ALL THIS STUFF

ALL THIS STUFF

All this stuff going on in my head all the time.

All my fixed constellations changing like fireflies.

All the burning ladders of my unsuccessful siege of heaven

lying down like crosswalks at the feet of the mob.

And the stars that seemed so aloof and untouchable

settling like dust on my eyes.

I want to go home but home itself is gone

and there is no one waiting for me.

I live in these nomadic tents of my breath

that the wind blows through day and night

and everything I touch

though I long for the will of a pyramid

turns into quicksand.

I observe the life within me going on,

this flux of intimate intensities

as if I were no more than the container

and sentient window of a stranger’s house

looking in out of the darkness

of my uninhabitable homelessness

that has always been my last known address.

Nothing is ever what it seems

in this shell-game of themes and memes

that shuffles me around like a hard pea

gullible enough to deceive itself

it might one day turn into

the new moon of a black pearl.

But I’m chained by my vertebrae to a slaver

in a caravan of all my wild sides

being dragged like a jungle

toward these civilized coasts

that put everything asunder

that God has joined together

and brand what they sever

with the savage logos of an enforced belonging

that death is the only escape from.

My private cloud of unknowing

with the occasional black lightning bolt of insight

that sets my roots on fire

so that the whole tree becomes its own funeral pyre

and sheds me in flames.

And trying to fit me like a shoe

to the newly washed foot of God

is a vain waste of time for both of us

when you’re life’s got a hole in it

I keep patching with poems in the cold

or keep stopping along the way to take off

and dump out the pebble of the world

I’m walking on with a limp.

And it’s as foolish for a river

to ask where its youth has gone

as it is for me to lament the passage of mine

that I sent on up ahead like water

to keep something flowing behind me.

I don’t look for grey hairs in the wind

when it’s as clear as grace

that time and space

don’t encroach upon the stars like cataracts

and everyone we’ve ever been

lives on in each of us forever

like water waiting in the open mouth

of the frozen moonskull

for me to swallow and thaw

so that the blossom can flesh the dead branch again

that trembles and bends before the wishing well

that all men drink from like a bell

in this mirage of fire in a desert of stars

to taste the lightning-tongued elixirs of life

that frees the serpent from its scars

like a discarded straitjacket of skin and pain

to go witching for water in hell again.

PATRICK WHITE