WHITE VOID FOR THE MOMENT, QUIESCENT AS PAPER AND CANVAS

WHITE VOID FOR THE MOMENT, QUIESCENT AS PAPER AND CANVAS

White void for the moment, quiescent as paper and canvas,

a little white square in the middle of my heart

as a psychologist once said, startled and wide-eyed,

and there’s no one there, as if I were the simplest

of impossibilities. Could be. But who would be there

to know what it might make a difference to, or care?

Some purposes fulfill themselves or maybe

the quality of peace goes white in the winter

as it does in the dove, so as not to attract

undue attention to itself in a snow storm of poems.

Or maybe, sooner or later, even reality

comes to realize its suprasensual ground of being

is misconceptualized from a word or a name

that has the creative power of one of the shapeshifting lords

of the dead metaphors that get brought back to life

with no idea of where they’ve been in the meantime.

All of genesis in the first word, the to logos,

the whole table of contents of the imagination, now and to come,

the alpha and omega like the short and long vowels

of the sacred syllables of picture music,

apple bloom playing the dead branches of its leafless violins,

and the grammar of a living medium of animal images

and the shamans who entered into their visionary agony

painted on the blackboards of our native skull caves

where we worshipped bears dressed in the hides of humans.

The happy beginnings quit and the hard-line endings go on forever.

I’m back here at Long Bay, like the long story

of a lifemask that’s been passing itself off as me for light years

sitting alone around a daylily of fire

giving a private lapdance to the wind,

scattering stars and leaves and smoke around

all over the place, as if it were looking for something it lost

in a panic to retrieve it from the passage of the mindstream

like time unravelling the seams of all things

unstitching the constellations like the wavelengths

of the enfeebled threads that kept our wounds together

long enough to heal into the crude ores

of terraformed scar tissue that might smoulder

like a starmap of brown stars over the course of time,

even when it’s been mined out like the open pits of the moon,

no light bulbs in the sockets of an empty skull

but never shines the way its eyes used to

when you could look through them

like reflecting telescopes into the sidereal splendours of the soul.

Before it discovered the unbearable solitude

in the nightfall of pain, and the white apparition

that comes like the silence of a nurse in soft shoes

to sow its mouth shut to keep the others

from waking up on the night ward from their dreams

to discover like a wild rose at the end of summer

that everything is terminal, our departures and arrivals,

our exits and entrances alike. That there’s a holy war of one

deep in the heart, win, lose, or draw, day and night

that goes on without respite that even for survival

the crazy wisdom of a compassionate warrior will not fight,

our human divinity not something to be won,

but a birthright, a square of light like a faceless stamp

on a loveletter that melts like a snowflake

as soon as it alights like a star on the furnace of the heart

and the ghosts of our tears return like rivers

to the oceanic awareness of the bays

we sit beside listening to the spiritual white noise

of the cosmic events, in bliss and sorrow,

we once lived through like the mirages and muses

of a tomorrow that came too late to celebrate our absence.

PATRICK WHITE