WHEN YOU'VE AVERAGED OUT YOUR CRCUCIALS

WHEN YOU’VE AVERAGED OUT YOUR CRUCIALS

When you’ve averaged out your crucials

and you’ve walked in the light and you’ve walked

in the shadows of things your eyes still taste of

though you’ve set a star as the moral compass

of your cloudy destination, and it’s following you

down a long stray thread of a road, the smart money

bets on doing some good in the world

you may not even be aware of, let alone

expect payback for as if you were doing business

not gambling on an intuitionally calculated risk

its probably better to leave a sweeter cachet to the place

for your having been here, chicory by the side of the road,

or wild orchids in the marsh, by the addition

of one flower more than to desecrate your life

with bitterness, resentment, the indifference of ambition

when its heart gargles with an inhumane antiseptic

to keep from being infected by the human in its bloodstream.

You don’t have to arrange paradigms of shining

into some kind of mandalic starmap unless you want to.

Giving something up isn’t the same as adding yourself to it.

Even if you foreknow you’re doomed to lose, total eclipse,

if you’re a real gambler, you lose with flare, like a solar corona.

You’re intrigued by the unfolding of the road you took,

the river you’re running, the rapids in the mindstream

you’re about to shoot down the middle in an inflatable life raft

in the spring run off of the waterclock of a reverential northern river.

It might be important to seek

the eventual forgiveness of the night

for what we’ve done to it, treating it as a reward

for breathing our way through another day in the light.

But the stars aren’t listening to the alibis

we’re whispering in the dark to our selves.

They labour under the cowbells of their own myths of origin.

But you can always do a little good in the world.

The whole place is wounded. No shortage of opportunity.

You can drive the ambulance back to the hospital.

You can be the atom that decides the outcome

of a cosmic event, so slight are the actions of the random,

chaos in action, it just takes one to light up

infinite time and space moment by moment

and blow it out just as quickly to enhance the night,

the pulsar of a firefly in a lighthouse of dark matter.

You ever wonder how many messiahs

have come and gone from the world

without ever once having heard of themselves?

If you don’t like to drink spit out of the public fountains

of other people’s mouths, though they exhale rainbows in the mist

maybe it’s time to taste your own to see if it’s sweet or not.

When things are real, not solid, nothing’s diminished,

nothing’s enlarged, because size is no longer relevant

in a world of wavelengths that have given up living like particles.

And forms are more provisional than cast in bronze.

Waifs of the air, maple leaves cast on the mindstream

covering their own reflections with the fans and hand mirrors

they carry like accessories to their own deathmasks.

Hard to make a wax mould of a dream, an emotion, or an insight.

The mystery of life isn’t an interpretation

waiting to be deciphered any way you like,

though you’re free to do this with the impunity

of a crossroad puzzle. Its silence is a deeper eloquence

than that, and when it expresses itself it’s as immediate

as starlight on water. Its spontaneity never hesitates

to shock us with the impersonal beauty

of a moonrise over the lake in a lunar flood of wonder.

Or some small act of love that’s denounced by the doer

as a foolish way to live against the odds, as soon as it’s done.

Everybody’s on death row here. No one gets out alive

or unwounded. Sparrows and stars and houseflies

pass freely through the bars, and the wind at night

whistles through them like the vocal cords of a harp.

Would it hurt to pass a cigarette through them

to someone in front of a firing squad of stars

or write a loveletter for someone who can’t read it?

PATRICK WHITE