NO ONE IN THE WORLD

No one in the world knows me today;

there isn’t a mirror that could sink

the black sail of my face,

or a name that could follow me home like a threshold,

no sea at the end of the limp ribbon of my bloodstream,

no shore of an island heart to be washed up on

as the trees wait to announce their burning retractions

and the sky so blue, so blue, so blue,

such a perfect oblivion of blue

no mortar and pestle of the mouth

could grind a colour so fine,

and I hear the engines of the day

and the people of the day

but their business is not mine,

and the roads that can be patched,

that smoulder under a hot poultice,

a black bandage of asphalt

are not the roads I walk like a wound

with nothing to say to the delinquent streetlamps

wondering if winter will catch them in bud,

signing a guest-book of wet cement

in a braille of fingers and footprints.

One by one I have pulled the stars out of my skin

like the thorns of roses and serpents,

the stingers of the kamikaze honey bees

that die like lost swords

in a blaze of devotion, sugar and gold,

detangled their burrs of light from my hair,

and disarmed the toxic sickles

of the moon in Scorpio

that reaps fire with fire

by letting the harvest go to seed like ashes,

by letting the harvest rust,

by making martyrs of the scars and the scarecrows

by crowning them

with the bitter ivy and barbed wire

of distinct constellations that glowed

like an eyelid of nettles,

needles through the eyes of an evil doll

that drowned in a deluge of roosters and whiskey.

And it’s not that I’m giving up on my defeat

or looking for immunity, an antidote, sanctuary,

an ebullient insight into the way I feel

that grasps at clouds with too much certainty,

or even an honorable armistice

to lay down my weapons

like the shadows of the midnight sun at noon,

or trying to get high on hallucinogenic parachutes

that gill the sky with fish and mushrooms and terminal envelopes

that house the feathers of another dimension;

let me fall like a pillar of wine

in the ranks of this lonely holy war

I wage with the sand ghosts

of a thousand visionary shrines

like a heresy whose time has come,

like the empty-handed boat I am

whenever it starts to rain.

No one needs to know who sits on the throne

of the faceless coins I’ve issued

to shut my eyes like doors

on a fever of scissors cutting the strings

of fanatical puppets

stuffing the mailbox

with bouquets of crusading propaganda

that want to tar my household gods with wings.

There are things that go on in the world

so alone and unknown,

hidden harmonies, fountains, wells,

the eyes that the night drinks from like flowers

and gates of light so open

that even space and time leave their shoes

like the beginning of ignorance

to circle the clear flame once like unwitting pilgrims

and extinguish their gaping mirrors

like the torches of unfaithful lovers in the silence.

PATRICK WHITE