THE SEASON

The season wears out like an old pair of shoes

too far gone to reheel the sunlight

and the road is rough with the gravel of time,

and it’s doubtful the gates I’ve walked through

aren’t groaning on their hinges by now,

all those faces that were me,

those random rags and glimpses of the past

saturated with visions of me

that don’t know I exist as I am now,

and that bank of the river tenable if at all

only as a delusion, I grow strangely

freer and freer in the intimate impersonality

that whispers me like a shadow into the void.

Actor, audience, god, and play

however pure and empty,

however unaware of the creation

that dogs them for answers,

the four corners of the known world,

four dunces in the classroom

weaving a chalk tapestry

of reformative lines.

What would you have me put in their stead,

the puffed-out cheeks

of the cherubic quarters of the wind,

the maudlin sensuality of copulating serpents,

a rosier vista with garden futures,

fountains in a vast, indifferent desert

that drinks skies from the skulls of planets?

I was never good enough to lie like that,

and I never thought not knowing was evil

though divine ignorance is the ultimate heresy

among those afflicted by slothful certainty.

And it took me years to realize

the virtues of omission

weren’t just another pair

of used surgical gloves,

that not doing was the hidden engine of the universe,

the black hole in the boiler room

that drove the galaxies like pistons,

the dark mother behind the forbidden door

beyond the distinctions of birth and death,

exit and entrance.

I still walk around not knowing

what I’m doing here

coercing myself into directions

that have never been schooled by a compass

into believing they’re going anywhere.

And what’s the point

of burying yourself prematurely

under a tumulus

of acquisition and achievement?

Though I come back to the hive

with the pollen of orchids,

though I’m given a Roman triumph

in the colonies of the ants

for the dismembered body parts,

the wings and the antennae

I have plundered from the junkyard of the world,

the aphids I have subdued in chains,

what triumph among the stars,

what more than a little smoke

among the luminous exhalations

of the mystery that breathes worlds into the dark?

And who so spiritually bad-mannered

to insist on their existence

in the face of that?

And I have held myself up like a candle

to the face of love

and still don’t know what it is,

what colour its eyes are,

or what it feels like to run my fingertips

over its skin,

the shine and flow of its hair,

but there have been women with names

that I have whispered things to in the night,

that I have cursed and celebrated, wept over

and survived, women who aroused my longing,

who brought the mystery close

and blew out the candle

and made my body shudder with delight

and there were things done and not done

that I remember, vows upheld and transgressed,

and furies of blood and light

that left me whole and broken.

I don’t know what love is,

but I remember these

who were the skies I walked under,

who mingled their solitudes with mine

in a frenzy of stars

that changed everything forever

where we are alone together here with everyone.

Man, the meaning of life,

woman, the life of meaning,

one, definitive, the other, expressive,

two birds from the same mouth,

I learned to sing in the dark

at the knee of the moon and the ocean,

and saw that everyone had to be right

for mistakes to exist,

that ultimately all rivers made the sea,

that two eyes made one seeing,

that longing is the first feather of union,

and wisdom just another way of losing your mind,

an enlightened form of ignorance,

an eyelash of clarity,

a bar on a window in an unmedicated asylum.

I dedicated my mouth to poetry

and over the last ten thousand pages

haven’t said a thing since

that wasn’t just another

jest of the silence that roars

like a wounded dragon

at every echo of a whisper in the valley

to proclaim its night of life

as nothing more remarkable

than a butterfly on a gate the next morning,

the eye of the lantern

that’s never seen itself,

hidden in the light of what it reveals,

the blind fountain of its own penumbral lucidity.

PATRICK WHITE