ALWAYS THIS SERIOUS SIDE

ALWAYS THIS SERIOUS SIDE

 

Always this serious side to me

I think I inherited from my mother

because she worried about everything

and things were always worse than she thought.

Life is prematurely older on the dark side of the moon.

There’s a better view of the stars

but sometimes as Rilke says

the heaviness of life

is heavier than the weight of things.

But one man’s carillon is another man’s death bell

and most people suffer a deficiency of joy

that if left too long attended

can prove lethal.

I’m grateful

despite my innate trust of my own sex

because my mother believed

when she was angry

she had to keep her life in trunks

in the basement

waiting for a day that never came

to live it

because all men were violent sex-addicted drunks.

Meaning my father.

I’m grateful that the man I’ve come to be

hasn’t tried to amend the passions of the boy

that are as much alive in me now as then.

The stars are even more beautiful

when you’re looking through a broken window.

The outside comes in.

And the inside gets out.

I’ve tried to evolve my way out of

the legacy of the abyss

my father left me like an astronomical catastrophe

way back in the Permian of my childhood.

I’m more mammal now than reptile.

I’m born from a womb not an egg.

My mother made me warm-blooded.

And it was growing up

without a nightlight in the darkness

in a hostile environment

that first made me think.

And more importantly feel.

It can be dangerous to get in the way

of people who are trying to ruin themselves.

The self-condemned see people

as the dandruff of the world

they keep brushing off their shoulders

in contempt of those

who have chosen to go on living.

There’s a ferocious messiah

inside every suicide

that’s dying to get out

but he’s tongue-tied

when it comes to bearing witness to oblivion.

The orthodoxy of great pain

thinks of joy as a heretic

and burns it at the stake

to make an example of its innocence.

I learned to shut up to keep from being converted.

I still think that was wise.

A kind of proto-Zen way

a star in the blazing noon

keeps shining

in the world

not of it.

White dwarfs and mini blackholes

abusing their habitable planets

like the refuse of a solar system.

They bent space into twisted children.

And I don’t know if I’m one of them or not

because experience has taught me

there’s nothing more gullible than thought

and I’ve never been much for long

that didn’t delude me into believing

there were islands in the abyss

I could crawl out of

like a creature from the sea

into a new medium

where I could remake myself.

Where I could build myself

a little house of transformation

out of the fossils of my past

pressed like dead flowers

between the shales of the moon.

Where I could build

a small chrysalis in a slum

and go in a bitter spider

and come out a honey-bee. 

But it’s degrading to turn a demon

into a domestic

and live with integrity.

I couldn’t quite get the knack

of dumbing down

to someone else’s best.

There was no room for solitude in the nest.

So I jumped back into the same old snakepit

and on the way down

the highest and the lowest came together

and I discovered I had wings.

I was an oxymoron.

I was a serpent who could fly.

I was a dragon o yes

but was I wise?

Could I express the fire in my eyes

without burning my mouth?

Could I make the rain come?

Could I swallow the moon whole

and regurgitate it like an ostrich egg

without shedding my skin

or turning into the afterlife

of a flightless embryo?

Was I a true eclipse

or merely a shadow of myself

that grew longer as the years past?

Was I the double feature

of the creature from my childhood

that crawled out of the dark lagoon

like a freak of nature

that had savagely matured?

Soon the questions lost their appeal to me

and I sluffed off both delusion and reality

like two straitjackets of skin

that couldn’t keep it together anymore.

I pulled them both like twin hinge pins

from the same door.

And just walked out of the house Jack built

into the open like a bird

who preferred branches to rafters

and everywhere it landed

was at home in its homelessness.

The moment you realize

delusion and reality

are not opposite sides of the mirror.

It’s like this.

The water doesn’t follow the path

the moon lays out for the waves

that scatter the light like petals

all the way back to the horizon.

There isn’t a step you can take

that isn’t a homecoming.

There isn’t a threshold in the world

you can call your own.

Green bough.

Dead branch.

Broken rafter.

Same song.

Same grammar of the wind

trashing the first drafts of the leaves

like outdated starmaps nobody reads.

 

PATRICK WHITE