IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

If I ever get to look back on all this

even if it’s just to show me how wrong I was

about so much, how much I risked for so little,

I don’t want to have been mean and petty here,

I don’t want to have lived short-minded

as if my brain never grew to its proper height

and I had to live close to the ground

with burrowing wasps and centipedes

trading toxins in the grass like slumlords.

Tried to live like a magnanimous man

with an open hand whenever my luck kept pace

with my generosity. Didn’t want to die

knowing nothing about the stars, that shining

that grew in time even brighter in the dark within.

Wanted to know the fury and compassion, genius,

the affable kindness, madness and love of humankind.

Used to say we were born to see and be happy,

and if you couldn’t find a meaning that suited you,

make one up of your own. Don’t waste

the great creative potential of the absurd

and try to fit yourself like a little polyp of sentience

into the fossilized coral reefs of the past.

Go for the galaxies. What’s to lose?

If you’re going to fall, fall from a height.

Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre flight.

You’d be surprised at what the timing of one comet

falling out of the black halo around the sun

can mean to millions watching down below for signs.

Sensible shoes, or starmud on your winged heels,

Icarus or Neil Armstrong using his foot

to take a big step for humankind, walk your mile

standing up as if you were scanning for leopards,

your simian continuum at a fork in the road.

Danger is a capricious muse, but it can still

rivet you with inspiration. The hunters get eyes.

You grow an exoskeleton, then rib

the walls and rafters of the house and soon

the sun decides where the windows are going to go.

The Hox genes talk, and you’re the topic of conversation.

You start listening as if

you were listening in on yourself,

all those voices and things

for words you don’t understand,

bliss, butterflies, sorrows and assassins,

the victimized heroes of egoistic tragedies,

and the poetry in the pity of unexpurgated passion.

Lovers in the last throes of unmitigated catastrophe.

The rush and turmoil of the picture-music

going on all the time, shapeshifting

from one musical scene into another

and even you with your hands over your ears

sick of listening to the cosmic hiss,

climactic cymbals in the great performance

just waiting to come together like a hadron collider

deep underground where black holes in space

are born of the impact. If you’re not already

too calculating, or mesmerized like a stone bird

by the snake-eyes of the dice, put some money

down on yourself as if you had one to lose,

and if for nothing more than the exercise,

kiss your prophetic skulls for luck and let them roll.

And when you love, don’t approach a seabed on the moon

with a spoonful of water you can both sip from.

Return like an ocean with a convincing atmosphere.

If fools rush in where angels fear to tread

the angels will follow soon enough, with blessings

on the horns of your head. Learn

every gesture of her eyes like pictographic signage,

of her heart, a grammar for two, of her mind

be the no one to lift its veils, of her body,

apprentice yourself to the genius of her starmud.

Everything that lives is a gesture of the absurd

the imagination delights in elaborating

like people with the personalities of apple-trees

or the encyclopedic prolixity of the Burgess Shale.

I am is not the cornerstone of anything.

I imagine. And the wind is the threshold of the tent

that sheds the desolation of a self like a flower

that blooms in fire. Why water a mirage? Live large.

Squander stars on your vision of this, swallow the abyss

to keep your emptiness well fed, let your wisdom

be the private life of space, your time on earth

be passage and transformation, and your heart

cherish the bliss of all, animate and inanimate alike,

who suffer the same dream of being awake that you do.

PATRICK WHITE