TO A YOUNG POET

TO A YOUNG POET

As you are now, and I have been

a long branch at the top of the tree

in a black spring, reaching out

for the fury of a distant star

to adorn your spine

with a leaf of light

that might be the sail

on a boat full of worlds

that will thunder like windfall fruit

or an army of hearts

pulsing across the drumhead plain

of your moon-salt thoughts,

their liberation, a sea of blood,

a squall of vipers, a murder,

and a brazen idol away

from the beguiling taste of another paradise. What

does this mean? This means

I come before you

like a brutal lighthouse without a warning,

unfolding wings of light like a stormbird

slipped like a letter

under the door of huge winds

that have driven most sailors to shore,

prudently seasoned

by what the ocean can do. But you are

a creature of the depths,

a volcanic thermophile

grown gigantic in your darkness

and your solitude, the Cyclopean shadow

you would cast on the castle walls

in the tiniest burning house of time

if only there were light and life enough

to convince the grotesque it’s beautiful;

the folly of your unknown world

is the secret wisdom of a second moon. Not

insane enough yet

to be a credible witness

to the antics of your own asylums

where the mad angels

swear you’re real and fling you like a drug

they won’t take across

the lunar floor

of your infamous acquiescence, I come to you

like a prophetic lighthouse, arms of light

outstretched on the edge of a towering cliff,

pleading like a Druid with God

for answers I could sacrifice

like rams and humans

to questions on the altars of a mountain brain

that heaves me like a continent

up out of the depths and opens my mouth

to announce a black wind in the abandoned caves of silent oracles.

I can hear the whisper

of the serpent ghosting through the grass

in a cemetery of dead echoes, and I can read the names

of the midnight shipwrecks

you have suffered on the inclement shores

of your own island consciousness. Are you marooned

or is it that you’re just choosey

about rescues and life-boats?

Unfolding these petals of light like straitjackets, like tides,

I come before you,

a navy sunk in a well on the moon,

no footprints on the map to where your treasure is buried

like the jewels and wishbone harps of the dead.

I’ve always disappointed my own wisdom,

and the dark-hearted clowns

of the suicidal circus

that waits like a sense of humour

for an encore,

have long ago died without applause

like unexploded shells

far from their badly-aimed humanity.

Like the universe, whose life

hasn’t been a clown

shot out of a cannon

without a safety-net? So

I come before you without a face, a mask,

a self, or the worn-out authority of a wound

scarred like a book out of the sum

of all my failures, offering

these simulacra of keys to what

has no need of a lock, but conceals your fate

in a mouthless rumour of intimate stars.

And I do not come to fill the dead seabeds of the moon

with tears and raise vast armadas against the fact;

no one need tell the wind the world is sad,

nor multiply the horrors of hell like bitter weeds

in the ashes of the wheat when fire itself,

so long the nun of its own burning,

pledged to ferocious purities,

is corrupted by what it consumes.

And among these murmurs of murder and war,

these corpses and civilizations sandbagged into seawalls

against this toiling deluge of blood, who

but the most unfeeling, could indulge

the obscenity of the lie

that life is beautiful or good

in the radiant marrow of the bone

cracking like a flute in the jaws of an iron dog?

Nor do I come scrying fissures in the sky

marking annual Armageddons

in a calendar of vengeful tomorrows. If the world

isn’t already worthy of love

it could never be worthy of hatred.

No curse, no blessing, no reform or utopian felicity,

ignorance and enlightenment both

one heartbeat shy of the truth,

and freedom, compassion, genius,

three brides on a bridge of snails,

how could I come before you clearly

if there were anything in my hands? Fire

doesn’t need a teacher to burn

nor the wind an instructor to fly

and if you haven’t already been struck

like a birdless tree

by lightning on the moon

what farce of the sublime could show you

what you don’t need to know

to be what you are

when spring comes like a voice, a whisper of bliss,

a green arsonist, a jest of life

to the startled garden

in the rootless urn of your unsayable longing?

PATRICK WHITE