid off

a masonjar full of fireflies

you jammed like stars

into a moment you wanted to preserve forever.

I meet the past everywhere on the road I’m on now

coming back from the future

as if I had all the time in the world

to recall tomorrow

without a sense of urgency.

Or as I once said to a beautiful young artist

when she was poor and nameless.

Until you’ve bought

your own work back

at a garage sale

for next to nothing

you can’t be sure

you’re going to be famous.

And there’s no way

you can trick yesterday

out of the arms of the past

like the new moon

out of the arms of the old.

I was one of the tantric children

of literature once

an enfant terrible like Rimbaud.

I got a taste of fame.

I spit it out

like bottled water

from the wellsprings of the muses

who found their inspiration in clean living

but never got fired up

by the lack of truth in their diet.

I shut my mouth.

I was as precocious as a highchair.

I would go to a poetry reading

and turn it into a riot.

Fire on the water.

Autumn trees on the Fall River.

I was an arsonist

in a volunteer fire brigade

witching for water in hell.

Now I’m the emergency exit

at the end of a long line

of alarm bells

I’m swinging on like Quasimodo

in self-defense.

I don’t need a mirror

to know

what the lucky don’t see

in what’s ugly.

Beauty falls in love with the Beast.

But I haven’t been to church in awhile

since my soul

took out a restraining order

to keep the priest away from the child.

Early autumn along the backroads into heaven.

The sumac’s burning.

The sumac’s burning.

The phoenix is on its pyre.

Is this a birth?

Is this a death?

Or just where highway seven

meets the five eleven

and time intersects the timeless

like the red yellow and green

of stop pause and go

that hangs its streetlight

like the stages of a ripening pepper

above the kids in the crosswalk

of another Halloween

that walks with the dead

all the way to the other side of the living

like a ghost in a bedsheet

with a bagful of jelly beans?

Let the living and the dead alike

grasp what little they can

of happiness

but if your hands are full of nothing

there isn’t much room

for anything else.

Let go of it.

Throw it down.

Nothing’s free

if it’s still void-bound.

Then sit down on the ground

and have a good laugh

at your own expense

when you see the dark abundance

in the bright vacancy

like black matter

through a gravitational lense

that expends ninety-six percent of itself

on a universe

to keep the lights on

the other four parts we can see.

But isn’t it good to know

there’s so much in life

we’ll never get our hands on?

That so much that’s out there

wants nothing to do with anyone

either of us will ever be?

That you and I

and what we remember

of the way we created each other in agony

in love and lust and jealousy

and all those little endearing ways

we couldn’t be each other when we had to

and these hills I keep retiring

more and more to at night alone

just to be closer to the stars

and the stars themselves

exhausting the last of their farewells

on a summer that’s already turned its back

and gone down over the hills

and the way memory over the years

stops opening itself up like a family album

and begins to take on the image

of anyone who’s standing

near enough to the mirror

for it to appear

in the guise of what it’s become?

Isn’t it good to know

that memory is the mother of the muses

and that the past

isn’t a museum of dead artifacts

and teeth missing from elusive jawbones

grinning at the absurdity

of what does and doesn’t last

and how luxuriously the present cherishs

the garbage of the past?

Isn’t it good to know

memory is the watershed of inspiration

that flows down the world mountain

to keep the sea’s glass full

of the mystic wine

that can drown a drunk in a dropful

and rescue the moon from the eyes of the blind

who refuse to get into the lifeboat

when they’re asked to leave

everything else behind?

Isn’t it good to know

however many fools go to school

and fall in love with knowledge

like ladders with windows

they can look at the world through

like enlightened towers

with an elevated view

of what surrounds them out there

that even we we die

we’re still exceptions to eternity

and not the rule?

That we remember each other creatively

and not as we were

once and for all forever for good

as the people way back when

who misunderstood

when you leave someone

you don’t add them

to the great resevoir of the past

like a future you left behind you

that couldn’t last

because time had done with it

the same thing it does

to the emotional life

of any other pyramid

lost the sands of an hourglass.

The future’s just a ruse of time

that sucks us into

accepting the present

as a provisional compromise

with the moment at hand

as if history without a past

were the only alternative left

to living forever.

But however we refine clarity

it’s still not enlightenment

if you’re still telling the story

and the story isn’t telling you

at the same time

in another universe

stranger than this one

that makes us up as it goes along

out of whatever it comes upon

like someone far away we’ll never meet

but we keep looking for in the eyes

of every human we greet

like a myth of origins

taking its seat around the fire

like a house of the zodiac

that bears credible witness

to the truth of the fact

that time is more of a maniac

than a liar.

 

PATRICK WHITE