MORE PAST IN MY BRAIN AS I GET OLDER THAN FUTURE

MORE PAST IN MY BRAIN AS I GET OLDER THAN FUTURE

More past in my brain as I get older than future,

intrusive memories like ghosts come seeking absolution

I still can’t give them sincerely after all these years

of irrelevant tears evaporating through holes in the ozone.

Things I’d wholly forgotten about, returning to this seance

convened by the mother of the muses in her crone phase

like stars and flowers come back to make you smile again

for something as simple as remembering their names

you thought you’d lost in the grass like rings on a key chain.

Painful images I wish I’d never lived to see

but came to understand slept just under the eyelids

of the things most people dream of damaging

by inflicting the worst wounds on their own savage humanity.

Lovers that reoccur in the night air like fireflies

recalling some moment when we touched illicitly

double-crossing all of our mutual taboos to risk

the burning bridge of the dangerous blessing

of the passionate dragon on the far shore of our urgent flesh.

The riverine sediments of the mindstream’s starmud,

an encyclopedic compendium of outcomes and random eventualities.

Any single one of these mystic details is the table of contents

of a whole other life than the one I’ve been living so far,

stars matted in the hair of the leafless willows mad with despair.

Joy, pleasure, tenderness. Sorrow, anger, recrimination.

With the planet tilted a feather’s weight more toward joy

on its axis, or we wouldn’t have anything to cry about

when the season passes. When the wild irises

burn out like pilot lights in the urn of the furnace of the phoenix

losing its will to rise again out of its own ashes.

And through it all, so many afterlives arrested by the mystery

of what we were to each other now that kept

calling us back to each other like wolves in the fog

on opposite hills of the heartscape we couldn’t find a way out of.

There’s still generosity in my fingertips

when I touch the eyelids, the lips, the lunar thorns,

the feldspar pictographs that have been carved into me

like the braille cartouches of the dynastic royal houses and scars of love.

I like to err on the side of a generous spirit as if

there’s always a factor that stands outside the equation

like a fulcrum maintaining a balance that has nothing to do

with equality, but deeply affects the course of a parallel universe.

And I can see through the eyes of the chorus of a hundred voices

chanting like a mantra for me to look at it one

of a thousand other ways to say yes what happened between us

was meant to be, and hear all these fanatical pamphleteers

trying to exonerate the culpability of what we had to do

to survive one another like two separate shoes going their own way.

As sorry as things often turned out, I celebrate the intent

because that part was honest, of who we really wanted to be

to each other, and hoped we were, before the labour

grew too intense, and we took off the pretence of our life masks

and stared into each other’s faces like black mirrors in full eclipse.

And I don’t need a philosophy to back me up on this.

It’s just the way I prefer it. An artistic flourish of the soul, perhaps.

Blue chicory by the side of the road instead of poison ivy.

Strewing more rose petals on the starmap of the path

we walked together for awhile than thorns.

Trying in everything to ennoble the way

I’d like to see myself when I’m on my death bed,

not as some mean-hearted ghoul living under a bridge

but a man who lavished himself like poetry upon life

as if he were sowing stars into the abyss of the wound

love opened up in him like the chasm and chrysalis of a loveletter

always addressed to someone on the other side

of this surrealistically romantic starfish of a universe

where we first met in a ghost dance of enchanted binaries.

PATRICK WHITE