JOURNEY

I’m on some kind of journey

but I don’t know where it’s going;

I’m growing wings and shedding them,

and I’m true to every thought in my head.

I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,

a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,

a meteorically battered planet

that wobbles between a kiss and a fist

in the way it keeps running itself around.

I spend too much time alone.

There are no obstructions in any direction;

and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,

talking to myself like a candle,

weaving my way among the shadows

like a fish through the supple harps

of the silver river reeds. I see

that I’m taking a bath in my own grave

to wash the soiled skies of the painted world

off my eyes, to behold

the brief career of the leaf of life

and how the light gusts out from the windows

like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short

and the new temple never gets further built

than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest

left to the business of the earth,

all that beauty and magnificence,

unravelled among the mud weavers.

I was inoculated against death

by a splinter of the moon;

by how little time there is for love,

for the root to get drunk

on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,

by how little I will ever know

of the road to the doorway I stepped through

to stand in awe before the moonspill

on the raven blue waters,

and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman

who has just conceded an island in her passage,

and the fragrance of unheard music

that I am a pillar of wonder

before the unsayable

as she lets drop her shadows and feathers of light,

and the blood-god assumes

his flowering crown of fire

to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.

What I have lost in the river

I will find in the river

and what I have taken from the sky

I will give back to the sky,

and there shall come a day

when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,

and the darkness that overtakes me now

will be a gate of stars to a water palace

where the dragonflies and waterlilies

are the sceptres and crowns of a human divinity

that will endure like a whisper of radiance,

a more haunting taste of light,

the rumour of a black rose

that outshines the angels

that coax the lanterns out of the night.

I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies

on the windy shore of a trembling lake,

like the blue hat plume of smoke

from a gallant winter chimney

into the vastness of my own mind

like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.

And these words will come and go

like the tides of the ocean I was,

like the providential leaves

of unfurling fortune-cookies,

like an avalanche of gold

washed down from the mountain upstream.

I write them in flowing diamond,

I write them in auroras of blood,

in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,

in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night

in the fleeting, indelible dream

of doors and hands and moons,

in warm breath on a cold window,

in a halo of comets

smeared into light by the sun,

in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,

I have said what it was mine to say

on a page of the wind

that whistled through me like life

greening the sands of the hourglass

with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart

to fall like wisdom from its tower

toward a fallible paradise

that won’t leave me as I am for long.

And I will jump again

into this cauldron of joys and sorrows

to string my spinal cord

over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,

walking upright

to plead with my own answers

to thaw like a mirror

estranged from the world it reflects

in the self-effacing flames

of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.

The awakening seed

echoes these flowers of fire

in the valley of a voice in the furnace

that lies down in the cool grass

by a stream of idle stars

and arrays its vagrant heart

like a breeze of blood in the dust

to the refugees in the shadows.

They move like eyelids

through all the phases of the moon

from an unspooled well of darkness

to the slash of a razor of light

to the threshing of the full harvest

in the siloes of the nightwind

enthroned like a breath of life

in the midst of its own dispersal.

PATRICK WHITE