YOU CAN AIM YOUR SHINING BUT BETTER TO BURN LIKE A STAR

YOU CAN AIM YOUR SHINING BUT BETTER TO BURN LIKE A STAR

You can aim your shining but better to burn like a star.

A calm continuous explosion. Just like the Big Bang

before dark energy entered the scene

and things started to get interesting

as they accelerated. Space grows.

More light years between stars

until the last firefly goes out like a nightwatchman.

Everything’s like that, people, love affairs, gardens

at the end of summer, suicides, girls

that have never worn purple before, wisdom

and the love of knowledge, honour in a life of crime,

flying carpets that never made it any further than the windows,

fruit trees, the eyes of luck fixed on a starmap of dice.

Everything’s evaporating into a breathless abyss.

One day every cell in my body is going to feel

like the lone survivor of a homeless colony on the moon.

The trees, the birds, the stars, everything will have

transcended itself spontaneously including

any heaven, afterlife or reincarnation,

or even long oblivious eras lost among the molecules,

you might have planned on as a pit stop along the way

gone with nobody left to know it.

Especially when I’m down by the river at night

in the early fall, and the air is pungent with duff

after a rain that really messed up bookbinding the leaves

and the stars are moving to their winter grazing grounds,

I feel it more than think it like a deep wound in my heart

this inclusive sadness for everything that has ever been

or is and yet to be. And I want justice now

for generations that have yet to be born

and though it’s as elusively numinous

as trying to make out what constellation

the fireflies are trying to shape out of the valley fog

after a lightning storm has just passed over

and everything is as clean and disordered

as the dishevelled bouquets of the wildflowers

beside the singing ditches and in the vetch bound fields,

it seems like a desecration to have arrayed

all this beauty, these woods, my eyes, Arcturus and Aldebaran,

even the anti-mystic details of the history of war

we keep a record of to consider ourselves civilized,

and all the hurt, the sorrows, the disappointments, the sacrifices

and even in the way we born to love each other like appetites,

all that and more reaching out to attain the unattainable

and then the startling realization, like a mirror

recognizing its own twin in a crowd of unrelated reflections

you are the abandoned crocodile that grew up

in a slum of radioactive slurry, and at this time of year,

when the wild grapevines are ripening like shepherd moons

with life-sustaining seas under methane ice-caps

and dusty mauve cataracts, without an eyelash of distinction

you are the wine that life is intoxicated upon

and extinction is a kind of trance we go into when it’s time to sober up.

PATRICK WHITE