ONLY THING I EVER SAVED UP FOR IN MY LIFE

ONLY THING I EVER SAVED UP FOR IN MY LIFE

Only thing I ever saved up for in my life.

A telescope when I was thirteen.

Sixty millimetre, alta-azimuth mount,

three lean skeletal folding crutches for legs

black rubber tips at the ends

old mens’s canes

that sat it down bluntly on the earth like a spider

with elbow eyepieces and extension lenses

and a cool blue white enamel tube

so smooth and pure

it felt like the skin of waterlilies

and tasted like the moon

on the lips of the morning glory

in a total eclipse of bliss

as I had known it up till then.

A wonderful object. A work of art.

Second only to a woman’s body.

Mystic tangibility at last

though one will bring you closer to the stars

than the other that just looks at them.

This was the glyph for A

in my very first alphabet

and that was all that would ever stand

between me and the stars

as I had known them up till then.

Late nights on a high rock shelf

up on Heartbreak Hill

the name of an old prison

converted into a junior high school

where seven hanged men

were rumoured to be buried on the grounds

that were all that remained of it

along with several dozen cows

away from the lights of the city.

Away away away

from the drunken fist fights,

the screaming wives,

the crying children no one could help

just me and my telescope and a stray cat

that waited for me every clear night

on the path up through

the wild fields full of scrubby broom

to follow me as if she weren’t quite sure

she wanted me to know she was there or not

to the one spot

in the whole, wide, wondering, fucked-up universe

I could focus on something

without being afraid of it

or in my neck of the woods

trying to hunt it down.

I was spaced way out there

with this great blue heron

eyeballing fish in the night

like a native with a spear of light

posed forever over a hole in the universe

as if another constellation

had just made the front cover of the sky.

I was in the mythic company

of radiant swans.

I was among cold bright remote things

that grew more mysterious

the greater the distance between us

and deepened in the darkness

that made us seem more like intimates

alone in a big vast space

with a stray cat and a brand new telescope;

none of us with any clue

about what we’re doing here

but anxious to find out.

Clarity can be a knife in the wrong hands

or the scalpel that takes the tumour out in the right.

But if you’re wounded by the truth

you can’t be healed by a lie

and you might like what you see

but have you seen what you’re not

always seemed like the best advice

I’ve ever given myself like a Zen mondo

I’ve found incredibly hard to take.

It’s like trying to tell the difference

between bad whiskey and good

by which one of them

is trying the hardest

to get drunk on you.

Stupid minds get stuck in the starmud.

Middling ones get lost

in the clouds and the moonlight.

But the true genius of insight

is clarity.

Is a cold, dry lense

with no dew on it

but the whole of the sky and all of its stars

like lapis luzuli

or the translucent immensities

of a star sapphire

for an iris

or emerald in the case of a cat

as I had known it up till then.

PATRICK WHITE