YOU DON'T COME

YOU DON’T COME

You don’t come. Your absence is a guillotine. My heart

plummets from the altitude it risked in looking forward

to a day with you outside of time and circumstance, jumps

from the edge of paradise, the flat earth, the back

of a winged horse. You don’t come and such

is the nature of love

I go out of the plane not knowing

if I’ve got a parachute on and my heart

pulls the rip cord to see if there’s any salvation in the fall,

any flowers for me in the bag, morning glory

or dandelion seed, or this is just another

mode of acceleration to death. You don’t come

and my heart candles without a reserve,

I haven’t packed a spare dawn

and though I will make every effort to understand

there’s a grave waiting down below like an open mouth

and the void is laughing at the persistent folly

of my believing you would come,

and my fear of not being worthy of love anymore

sends my mendicant self-image out

wandering over thirteenth century Europe like some flagellant

on a pilgrimage of flogging, ribbons of blood running down my back

from salted wounds, and though I know

the expectation and the disappointment are both delusions,

birdshit on the claws of a sphinx, and I will try to be

intelligent and wise about the whole thing,

tugging my heart out like a garbage-scow into deep space

where it will be laced with explosives and scuttled once again,

and I will be awarded another paradoxical brownie-badge

by another scout-master Tibetan rinpoche

for knowing how to survive alone in this empty wilderness,

a tiger of will, a Viking of resolve,

an aging clown without children or laughter, a jester-king

officiating from the throneless butt of his own joke,

a poet with nothing to praise, a painter

with cataracts in the eye and flowers in the sky, I

know there is nothing I can tell myself, no spiritual weed

I can poultice over the vacancy that goes on forever

to draw out the infection from my heart, the gangrene

from the broken pillar of the foolish temple I erected

to serve the goddess in any of her lunar phases,

and though I struggle like a diminished thing to accept my dejection,

to imbibe the toxins from the left tit of the Medusa

while trying not to turn into stone, while trying

not to avert my eyes from this crone-form of the moon, let

Kali drink my blood, in the name of insight, clarity and courage,

good wolf, I know this, too, is delusion, another

projected holograph from the third eye of the pineal gland,

and kick the chair from under

the useless fruit of my head in a noose. Back to earth

without a heat shield. Impact. You don’t come

and your absence is filling up with people I like as far as I know

but don’t want to see, people who walk into

the sad forests of my solitudinous melancholy with chain-saws

for conversation, stupid lost bored people who just can’t help it,

looking for cigarettes and companionship in the life-boat,

the leper-colony, stars on the Titanic, and I am compelled up

from the depths of my cosmic despair like a white whale in a holding pen

to jump for the tourists, make a big splash, make

anything happen to amuse them, and I try, I honestly try, regretting

even the shabby sincerity of my own incapacitated efforts to love them

by pulling something out of the guts

of my own anonymous dismemberment, a hand or an eye or a smile,

and it all feels like the work of a tired ox grinding social corn

on the zodiacal millstone of its own heart

but everyone leaves like a gray day anyway, the sun eclipsed

and I am returned to myself like polluted water

running like a desert flashflood through the dry creekbed

of your undeniable absence. You don’t come. You have forgotten me

as you said you wouldn’t and all the promises

of intimacy and vivid affection

are unleashed like a plague of locusts on the moon

to devour the open-faced swordless clocks of the flowers

I planted there for you to know eternity in the hour.

I am eaten alive by a million mouths

and even yesterday’s demons banished from the feast

are called back from lean exile

to this jubilant feeding-frenzy that consumes without mercy.

You don’t come. And I don’t blame you. I understand

the flux of time and circumstance, I understand

how a man goes to bed at night thinking

he’ll be drinking wine in the morning

and winds up being offered vinegar on a cross,

I understand that there are events that appear like sharks

in this water droplet of a world, that there are crossroads

that baffle the journey with traffic cops

and starless unknowns, with roadkill and dangerous vagrants,

that there are off road shortcuts across the far fields

that seem to take forever to return us to where we began. Alive

fifty-four years, I understand what it is to walk this road of ghosts, a refugee,

