I WOKE UP SAYING YOUR NAME

I WOKE UP SAYING YOUR NAME

I woke up saying your name

but in the course of the day forgot.

I should have forgiven you sooner

but my tongue was a noose and a knot.

I should have let you fool my eyes

but not my heart. No Grecian urn

but just the same

I loved the shapely vase of your body

and the fact that my ashes weren’t buried in it.

But those bouquets of angry snakes

you kept trying to arrange

into a Zen garden in Kyoto

or a hair do in Mycenean Greece

kept me looking for an antidote for years

to all those estranged wavelengths

of a gamma ray burst

I stood like a nuclear meltdown in the way of,

though I poured my blood out like heavy water

to get you to stop and cool down.

What it is is what it is only

if you don’t factor in what it’s not.

Otherwise, in the bigger picture,

what it is is just as much what it’s not.

And who can assess

what didn’t go down between us?

I’m sitting on a cold rock down by the Tay River

freezing my proverbials off

because I like being alone with the stars

at three in the morning

because they don’t ask for an explanation

about why I’m up so late

so many light years from home.

And they don’t ask me to translate my scars,

the dead word into the living,

back into wounds

they couldn’t relate to anyway.

And I don’t need to tell them

if you’re going to open yourself up to someone,

if you’re going to bloom, if

you’re going to shine

a rose, a star,

you’re bound to taste your own thorns

or the splinters of broken chandeliers

on your tongue, or a dog

with porcupine quills in its mouth,

howling at the dark side of the moon

as the greater of two faith healers.

Though neither the stars nor I

are into comparative mortality.

And as I approach death and love aimlessly

looking at the stars timelessly alone

I don’t bemoan my brevity anymore

and they don’t flash their eternity in my face.

There’s just stars and eyes for awhile

and both of us agree

death and eternity are none of our business.

There’s just this little bit of heat and light

that flares like a matchbook for a minute

and then goes out

like a holybook, a firefly,

a poem or a flower

burning in its own ashes, smothered

in its own smoke like a pillow

over a dream in a skull

that effaced itself like stars

packed into a snowman that thaws

according to cosmic laws

not meant for our eyes only.

And God, the Zeitgeist,

the Universal Id knows,

how we’ve both tried

to enlighten these lumps of coal,

these sorry excuses for eyes

into diamonds that flow

with love and compassion.

How we have laboured like Sisyphus

to haul what’s deep underground,

the dark ore within us,

up into mountains of light

only to watch it run down again

rivers and rain

into the great night seas beyond

like a heart-mind continuum.

A leaf and a starmap on a lifestream.

We have advanced into our retrogression

like everything else in the universe,

big heavy methane planets

with shepherd moons

that cast their shadows

like beauty spots on Saturn,

our polarities reversed,

our axes toppled like Neptune’s.

PATRICK WHITE