I WANT TO DRIFT OFF INTO THE STARS

I WANT TO DRIFT OFF INTO THE STARS

I want to drift off into the stars

without really knowing what that means.

Down by the Tay River, deep in the darkness

off Sunset Boulevard and the light pollution

of passing cars, there’s a fallen ironwood tree

with the skin of an elephant I sit on

and the horn of a black rhino

where one of its boughs was broken off.

And it’s got half its roots in the air like I do,

or Algol, the ghoulish head of Medusa in Perseus.

I come here when I’m sick of dealing with the world

like a game of snakes and ladders,

when I know I’m a crosswalk

or maybe even a train track

that’s never coming back this way.

I brush a frosting of snow off my log

as if I were making a place for myself

on a bench at a bus-stop that hasn’t come yet

and I gawk at the winter stars

like a junkie trying to shoot the Milky Way

into his bloodstream

so he can o.d. on all that radiance

as soon as it reaches his heart

to humanize the mystery

of how impersonal life can be to all of its own.

I sit in this small nook of cattails

that make me feel I’m an artillery officer

in Napoleon’s army, surrounded by cannoneers

waiting for me to give them some kind of order

to begin firing on the birch grove battlements

across the perennial strategy of the intervening river

that wanders through wars like a Druidic scholar

at peace with himself and the moon

like mistletoe in the tormented boughs of the oak

the river’s trying to decide

whether to let live or not.

I’ve made a pile of muskrat, raccoon,

squirrel and bird skulls

I’ve collected over the years

and I look long and deeply

into their eye-sockets man to animal

in sympathy with the fate of all that lives

however they met their ends,

however their deaths are justified

as a furtherance of the living,

and I swear the way the snow

rimes their eyes in the moonlight

they’re weeping prophetic visions

as hard as diamonds distilled

from the brutal clarity of their own fate,

sudden, cold, and indeterminate.

Translucencies of insight

that can slash your eyes

like scalpels of light

that have just finished decapitating the flowers

like Robespierre the debutantes of Paris

and notice you sitting there

with your head still on

and say what’s wrong with this picture.

But I grow obdurate in the midst of brevity

like a protein molecule

in the core of a flashing meteor

or gold in a nugget of black ore

that knows one day it’s going to be poured

out of the darkness where it used to abide

like a honey-tongued nightbird

that didn’t so much hide

as hesitate to reveal itself.

I gawk at the stars

and it doesn’t make a wavelength’s difference

to much that I can see,

and the way I am so sublimely ignored

by everything that intrigues me

I am split by the perennial

optical illusion of human consciousness

into feeling simultaneously horrified and blessed.

I comprehend the depths of the solitude

and the enormity of what I am

that can include the river, the stars, these skulls

and share in their passage

as a measure of the way I change.

And I ask myself how can they not know

what hour it is

when I’m sitting here like a nightwatchman

staring out into the eternal stillness of space

on an ironwood log, participant and witness

at the nexus of time and forever

realizing on a cosmic level

I embody in three pounds of starmud

like any other unimaginable dimension of the human brain,

there’s only been one fate for all of us

since we entered this world of forms

when eternity sat still and time began

as if there were any difference in reality

between ice and water

or between the emptiness of the mind

and what that emptiness contains.

Call it dark abundance, bright vacancy,

Call it the plenum-void if you like.

They’re all just fingers

pressed against our lips

like the silence of the stars

pointing at a no thing we can’t say.

And they’re pointing in all directions at once

the way a star shines down upon everything

as if each and all in this realm of forms

were the sole source of its illumination

from the inside out.

The first word

in the mother-tongue of sentience

to break the silence

like a blossom of light

in the dead of winter

on a bough of dark matter

that ripened the echo-less echo

of its sacred syllable into our eyes,

the fruits and seeds of seeing

by which it knows us

like the river knows what it mirrors,

like joy knows what’s behind our tears.

PATRICK WHITE