carrying your own body to a shower in a concentration camp,

to mistake the apocalypse of a nuclear explosion

for the advent of dawn, to mistake the knot in a river of wood

for a ship on the horizon, an island in the stream. Castaway again

on the cold rocks of some extraterrestrial shore

to follow my own footprints back to me, every life form on the planet,

including myself, a fossil of nirvanic spontaneity,

some indecipherable glyph broken off

the loaf of some lost continent like a crumb of stale bread, a bone-fragment,

a dead civilization, to feed the curiosity of time-travellers

who fix like junkies on the mystery of their passage

through empty alien rooms, though I burn like a library of reasons,

and mock my own scholarship, mustering arguments against myself

to excuse your absence and justify another fleet of coffins

sailing to the rescue, I do understand. You do not come. This negligence

is unintentional. You are young, free, a gust of wind and a leaf

that flares up in a back-alley throwing gold-dust in your eyes,

fire-fly north that can’t be constellated, a dolphin off the bough,

and I am no fisherman with a net, no obvious lures,

who’s trying to draw you up on deck out of your element,

but a captain going down with the ship, his hands at the wheel out of habit.

You have not come and I am a thousand years older and more correct

than I was on this delirious bird-mad morning,

lyrically awaiting you, than I am now looking upon all these sad eggs

smashed like a junkyard of embryo suns and broken crowns

at the foot of a nest in the bent axle of the cosmic tree

where I hang like the pagan god, Wodin, a sacrifice unto myself,

one pathos to another, inaudibly whispering last words

into the ineffable silence of a non-existent ear.

You have not come and all your reasons are valid. Brutally,

I understand the firewalk of this excruciation on crutches,

limping over hot coals to transcend myself for clarity’s sake,

for poetry’s sake, your sake, my sake, love’s sake, the seeing’s sake,

I have worn out the road and the bridges of my feet

with my walking across the rivers of hell to understand:

I am aging and the ignorant insane children of this black spring,

brought up on logos and T.V. only come to look through

the rubble of Tintagel for the lost jewels of Merlin,

for any heart-stone they could pull the sword out of

to establish their own thrones once again

in the fields of glory beyond the round table of the calendar.

I have drunk from the cup and passed it on and all the shining skies

that I have ever walked under, all the legends of my stars,

my former radiance, in their eyes, are cemeteries of dead stars,

black dwarfs and the holes of exhausted graves in space, the blue-white

of their ingathered light that once could stir a planet into life,

now the braille of an effaced epitaph runed on a poet’s tomb.

And it’s not as if they don’t come bearing gifts when they do come,

flowers and compliments to the green patina on my erudition,

small obeisances at graveside, gratitude

for my gray-haired kindness, token offerings to the dead,

to the prophetic skull of one of their ancestors

consulted like the weather or Moses

on the future of the promised land that I’m forbidden to enter. No blame

in their approach to the disembodied, no fault

on either side. I understand. You do not come. No word

to allay the silence, no sword to fall upon in the stoic shadows

of your portentous eclipse, no way to scry, haruspicate, divine

the meaning of the darkness that overtakes me

like Herculaneum under the canning-jar ash of a volcanic heart

putting up preserves. My dick falls off at forty. At thirty

the colour runs from my hair like a sunset. At fifty

I’m a desert in an hourglass. Fifty-four and my blood chips off

like flakes of paint from a dry rose. Two thousand a.d.,

at the turn of the millennium, my eyes turn into clouds,

my tongue, the spent autumn of a leaf on the wind. By forty-nine

all that I remember is on display in a museum, my eviscerated heart

sinks through a convenient tar-pit and my brain, cracked mud,

orders a modest sarcophagus and rents a small room under an affordable pyramid

close to the valley of the kings. Today

I shed a few tears tinged with acid that die

like rain looking for roots on rock and bury my riddle of bones and vertebrae

under the snuffed fire-pit of a cave floor

for an archaeologist not yet born to guess at what I was.

You do not come. I understand. Tired of scratching at my coffin lid,

I must get out, I go to the Perth Restaurant and call to see

if you need a ride even though the wheel

is ten thousand years in the future, fire hasn’t been discovered yet

and I’m back in the Jurassic, a tiny mammal, trying not

to be stepped on by a stampede of doomed dinosaurs.

Wrong number. Wrong life. You do not come. I understand,

the flag of my heart at half-mast on the pole of my spine,

and no one but strangers and hired mourners,

mirages and self-inflicted nightmares

to carry me out of my hapless resignation into a waiting hearse.

PATRICK WHITE