ARE YOU BORN YET

Are you born yet, you who will understand this
when I have receded like a wave into the foam
of oncoming stars, no more than a cachet
of this remote flowering in the darkness,

one man’s indeterminate attempt

to carry the cherished fire

of his own indefensible humanity

like lightning in a battery

with umbilical cables and fangs

to jumpstart yours in a dark, cold time

that hasn’t happened yet? Are you there sometime

up ahead beyond this boundless falling

ignorantly pure and ferocious as I was

springing out of the nebular hypothesis of your own breath

like a tiger of light on the jugular of the judas-goat

life chains to a wounded cross of southern stars to catch you,

the crux australis of the issue? How many times

have I pictured you in the albums of futurity

tracking these words of mine back to me

in the lair of this particular day

trying to anaesthetize its own wounds

with the cleansing pyre of an antiseptic tongue?

This very moment that’s already gone

I imagine you glaring out of an overgrowth

of brindled shadows, arrogant and uncompromising,

the brutal judge of your own earthly excellence,

hunting alone, or trying to unmarrow

the message in the bones I’ve left

like gold in a bottle of ore, fireflies in a grave,

or a constellation in a folder of night skies

stamped for the black crescents of your eyes only,

these prophecies of chaos that only you can true

to the book of changes I leave you.

If you are young when you come to these skulls

like rain to the headstones around the ashes of old fires,

respect what must be you in time as well

as if it were your own reflection erased like a phoenix

from the gaping mirrors of witless carbon

that are all that remains of anyone’s renown,

the black dwarfs of a critical collapse of light.

But if you are old and marooned

on a glassblown island in a barefoot desert

when you stumble across these shoes in the dark

I’ve sent on ahead like the footprints

of who and where I might have been, don’t hesitate

to put them on like an urgent journey

to the circlet of the western fish

and dance your way back upstream

into the star shed of the oasis eyes

that spawned you from a dream,

your gray flesh restored, as it is today,

to the salmon rose of dawn, to the secret spring

of the key I buried like an equinox in Pisces

as an antidote to my own September crisis.

PATRICK WHITE