NO MATTER HOW FAR

NO MATTER HOW FAR

No matter how far into the past the star travels,

plunging its white fingers into the expanding womb of the past

to pull its own damp head out of convulsive space,

it will never find a beginning, the widening cleft between two thoughts

opening like a mouth full of silence, a sluice gate of thick water,

a dark prelude, the first letter alpha breaking like an eye

out of the eclipsed envelope into a splendour of light

to hang its jewel, its drop of flammable water

from the incredible webs of the night,

to shine alone in the dark with millions,

the elemental heart of an abandoned lover. The void

became a tuning fork and struck itself, became

a nugget of gold and dropped itself into the world pond

sinking like a throne through a center of infinite haloes,

disappearing into the origin of its own undulant pulse,

a fish leaping out of the stillness of the mirror

into the encircling waves of its own event

or an arrow into the target of its own ripples,

or God lost in his own universe without a return address.

Where now is the desolate monkey

forced down out of the trees

to stand up in the high conquering grass to look for leopards

who first shrieked into consciousness

or sat down quietly on his heels

to ponder the odd blue stone of a thought he couldn’t grasp?

Where is he who has gone on expending himself

like the first violin of a tribal symphony

through the blind abyss of the blood all the way to me?

Is there a skull that lies cracked and quarried somewhere,

a fallen idol in a temple of shattered bones,

a small, mouldy moon clotted with earth

who was the first to become aware of himself

as a paling star who would be washed out

in the brightening flood of the following dawn? Did he glimpse it all in a flash,

as the seed contains the whole of the tree, the blossoms

the singing branches, the closed eyelids of the apples,

did he see in the lightning gap between matter and mind,

in the first atom of self-brained sentience

all the murderous troupes of civilization

that would walk out of that first step, that progenitive initial

that goes on unspooling the maple samara

of the helical generations down even

into the bloodstreams and wellsprings of the lines of this poem?

Did he see the continuum of his own beginning

moving outwardly in time like a viper

through the oceanic fire-wombs of a nubile cosmos,

the world serpent that would marry the world

with a rib of light? Did he see me as I am this morning,

elaborated in all directions like rain from his watershed,

trying to make lifeboats out of the leaves to survive

this oblique sliding into the depths

of my own gashed being, the vagrant omega

of a maritime disaster morsed between two sibilants,

like an egg between the forked tongue

of a torn chromosome, this feeble S.O.S. I’ve sent back

through the anguish of the years to find me, to find him,

to shut the eye of the circle, a tail

in search of a mouth that could create what it consumes

in a single breath, a single word wholly sufficient

for all eternity, unborn, unperishing?

And it is not enough to say that the peduncle

is lost in the ensuing phylum, the root in the tree, the tree

in the seed and the seed again in the leaves and branches;

am I given eyes and nothing to see, wonder

and nothing to be amazed by, the blue wheel

of a flowering heart and nothing to feel? Homage

to the fallen bell of my unsung ancestor, male or female,

and the way he picked himself up off the ground,

homage to his pendulous walking across the plain;

and the tracks he followed through the luminous mud of his brain,

saying his name with his feet; homage and compassion

for the brute in lunar shock

before the rising of the moon through the startled dark,

homage to the lightning and the firefly

that jarred him out of his uterine revery

like metal from the ore of a stone. Homage

to the horror and grief and genius of the huge hope

he buried in himself with red ocher and bird-bone flutes

like the bodies of his children under the fire and ashes of his cave;

I bring black cherries, wheat, and scarlet poppies,

I bring the immaculate weave of the starfields,

sapphires and silk, and the wisdom of the wind,

the passion of fire, the will of water, the beauty of light,

and the freedom of infinite space,

and I scatter the worlds like opal grains of sacred rice

over the wedding carbons of your baffled remains

and I fill the clay molds of the footprints you left behind

with the fleets and caravans and flights of mind

that were born of your bruised heel,

your circuitous pilgrimage toward bison and berries, you

the brutal mile zero of the highways through the mountains, you

the first drop of rain in the headwaters of the river, you

the first feather of empathy that danced to fly, you

the first prayer to divine the green valleys of an afterlife

where the silver gazelles came down every night

to the water’s edge, gifts of the great mother’s thighs.

Like a prodigal son returning to the boneyard of his cannibal parents,

without judgment, I bring you the sugars of a ripened mind

and the fat of my sedentary flesh

to gorge on as you wish. And though we shudder with progress

over the excavated skulls in the hovels of the homophagoi,

we unmarrow each other no less. So praise

to your broken, battered, disease-ridden body,

your muscled weapon and your withered breasts

that hung like oriole’s nests from a rack of bone; praise

to the beast master and savage cauldron of your mind

from which you drew the elegant visions of a predator

you charred at the end of your tunnels on lime.

This morning I practise the same art for the same mysteries

on the same dank womb-walls of efflorescent time,

following the spoor of these migrant histories

back to you. Faster than light I must outrun myself to regress,

and I come with poems and paintings and problems

and a forwarding address.

PATRICK WHITE