GOT A BOULDER ON MY CHEST LIKE A HEAVY HEART

GOT A BOULDER ON MY CHEST LIKE A HEAVY HEART

Got a boulder on my chest like a heavy heart

someone carried all the way here like a skull

from the river, and I’m buried under the hearth fire

of forty thousand years ago as if somebody

wanted to make sure I never got up again

and did a good job of it despite the grave goods.

Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.

I’m as legless as a Bodhidarma doll, a sacred clown.

Pop me in my inflated cherry tomato of a nose

and I bounce right back again because of the way

I’m weighted. I can remember when I had

the footwork of a boxer and I used to duck, weave, and bob.

There’s a star still following me through the woods

deeper into the mystery of where I’m going

and what I’ll see as if it were ageing right along with me,

shining intermittently through the crowns of the maple trees

as I do these days through the eyelashes

of my intractable third eye, gone, gone, gone, gone,

altogether gone beyond as if my sanity

had lost communication with its expectations

as my subconscious leaves the solar system

like some undirected spacecraft flying solo

into realms it appears I’m witnessing just for myself.

Estranged ways of looking at my life

in the expanding context of the homeless vastness before me

as if a million light years of thresholds had to be crossed

before one door could open as imposing as space

everybody I left behind is growing into meme by meme,

symbol by symbol, as if mind were stepping out

of its shapeshifting sign of the zodiac, trading in

its quicksand cornerstones for a backpack

that will always be on the road like light hereafter.

There’s no where to garden, and the further out I get

the less faith I have that anyone is receiving these messages

I keep sending back like broken twigs and snagged rags

so that they can know where I’m at and get a fix on themselves

like a comet gone cold this far from any sun disc, Mayan or otherwise,

trailblazing through a treeless wilderness where

the only wildflowers are the irises of the Pleiades,

bull-vaulting Taurus on the horns of a dilemma

they took into their own hands like the fate of hydrogen.

Used to know what I wanted to be once. Now

I seek the unattainable and it comes to me I’m no one

close to what I’d thought I’d be, looking at it

from the outside before I was wholly dispossessed

on the inside, by the reality of living the vision

of a deeper aspiration that’s got nothing to do with me.

But it takes as much to live a mirage as it does an oasis

and I’m as faithful to the one as I am to the other,

and this spaced out, who’s going to insist on the distinction?

PATRICK WHITE