AND I THINK I MAY BE HALF CRAZY

AND I THINK I MAY BE HALF CRAZY

And I think I may be half crazy, half desperate,

half dead and wholly alone in the dark

with the ghosts of things I could not save

from drowning on the moon, the collapsed bridges

in the accusing eyes of large, wet promises

that died like worms in a hopeful rose,

commas and kisses that ate through its eyelids

into a dream that never grew wings. I am

bent weird like the bruised radiance

of a ray of light chromatically startled

by the return journey of the mirror,

the odd deflections in the pyrex eye

of a telescope that never crys, a white madonna

in a mountain shrine of stars

that stares at the heavens blankly, well beyond

the graphs and passions of her grave ascensions.

And I don’t know where I am,

and I don’t know what to say, and I can’t tell

if it’s always been this way

and I’m just discovering it now

having fallen into some kind of black hole

that we’re all in alone with everyone

believing it’s just another ordinary day,

though it’s never been this day before, so it isn’t;

or if I’ve become the warden

of a private horror locked in himself

like a skeleton in a straitjacket

trying to placate its loss of focus

with the physics of indeterminancy.

Every day I’m at the empty foodbank, every night

the lost and found of licensed lives

that dropped like wallets in the grass,

asking if anyone has seen me lately,

if anyone can recognize my voice.

A million stars return me

like a foundling

to the stairs of my own house

and a dreadful silence walks away

leaving me like a language I don’t know how to speak.

And the hours are eerie and wounded and vast

as if I blundered into the mass grave

of all my former selves and asked the doll

under the arm of an exterminated child

who did this to us. Was it suicide,

Jonestown, black cool-aid,

or the lime of an unknown hatred?

Why am I alone among the missing

in this iron-handed darkness

that makes an oyster of the sky

and grows me like a pearl or the moon

of an uninhabitable planet battered like a bride?

I want to get things off my chest, confess

like a homely cousin of uranium

that I’m really lead at heart, a stable element

that won’t irradiate the dark with refugees

or the brilliant declensions of genius.

I want to be the stuff of aqueducts

and revel in my arches for millenia,

irrefutably benign and useful

from the mountains to the city on the plain;

I do not want to be this farcical Chernobyl

that burns like a brain that melts

before it shines

and kills the birds for centuries around;

I do not want this torment of a half-life.

I do not want this thirteenth house of stars

eager with evictions in the hands

of campaigning landlords

that lie a lot like me. Someone close the door.

Someone lock the window. Someone

tell the ardent stranger at the gate

that he’s come a bell too late

to answer the ad in the local constellations,

I’m down for the night behind a hill

of foreign flags that died like vapid candles,

I’m overseas; I’m off my hinges

and it will be continents yet

before I rise with Mu and Atlantis

to look for a northwest passage

around all the kings in my way.

And I don’t know how it happened

or what precisely has

but a thousand faces aren’t enough

to express me as I am. What net

could catch me on the fly?

And where are the urns

that once enthralled my ashes,

and if I’m now in exile

and this is not a country with a mouth

where are my thresholds now, where

the golden skulls of my forbears

that I drank to the lees

of prophecy and light? Where

is the now and here of my last address

and who is this

who ages backwards from the future

like a star that’s pauperized

its abdicated shining,

and doesn’t exist

beyond the eye that heeds it?

And when I listen to myself

fumbling for keys in the hall

why is it always a thief

who walks in

and asks me what I’m doing here?

PATRICK WHITE