AND THERE IS ONE VOICE

And there is one voice among many,

one I remember as mine

among so many drops of rain, so many stars,

so many leaves, flames, feathers, flowers,

and the teen-age girl in so many corners of the darkness

skeining her pencil webs across the page

to catch something, a butterfly hunting spiders

that won’t understand her,

and the lovers that have sifted downstream

from the radiant watersheds of their mountain plateaus

like silt over the laryngeal deltas of my saying,

black pollen of extinguished stars

I carry around in the medicine bag of my afterlife

like mystic winds to keep the sails up

like the eyelids of a blind rose.

So many skies have enthroned themselves within me over the years,

so many waves and planets and legends of darkness

and the shipwrecks and shores of the weather,

and the storms and the birds, and the shriek of the lightning,

so many dawns and sunsets

and the strutting peacocks in the twilight,

and the sumptuous nights with their illicit luminosities,

so many banners of burning straw

as I look for the one needle of light

that was the gate and the eye and the mouth and the voice

of what most closely resembled me for awhile,

before I learned how to slough my skin

and the hauntings of the black poppies who long to be clear began,

and what was one threshold for a poet in solitude

turned into a palatial labyrinth of doors

that swung on their hinges in space like birds and tongues and bells

all the homeless whose last address will be a gravestone,

all the hapless, broken wretches

who keep trying again like losing bottle-caps,

and the women who came to the mike

to sing like an ambulance,

and the atrocities, the murders, the obscenity, the weeping,

that grabbed at my throat like severed hands

to scream of the horrors and sorrows

in the bloody braille and crippled signage of slaughtered flowers.

There was a boy. He was sixteen. And a prelude

that grained him out of a black cloud

that swirled around his feet like a snakepit

and pearled him into an eclipse

that time held up to the moon like a crow,

like a telescope silvered by the eyes of the night,

a black mirror that parted the veils of the obvious

like a woman’s legs

and went looking like a silo of infinite space

that echoed like a famine

into what he was the name of.

And he discovered he was nothing but the shadow of the world,

deaf mailmen, reluctant debutantes, car thieves

with the souls of hunted deer,

hookers whose blood glowed like neon

to fill the pleading mouths of a nest of empty wallets,

and the arrogant, the boring, the vicious,

the scholastic tidal pools who conjectured

about the existence of the great sea of being

that overwhelmed them day and night,

and the arsonists who walked in the rain of their distant exile

playing with their hearts like matches,

and the bruised violets who hide their eyes

under the sodden leaf of an autumn journal

that reads like the last ocean on the moon,

and the treacherous, the bitter, the liars

whose quivers of feathered asps

broke like arrows against the stone lions of the truth,

and the assassins who waited

like the thorn of a sundial to blood their shadows

in the eyeless witnesses of the crimes of noon

and the reformers who wanted to cover the earth in leather,

put shoes on the world

and wore out like flying carpets,

and those who were born to salt the field

and those who were born to sow,

and the rootless wildflowers

that gathered on the corners of concrete cities

like fire on the wind

only to be threshed by the blades of the moon,

cut down by the scarlet scythes of harvest squad cars.

And he has lingered among the opals and sapphires

and on the stairwells of water

that coiled like rivers and women

through the hovels of fire and ash

that consumed him like the memories of a phoenix

that had gone out like a pilot light,

and drunk the stars and eaten the radioactive meat

out of his own skull

like an enlightened begging bowl,

and come undone like a bell of wine in space

like a drunk shapeshifter, a staggering compass

on the high wire of his spinal cord

when his locks were moved by one of the keys of the mystery

that attuned him to the voice of his freedom

in a vast, starless abyss

that wiped the universe off the mirror

like the last breath of the light

to prove he was irrevocably dead.

And through all of this he has been a podium, a stage,

the gaping ellipse of the clear light of the void

auditioning another dream for the talent show,

an advance scout in the night

following rumours of stardom

across the appellant deserts of the moon

like thought chains of migrating geese

trying to remember their lines

like the secret names of God

on the rosaries of their long farewells,

and the only way to be anything

when he turned the light inward

was to agree that everyone had the answer but him,

that even the darkness that dyed

the clarity of his waters with night

to detonate the fireflies like blasting caps

wasn’t a robe of his own

but the nocturnal paint rag of the sky

that has been making him sit for his portrait like space

for the last forty-seven years

of writing shadows on the road like poems.

And I haven’t stopped crying for him since.

PATRICK WHITE