AND I DON'T KNOW IF I SUCCEED

AND I DON’T KNOW IF I SUCCEED

And I don’t know if I succeed myself

in every moment, a hereditary dynasty;

are ashes the continuum of fire, sorrow

the natural legator of joy, one thought

the progenitor of the next? How

can the mirror reflect itself

unless all things are mirrors

drinking from their own faces; unless

there are roses even as we speak

growing the eyelids and lips

of young women elegant

as eighteenth century herons and willows,

a poet who once dedicated himself like rain

to the battered body of the moon,

trying to turn his visions into atmospheres

that she might breathe again,

that the atrocity of her nakedness

might be clothed in orchids and grass

that shuddered in the gentle foreplay of the wind,

now bagging grams like the loaves and fishes

of a street messiah? In a world

where it is always autumn for the children

who wither and twist like brittle leaves

in the arms of desecrated mothers

whose wombs are trivial catastrophes, the flesh

of their emaciate sons and daughters

buried like shoes in short graves

pathetic with flowers, is art, is God, is love

merely the dodge and deceit

of the bored and obese, these

metaphors and symbols, this search

for a truce among these unknown factions

on which I ruin myself

in minor holy wars against ferocious kennels,

only the debauchery and douche

of a mystic luxury

that refuses to see the moon and the earth

for what they are, a blood-stained rock

beside a shattered skull? I love

the orange trollops of the wild honeysuckle

and the open palm of summer stars

that comes in the night for a reading,

I love the negligent beauty of the high fields

and the radiant empires of time

that suggest I was not always thus

in the all-night laundromats

that pry through my dirty linen

out of the corner of their small town eyes

to see if I’m deranged or dangerous, but how many times

in a mudpack of disgust and laughter

who has not reviled the self-indulgent facials

that estrange them from the truth

of what they fear they have become,

a pampered sin of omission

looking for the words to enroll their emptiness

in a night school for working corpses?

PATRICK WHITE