EMPTY-HANDED I COME

EMPTY-HANDED I COME

Empty-handed I come; empty-handed I go.

The road has no name.

The destination doesn’t exist yet.

By my side, no one. Little bird, you want to drink

from the dragon’s chalice, but faces from now

I will not know you; the mirror

will not breathe. Unlovable, strange, some

warrior mystic under an expanding sky

where the stars move further and further apart

I hammer swords of light out

on the igneous anvil of my heart

folding the metal

like the first edition of a holy book until the edge

draws blood from space

with a slash of lethal intelligence.

The clowns of God are rehearsing for a play like this

and you have your lives, your disgraces to live;

your clock of lies that says

it’s always a lonely time to forgive. Now and here, never

anyone or anything, all objects turned to thought;

ahead, the eerie seduction of living for nothing

and all behind, the auroral dispensation of delusion.

Did you do well? Did you do poorly?

Are you clad in the rags or robes of life?

Is your mind wired to lightning

or are you just another flake of heat in the desert;

a gesture of extremes, hallucinating?

I’ve never liked people much; they

bruise the eye of the wine

and keep the flowers of night in a straitjacket.

They don’t know how to take themselves seriously,

mistaking maggots for magi. Their diamonds

don’t flow; across the streams of their being

they build dams out of crutches, houses of God

out of the bones of the ethnically cleansed.

Their children sit at the feet of eggs

giving lectures on the perils of flight. Offered wings

they cling to their fear of heights

and dread death like a crack in the sky.

I’ll take the hawk over the barnyard every time;

the wolf over the house-broken dog, I will not

masticate shadows in a well-trained field.

I may be only a drop of blood

hanging from the horn of the moon, a nail

of salamander gold regenerated in the fire

to plank a leper’s coffin, all my work, the invention of the wheel

for birds, a leader that follows, always a needle off north.

I would rather see what the widow sees

in the petty eyes of her beloved

when he’s laid out in the living-room

like a gambling debt even death couldn’t pay.

I would rather be impaled in hell

on the tip of an eyelash of true insight

than wobble my way through this gallery

for the blind

begging donations from the light. Let those

who have gerrymandered their minds

into emergency wards for the heart receive

silos of what they’ve sown, seven years

of lean and fat

and a mini-series of death certificates

notarized by a grave-digger

taking invitations at the door. I would rather

rage like a pagan wind in the orchard of my own face

than to have even the slightest of my solitudes

whisper one word of falsehood

at this trial of seeing. Let the dead give witness,

let the blind swear, the ignorant insist,

the cripples lie and the cowards balance; still

you will be sentenced

by a knock on the door in the silence; still

you’ll expire like a parking meter

or a pensioned saint

on the way to paradise, mermaids in the wave,

maggots in the rose.

PATRICK WHITE