TACKING INTO THE EMPTINESS

Tacking into the emptiness

like a sail, like a lonely bird

grown bored with carrying love-letters

from tree to tree, star to star,

none of them with my name on them

or a return address

that wasn’t light-years out of date,

to amuse the wounded river of my flowing

I try to get outside myself,

exceed the gates of the black constellations

that govern me from within,

squeeze out through a hole in the fence,

through my pores, eyes

of blood, amber, pitch

weeping out of the pine,

trying to read through the page

with tears of fire,

leaking out of the tree, the pillar,

the plaster Christ that exalts the peasants,

an emotional blackberry

ripened by many nights,

seeping through a makeshift womb of jam,

trying to decide whether

I’m a miscarriage or a delivery.

I feel sorry for myself.

No one will miss me much

when the shadow of the last dragon

passes like a lifelong eclipse of the heart.

The infinite folds

of the hair’s breadth edge of my clarities

demanded blood, not pressed flowers,

and there is a special solitude reserved

for the Promethean thieves,

for those who dare

to spread their arms like a propeller

at the axis of the wheeling world.

I never stared at the playbill

of a cancelled sky for long

without trading my scales in for wings.

I cared dangerously for people

who took from the orchard like wasps

drinking from the bruise of my fall.

Their hearts were punctured

by sidereal omissions,

needled like a doll

into occult distortions of pain.

I will spend the rest of my life

learning not to care for them.

Their pulse tolled like the echo of a soggy bell,

souls and minds,

palettes and telescopes

who wanted it both ways

without really taking a look

to see how they broke

the harps of the longing between them

like the wishbones of impoverished peacocks.

I will master the heresy

of consoling their lovelessness with indifference.

I will apply poultice after poultice

of sensitive lies

to their gangrenous sunsets,

knowing the infection will never come out.

I will be the spirit of a bird

carved in rock,

and I will let the ores of my insight

lie idle in the earth

like the dream of a sleepless god

tired of hearing the universe go off

like an alarm clock that can’t be reset.

I am aging, I age, I grow remote,

I thaw like a bird in the sky,

an eye boiled like a grape

in the wine of its own tears,

and no one lies well enough

to surprise me anymore

with a face more original

than the masks it trades in,

and I’m sick of the knots and nooses of vinegar

that sour the shapely waters of life

by insisting the moon

is only a dead sea in a returnable bottle.

And there is a sadness in everything

like the memory of someone loved

walking away like a leaf down a rainy street

through the gleam of oleaceous carlights

and everything I have ever cherished

is a cameo of the void in a locket,

a portrait of an abyss

everyone is chained to

like a dog in a junkyard of delusions,

howling at the moon

smeared on a bumper of dew

that never put a dent in anything.

PATRICK WHITE