WHAT A SHADOW

What a shadow walks in the aftermath of realization;

I don’t want to know what I know,

I don’t want to sing what I sing

to the harp of the sagging powerlines

and the burnt guitars of naked trees.

I don’t want a music that shatters like glass,

the broken coal of a menagerie of black strawberry hearts

reeking of sulfurous roses.

And there’s a sword in the rain

with blood on it

dispersing like an explanation.

And it’s hard to tell the true from the crazy

in this infinite solitude of awareness

that sways me like a bell or a willow

between one extreme and the other,

a kind of walking through arboreal mythogems,

Druidic tree alphabets, whistling in the dark.

Tender, eerie, and promising

the light that saturates the air after a storm,

the infernal glow of dark fire-gods

who left their footprints on water like islands,

like the sad elements that constitute creation

on a wet autumn evening

riddled with lightning and rainbows

and the turbulent monumentalism of the sunset

moving its inimitable aeon across the west.

I am merely a longing wrapped in flesh,

a wisdom in search of the ignorance

to know what to ask for,

the pearl feeling its sand-nature,

its close affinity with time,

a lonely bird in the enfolding dusk,

wonder conceding its flower

to the darkness and silence of the mysterious abyss.

And I wonder no less now than when I was young

except that I am no longer panicked into the cruel ecstasy

of needing to know; a kinder agony, a more expansive serenity

gentles my absorption into the void

and reconciles the unattainable to my seeking.

No stars tonight.

No planet gleaming through

this turmoil of chameleonic cloud,

but I remember the echo of the rainbow

as the humbler sister of the two

and the more intriguing for her reticence,

the deeper well less apt to flaunt its waters,

the darker mirror,

a fountain of primordial metaphors,

homing crows returning like an ancient language

to the black dream groves of illiterate origins.

I prop the fire escape door open

with a child’s classroom chair

to marvel at the beauty and profundity

of all that I don’t know

and realize how little of anything is me,

and what a petal of breath my life is

even if I were to exhaust

all the seas of the rising moon like inkwells

to assert my significant insignificance,

the protean nothingness

of the immutable transformations

that accommodate themselves

in this embodied fiction of me.

Here insert the blade of a translucent ecstasy

that proves that of all my senses

my eyes suffer the most

because those who see and see the deepest

suffer the most, must

suffer the loss of their seeing

in the unfathomable depths of the darkness

and must become the sword to survive it,

not the slayer or the slain,

but the agony of an unanswerable joy

that keeps killing our dreams into life.

PATRICK WHITE