ALWAYS THIS GREAT KNOT OF SADNESS

ALWAYS THIS GREAT KNOT OF SADNESS

Always this great knot of sadness,

this wounded bird inside

that beats its wings against my rib cage

like one woman did once on my chest in tears

many manic years ago

to be let out to fly back

to whatever chimney she thought she came from.

And I said here is the live green bough

and there the dead branch

but the song’s the same on both

and I’ve been listening for her voice

especially when it starts to get dark

early on a winter evening

when the kitchen lights go on

and glow on the snow

like the warmth of generous windows

stretching their light out like a cat full length ever since.

Dead air in my studio.

The two big twin master easels

I’ve been apprenticed to for the last half century

have turned into praying mantises

and started practising censorship.

The imageless air.

The hiss of traffic.

No bird tracks in the snow on my windowsill

where the golden seeds of summer

wonder what kind of soil it is

they’ve been planted in

and what’s expected of them now.

Not a wavelength of picture-music in my head.

There’s been an exorcism while I slept

that’s taken the changelings from the orphanage stairs

but has put nothing back

except this sadness in my heart

that isn’t mine alone to suffer

but share empathetically

even with the agony of my tormented paintbrushes

and the life I’ve crushed out of

these tortured tubes of paint

as weird as that sounds

as if I were quietly weeping

for everything else that couldn’t.

Lachrymae rerum. Tears

deep down in the very substance of things

as if suffering were the afterbirth of existence

the background cosmic hiss

of greater things to come

and the universe isn’t big enough yet to bury it.

This might be why

my heartwood gets choked up

every time I look at what’s happening to the trees

and why I want to cry

when I see an old man with white hair

swipe a wedge of snow off the ledge

of a cement garbage can for the publicly disposable

across the street in front of the bank one story below

and make a quick snowball of it

as if it’s something he’s being doing

every first snowfall of the year

like some superstitious ritualistic initiation

into the marvellous fact that, yeah, it’s here again

and so is he

and then just throw it away like a casual aside

not at anyone

but just away

as if to say

that’s that. It’s done.

Now I can take on anything that comes.

And sometimes it hurts so bad

when the colour of life goes south

with the Monarch butterflies

and the wet snow is effacing

the garish red logo on the bank

that affronts my studio window

like a commercial form of graffiti,

I’ve got to turn to words

like burgundy ground willow

in a bleak windswept winter landscape

and try to write myself to death

to keep from going mad

on behalf of people I haven’t even met.

That’s how sad it gets.

PATRICK WHITE