NO SHELTER FOR THE HEART

NO SHELTER FOR THE HEART

No shelter for the heart, the wind

is a wound of torn birds.

Too long in the dark

the star blooms without eyes.

I break a vow of silence with my solitude

and poems materialize

like lifeboats on the moon

in a sea of shadows.

I light my last candle

and the darkness in the room

holds a black mass for what I’ve lost.

Sensitive as a window

the sky changes like a mood ring

and my muse is an albino chameleon in eclipse.

I keep an abacus of skulls

to remind me what year it is

but the hours go by

like pilgrims to their death

and I can’t relate to this eternal view of things.

The ghosts are used to me by now.

I keep the spiderwebs at bay in the corners.

I teach those who died young the names of the stars.

I remain undiverted by death

as the lesser of two differences.

And what do I know of love

I wish I didn’t when the longing returns

to come down like a hard rock from the mountain

into the valley like a rogue foundation stone?

My memories are all the first drafts

of lives I’ve scrapped like bad addictions.

I made a bad play

out of my encyclopedic sorrows

and closed it on opening night as a farce

and everyone on stage applauded for an encore.

Leave a gate open and I’ll walk through it.

Otherwise I’m the stranger at the fence.

I’m passing by. I’m where the road

runs out into the wilderness

and I won’t stop until I’m irrevocably lost.

I’ve decultified myself from my identity.

Even my own mind doesn’t recognize me.

But I’m one of the sacred clowns of words.

I jest with the sublimities of the absurd

to outwit the pain of going mad without a loss of face

or losing my voice to the echo of a death mask.

I sit in the dark like a fire that’s tired of dancing.

I’ve forsaken mystics to hang on to my senses

and I can see colours through my fingertips

that only the boney keyboards of the blind can imagine.

I’m a high-browed home-spun lunatic in a looping universe.

Profound as play, I hone my hunting skills

by painting magical trances on my skull wall

where the slayers lie among the slain

as if an explanation belittled the mystery

of lovers flint knapping the moon into spearheads

to sanctify the rose of blood they both live by.

What’s madness but a diversified neglect of sanity

in the name of counter-intuitive inanities

that break open like Zen fortune-cookies sometimes

or the koans of cosmic eggs giddy with the bliss

of kensha, satori, enlightenment, moksa, the blaze,

for turning your mind over at last like a white stone

to see what lived under it, with lives of their own.

Who says you can take your freedom too far

for the chains to reach? I’ve dragged the whole prison

along with me at times when I had to,

happy to die like an alarm of futile compassion

in an air raid of pre-emptive meteor strikes

trying to chip a diamond in the rough away

from its own image of shining. I was

choosey at the beginning of my entrance,

but the exit’s one size fits all like your next of kin.

I like being astronomical about my intimacy

with the women who cherish the boyish charms

of my effortless buoyancy in avoiding black holes

by never sinking into them like a cue ball,

though there’s no need to mention this

like an old planetismal theory I abandoned

for the more random action of aberrant orbits.

Not very acquisitive, I haven’t accumulated

the brittle polyps of a lunar barrier reef

to keel haul the moon when she’s riding low

over the extinct lava beds of her last rapture

for the cost of an atmosphere and the loss of an ocean.

I’m dog paddling in space without a life jacket on.

People look for words to express their feelings.

I’ve had to transmute a whole new grammar

out of the stem cells of my voice just to

hear myself think without anyone else talking for me.

So you fussed with language over a lifetime?

And you reek of poetry like a cheap cologne

you synthetically distilled from your garden of transplants

not wholly adapted to the soil they grow in

though you’ve uprooted all the weeds to the letter.

But what’s that compared to speaking in tongues

people haven’t been born to speak yet?

You can only write about so much life

as has mastered you at first sight

and if none of your emotions is crazed with hunger

the winners don’t get to plead for a second chance.

The garden is torched by dandelions.

The hydra-headed hollyhocks are toppled by the wind.

I exalt in the liberty of an unattainable excellence.

I fail greatly at everything I achieve.

I believe in what makes the night bird sing

as if its longing weren’t a secret the aspens

didn’t keep to themselves. I can see

no purpose to autumn, no clear reason for spring.

Whenever I forgo my intention, I accomplish

so much more than I could assess in a lifetime.

Never had a thought that wasn’t shadowed by a feeling

but I’ve never resorted to espionage

given my awareness is intelligent space

and the clouds of unknowing soon dissipate into stars.

I don’t look for periodicity in the clock of the rain.

The puncture wounds of childhood outgrow their scars

like expanding universes hype the Big Bang.

I build telescopes out of broken windowpanes

unaligned with the axis of the earth.

I made a quantum leap of faith into the unexplained.

I’ve got a unified field theory I call my mind.

I’m the remaining eye of a delusion that illuminates reality.

Just like a star. By the time you see it, it’s left you behind.

PATRICK WHITE