EVERY PATH

EVERY PATH

Every path is as wide with compassion

as the planet that you’re walking on

so there’s really never any danger of falling off.

I didn’t lie

and you didn’t tell the truth:

two sins of omission

trying to fit lenses to clarity

like fashionable eyewear.

It’s what people do

when they don’t want to see too much.

And I’m sure you’ve recreated me in your own image long since

I discovered good-bye was older than eternity

and more absolute than space.

I remember you asking me once

after we’d finished making love in the red tide

as the breakers dashed their galaxies against the rocks

and we both sprawled there naked dripping with stars

what I thought a human was and I replied

an interpretation with a face.

And you asked why we were here

and I said to listen to the sea beside someone like you.

And later as we were walking back to the fire

you looked back at our footprints glowing in the sand

like tiny island universes following us

like dance-steps painted on the shore

and pulling yourself in tight against my arm

you whispered I think we’re the music they’re dancing to.

And ever since I’ve cherished

an ancient silence deep within me

whenever I’ve looked at the stars and thought of you.

I’ve burned a lot of bridges

since that night of doors

with thresholds that couldn’t be crossed

and windows that turned their backs

on what they couldn’t see through.

I should have thought by now

I might have forgotten you

but you’re always the stranger

who shows up at the gate of the abyss

just as I’m about to enter

and throwing me a blindfolded kiss

says Here. Interpret this.

As if it were some kind of koan

you wanted me to break like a fortune-cookie

or Etruscan linear B

or the water of a womb that’s letting go

like the dark night sea that still surrounds us

as if all these eras of time

that have driven past us like stars

driving past roadkill

on the ghost road of the Milky Way

could be clocked

by the heartbeat of an embryo

born posthumously in the past without a future.

And sometimes it comes to me

like a glass eye rounded by the waves of its eyelid

washing up at my feet like a well-spoken memory

that lost its edge to the bluntness of time

there’s nothing natural about human nature

because there’s nothing supernatural about the divine.

PATRICK WHITE