THE CLOSER TO DEATH, THE MORE RISKS YOU
TAKE IN LIFE
The closer to death, the more risks you
take in life.
Whatever’s left of your dark
abundance, you spend it here
on things you know you won’t be able
to take for granted
in a few light years, windows and
wildflowers, dragonflies
and Venus going down blazing blue-white
in a tangerine sunset,
the haiku novel you write spontaneously
in your head
about the future of the red-haired kid
with floured skin and freckles.
The way the light waxes lyrical about
the larkspur.
Even the hairy scab of the spider you
found
stranded in the bathtub after he’d
put himself in peril
to come out of the darkness for a
drink. And the long
pathway to heaven you laid over the
side
like a two ply Milky Way of toilet
paper
so it could be gone, as it was, in the
morning
with blessings on its head and house.
So much time
and then there’s forever. We don’t
run out of it
we just plunge into one hell of a lot
more of it
than we can use.
So given what I know
as one of the few certainties that have
brutally enhanced my intensity for
life,
is going to happen to me sooner than
later,
twenty springs, twenty summers, twenty
autumns
if I’m lucky beaded out like new
moons
on the optimistic abacus of my fingers
and toes,
how could I not, like Tolstoy walking
with Turgenev,
at the crepuscular end of an epic life,
crush flowers against my face, or let
the stars
tattoo my skin with whatever
constellations they wish?
How could I not admire the immensity of
the light
thinly smeared on the delicately leaded
stained glass window
of the fly’s wing, lying like a black
maple key
on the windowsill at the foot of the
sky it couldn’t unlock?
I absorb every mystically specific
detail
the way I breathe. The inconceivable
uncanniness
of its being here, just as it is
without amendment, at all,
and me as well, to witness that all
there is
to my unlikely presence is the
fly on the windowsill.
Is the unknown star I’m trying to
name
the constellation it’s so furiously
from
shining through the crowns of the birch
groves
pulling their leaves up around their
throats
as autumn approaches for all of us. So
far
not moribund about death or the passage
of the flowers.
If it were a bad thing, the animals
would know,
and be afraid of it, and yet I’ve
witnessed
some of the highest summits of dignity
in the way an animal dies, accepting
what must be,
with such grace and dignity, even in
the clutch
of great agony, I just have to remember
what I saw in their eyes as they looked
at me calmly
as death underwhelmed them on the
inside
without the slightest disappointment
that this was the end of life. And no
panic,
no sense of possibly having lived it
wrong.
Just the calm of a flightfeather making
a soft landing.
All my life I’ve tried to have the
courage of my calling
and look into dark spaces and forbidden
realms,
fathomless abysses that staggered the
imagination
with their imageless prolixity, the
hidden harmonies
of archetypal starmud subliminally
suggesting
themes and metaphors of picture-music
that might
shed light upon my emptiness and yours
as if
we, too, were hidden secrets that
wished
to be known creatively, the way the
moon is,
when the seminal dew is on the grass
like the waters
of a breaking womb, though a lunar life
is strictly visionary,
or there’s an orgasmic frenzy of
silver fish
flashing their lunacy like sabres of
light
in their urgency for life in the rising
tide
of a providence that inspires them when
it’s high
to do or die, or expire in a tidal pool
of shore-huggers.
I’ve looked into the dragon’s eyes
directly
like two switchblades in a back alley
and recalling Rilke’s advice, tried
poetically
to kiss them back into princesses I’ve
neglected too long,
to humanize them back into my good
graces again
like the dark side of the moon taking
off its deathmask,
and turning around, showing me its
face, eye to eye,
as if mirrors hadn’t been invented
yet,
and I wasn’t a bird that had to be
afraid of turning into stone.
PATRICK WHITE
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