WHETHER I LANGUISH HERE

WHETHER I LANGUISH HERE

Whether I languish here in the cold tin rain, everything

black, green, and grey, and the violet crocus

adjusting its bruised crown to the fragile light,

and the willow already an accomplished dancer,

and the sad brooms of the pine

that sweep the stairs of the wind

heavier than ever in their helpless plight, or

tired of the slow exorcism of old Septembers

that still shine blue and gold

in the back of the family bible where people

come and go like migrant doors, I accept myself

like a heresy of rogue stars

and look for a deeper night within

for the honey and wine of the radiant wonder

that walks like a woman in the guise

of a silver herb through the valley of the wound

that life can be when the geese return from the dead,

I am the lament of a pointless mystery,

an intimate namelessness, an unknown agony

that consumes me like an exile, a severance

and a longing of which I am not worthy

even now among the leaves and birds, all

these manic, animated nations of the spring.

Is it myself I mourn,

some diamond fiction of the mind

that refuses to thaw in a season of flowing,

or have I acknowledged, without knowing,

there never was anyone real to regret,

no one to let down, no one to raise up

and nothing ever missing, no lack

of what I needed to be to live, no

second person to assess the outcome,

and all the coming and the going,

the exits and entrances, transits and transformations,

all the urgencies and emergency graves

were the immaterial props

of a dream, of a life, that was never mine

and isn’t me. Even when I hold

the invisible ink of the wind

like a page of the sky up to the light,

I cannot read my name, my death or birth

perched like a bird

in the concealing foliage of revelation. It seems

in the mystic ore of the oyster

I am not a pearl or a planet

or even a grain of sand

to found a universe upon,

not even the slightest of these agitations

robed in the nacreous dawn of a new beginning.

How many years, how many days and ways

have I groaned like an old wheel

in this river of grief

trying to grind a harvest into bread,

sorting the weeds from the wheat

to allay the chronic torrent

of this bridal hunger on my death-bed?

What faceless love is this

that wakes me with a kiss again and again

in every moment, the lips of the rain,

to squander myself on nothing

in the shrines and asylums of my eloquent pain,

the aging conviction

of a fetal contradiction

trying to celebrate the unattainable

in the resurgent fountains and fictions

of the unexplainable? And what a fool is here

to deride the gestures of his own devotion,

laying his life on the altars of the years

to make a gift of a gift

that isn’t his to give, stealing the wave

to pay tribute to the ocean, easing the flame

from the purse of the fire

to spend on the blaze? 

What could possibly be ours to give

when the only acceptable sacrifice

in the elusive eyes of magnanimous life

is to live?

PATRICK WHITE