STILL LIFE WITH CLOWN

STILL LIFE WITH CLOWN

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way,

a star without planets shining into the inhuman solitude

that receives everything without distinction or caste

like mountains toppling into the valleys that shadowed their rising

or the luminous myriads of the night

into the visionary cauldron of the dawn

that drowns them in their own beginnings, an excess of light

that drew too near to read the fading scrawl

of disenfranchised love letters

from a god fashionably unfaced. And I have seen birds

disappearing into the quiescent dusk like prayers

that fold their wings in an unknown grove

to wait for a morning that rarely comes, a song

that would hurl them back into the light, redeemed,

because the greater love unanswered,

it could only end this way. This world, a scintillance of dust

in the gaping darkness of implacable aeons

whose indifference to mind and matter alike

is worse than any judgment, grows lonelier with the truth.

A smile and a wound, one heart nudged toward another

in the frenzy of mad water

drawn out by the poultice of the moon, life is a cannibal

that wolfs its own, eats the candle and the flame

to pursue a scheme of persistence

shuffling the portfolios of proven minerals

to maximize the largesse of its living issue

with intensified affinities of blood and vision.

Bless the modern man who has sloughed his life

like a skin of chrome for an aimless longevity

that cannot grow older than the eternity he is.

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way.

He passes away like a pore on the cheek

of someone he never met.

Without going anywhere everything passes,

spring buds on the branches and Jupiter

flashing its tiny plinths of lightning

at the cradles of the elm in the upper boughs

sweeping the sky of stars,

and love, and friendship, and family,

and arrayed in the veils of its own enigma, beauty,

the only acceptable apology

for the serial distortions of time.

Transformations of the orthodoxy I call myself

keep turning the mirror inside out

so that one word of enlightenment

might be poised on my tongue when I die, but

until then, I am bound by a serpent of doubt

to drink from its fountains of fire

a martyr to my own desire. The greater love unanswered;

it could only end this way, a creature

endowed with seeing, mind, wonder

looking for a purpose in the skies that ponder

what to affirm and what to refute

masters of the mutable and mute

who return the view to the seer, no wiser,

an ice-age of winter glass inching like a glacier

or a cataract over the smudged moon,

and over the hazards of light, the ellipses and eclipses

that make it seem midnight at noon

when the heart looks radiantly

for comprehensible origins that do not diminish

by dwarfing the questions,

the intrigue of knowing the finish.

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way,

strangers that trust the word of the wind, and avow

adamantine fixities of nuclear binding forces,

but cannot, ambushed by change, stay,

grief in the flashflood creekbeds

that release the runaway horses

that were slowly gathering in the clouds

and farewell like blooming flowers

all along their courses and crusades.

Orion over the horizon, trumped by the queen of spades.

Eyes, heart, mind, eternities hover over every event

in a spiralling descent

from the bough of happier springs

that lent the soaring wings. Now food

is organized into civilizations

and the key to the chain of haloes

that enslaves the fallible nations

is buried with the dead like a dangerous secret

behind the dream mirror

in the jewellry boxes of their graves.

Generation after generation

the truth has been kept like a firefly in a jar,

a prophet in an asylum, or a peduncle

lost in the ensuing phylum

of a spurious progress toward pi-ing the circle

into incommensurable parts. We elude the real

and break like waves of urban trash

on the volcanic ash

of our island consciousness

ignoring the distant appeal

of the unsinkable world in distress on a sea

of infinite being. Everyone goes down with the ship

because the greater love unanswered;

it could only end this way, our moiety of intelligence

merely a quip of the stars that rip

their constellations down the middle

like a first draft of muddled fates that congregate

at the embassy gates

of a passport and a sanctuary that doesn’t exist

regardless of what the murderous squads

of defecting tour guides insist;

when the heart opens like a fist

to take up the cross on its holy quest

to free itself from the infidel, and the eye

is clear in all directions,

after countless liberations,

the only thing that is freed is a funeral bell

calling the faithful to hell

because the greater love unanswered, nothing certain

and no one with anything to say

at the falling of the curtain

on the specious themes of a cretinous play,

it could only, so delusionally enacted,

no absurdity retracted,

end this way.

PATRICK WHITE