LONG AGO

Long ago I learned to forgive

yesterday’s shadows

like the daggers of a dead assassin

I melted down into bells

without occasion to sing.

I was tenderly adamant

about the need for compassion

and hung them from the loftiest towers

like iron fruit or rain frozen in its descent.

Only the conceptualists

indulge in perfect virtues

and mine, at best,

are improvised approximations

of the dark whispers

of the blind fish

that swim in the watersheds of my heart.

And there was no other way

of pouring the infection out of the wound

except by inviting the maggots to the feast.

I reproached them all

with the wisdom of a mirror

for relishing the worst of me.

It’s hard to remember sometimes

that even flies have a dignity of their own,

if no honey,

and even the city rose

turns into an old, well-thumbed book eventually,

an index of celebrity desecrations.

I kept my eclipses and dragons

up my bounteous sleeves

and took the trembling stagefright of the stars

cowering behind their cardboard hills seriously.

Whatever the mind realm,

whatever facet of the jewel turning in the growlight,

whatever feather of the spirit

soaring overhead with a twig of fire

or groping below like a star-nosed mole,

my heart turned into a lifeboat, a well, a telescope,

and I hauled everyone up and in and out of themselves

until the moon began to look like a pulley

and there was an echo in the siloes

of my exhortative sufficiency.

Sometimes the galaxies 

were easier to save than the candles,

but I applied my whips and swans lovingly

I was a good oar on a seaworthy vessel

and eventually my heart turned into a rudder.

I launched every pulse in the name of the unknown

and soon found myself a stranger

in the eyes of the people who had climbed to safety

up the nets and rope-ladders

I learned to fashion from my spinal cord.

I wasn’t a rudder on a lifeboat anymore;

I was a dead shark, dorsal down,

lethal, a meat-plough.

Nobody knew me as I was.

I struggled deeply within myself

to assume the throne of my isolation,

my heart freaked by the hazard 

of random lightning strikes,

challenged by demons

I could not win against,

crescent moons that broke off 

in my throat and voice like teeth.

I became the nightwatchman

of pleading shadows laid out

like corpses in a morgue,

a lamp in the arms of its own journey,

while their bodies walked around delinquently.

And the shining was black, the light,

an eerie pollen of the night,

an indelible soot lasered like destiny

on the sheets and sails of a soul I could never wash out,

a luminosity that just didn’t open

the moths and flowers like letters

but rewrote them, a transformative mirror,

an eclipse of the sun

that rises within at midnight,

an illumination that didn’t just reflect

but imagined the things of the world into being

and went on changing them,

mutating them,

seer and seen alike

on the same side of the mirror

that suggested them into existence inconceivably,

though there was no existence

or non-existence

to exit or enter by.

My seeing grew cold and impersonal,

space, a straitjacket of glass,

my heart, an ancient ice-berg on the moon,

and with a shriek of mouthless perception

my blood was blanched into flowing diamond.

I dared to look upon suffering,

my own and the pantomime of others,

as the flaring of a brutal creative fire

that wracked the world in an unwitnessed dream

lonelier than the wind without a star or a candle.

And I knew it was saying me

behind the mask

of every hopeless word I uttered.

And I saw at the dark gate

that reason was only another peer of the realm,

and there was an infinitude 

of skys and windows beyond

that my eyes hadn’t grown into yet,

flying like a bird into the vision

until only the vision remained,

and there were intimate metals in every rock

that had been confided into being like a secret.

Reason was merely a prim shadow

in the cosmic fire-womb

of the original madness

to make the hidden known,

whispering the world

into its own ear like a blasting cap.

Everything exists to know the hidden

as a robe of its own blood,

the taste of stars in the sap 

of the sugar maples in spring,

whether the cool mushrooms of her lips

that she offers up in the night

under the evergreens

are dangerously hallucinogenic,

or tenderly toxic, white angel or fly agaric.

I found it important to learn

what doesn’t make me happy,

and then to learn

that there isn’t anything that would

as I long as I persisted

in looking for the meaning of my joy,

the replicable reason

that would let me breed it

like a butterfly or a silkworm in captivity.

Now bliss comes when it does

naked and adorned,

impoverished and squandering,

and my heart is more of an empty, open hand

than a fist clenched around

something it feared to lose.

Haven’t you noticed the sad drinkers

in the all night taverns

who age faster than the wine in their glasses

as soon as they start

to con the god into staying,

make a cage of the tree

to snare the elusive nightbird

that enhances their darkness

with a voice hinged to a doorway of light?

And the theorists trying to sweep

the ashes of stars

immolated in their own light like moths

off their thresholds with tweezers?

And those who live like pharaohs

under pyramids of quicksand

they’ve made of their heart

anticipating afterlives

that look a lot like this one

when the bandages will come off

like the brittle eyelids

of a shedding rose

and the bull harps will seed the moon again

and the echo at the end of the dream

won’t be just the voice of another used beginning.

PATRICK WHITE