NEVER WANTED TO WORK THAT HARD TO BE BEAUTIFUL

NEVER WANTED TO WORK THAT HARD TO BE BEAUTIFUL

Never wanted to work that hard to be beautiful

inside or out, be the rare fossil of a mirror

in the red velvet drawer of a jewellery tower

that slides out like a tiny coffin in a morgue.

Not out to prove that waterlilies have the bones

of astral hummingbirds. Love flowers,

but not in cults. Love the moon enough

not to make a religion of it, life enough

not to resist what it’s trying to put me through

whether I’m howling in pain, set afire,

or mystically exalted by vital bliss

or about to scatter my ashes from any of the bridges

that arc like grey rainbows of partially kept truces

with the lies of the lines in between.

Sometimes I’m mining mini black holes

inside the solar system looking for

new motherlodes of metaphor inside

the eye sockets of a skull crawling with Aztecs

like red army ants attending to their gods,

or go panning for stars well beyond the heliosphere

the way I used to catch fireflies as a boy

just to watch them glow a moment and let them go

like an intimate insight into what I still don’t know

but never failed to be enlightened by upon their release.

People outside my open window, laughing, talking,

setting up giddy long shots like sexual moves

on a hot summer night with a beer in its hand,

and the drunk demotic of a little English on the cue,

and alarmed car horns throbbing like ear aches in park,

and it’s all so intriguingly silly it’s got to be human

and I wonder if a thousand years from now will think

this is what we had to be like. And as soon as I

glimpse that, the whole scene is deepened by time

in the eyes behind a veil of eternity I lifted

while I was alive to see that everything here is indelible.

There’s a perpetuity in our apparent randomness

in the passing of the moment, that spontaneously

preserves us for greater things than we can imagine

like the Conservation of Data Principle

that holds good even in the singular depths

of a black hole listening like a poet through an open window.

A smudge of life on my poem, but I don’t mind

the fingerprints at all. What’s a star without planets?

What’s a shepherd ushering moons toward

the high blue grasslands without a black sheep

that wanders off by itself once and awhile

to check out other things along the way?

My poems pick things up in their flowing

like rivers pick up leaves and tributaries

and small flotillas of blossoms in the spring,

the occult alphabets of calligraphic oil snakes,

and mingles them all into the picture-music

of the mindstream, the motifs of a symphony,

or the themes of a play, that picks things up

and puts them down again like the moonrise

of a rock on a beach. Few of life’s harmonies

are symmetrically balanced crystallographers.

Nights when I look into the eyes of the stars

and even the lenses of my telescope break into tears.

You can take life out of it like a fly in the toilet bowl,

a bumble bee in a jar, a star out of your eye

a spider on a long-handled broom, or the crumb

of a leftover dream from the night before,

or you can leave it in if it wants to come along for the ride.

I’ve heard for so long from people who say they know

that everything is one, I don’t worry about disconnections.

It’s the fallible continuity of life that sings

like a nightbird from the dead branch and green alike

most beautifully to me, the way the light and the rain

and love when it’s real, make unions of disparate things

that depend upon each other for life like metaphors.

I revel in the crazy wisdom of the oxymoronic contradictions

that bond me to the universe like the small volcanoes

of the ground wasps that erupt between the fault lines

along the continental plates of the sidewalks

and apprentice me to landscaping with lava on the moon.

The circle’s wounded deeper into its roundness

once it’s broken by a branch, the stillness more profound

for the stone that’s dropped into it. Love, when it’s new,

trued by separation. The earth itself, an alloy

of the elemental table. To be truly original creatively

is to seek the low place like the sea and let

everything run down into you like myriad streams

that are neither many nor one, pure nor polluted,

and out of that mingling which is the whole of you,

raise them like weather from the bells of the flowers

to the robes of snow on the mountain tops

and know that with every cloud, every raindrop, storm,

every bolt of lightning, and all the life thereby engendered

is you returning like a shape shifter to your own depths

and everything comes along for the ride as if

they were always on your side, like your eyes are.

PATRICK WHITE