I DON'T CARE IF YOU REMEMBER ME OR NOT

I DON’T CARE IF YOU REMEMBER ME OR NOT

I don’t care if you remember me or not.

I’m not going anywhere. I’ll still be here.

But I’m going to disappear soon enough

and you can have the mirror all to yourself.

I can’t imagine dying alone is any deeper

than this solitude I’ve been living on my own.

Take that chisel of a tongue and chip

my cartouche off that gravestone I’m not under yet

as if you just discovered a new talent

for pecking away at death as if you were married to it.

I’m out of here. This is my grand exit. Like Keats

I make it with an awkward bow, the way the deer do

when they come down to the river to drink.

I don’t make it in anger. I’m not judging a mirage

because it doesn’t slake my thirst for real water.

I’m not bitter, vicious, or proud. I see myself

in you, especially when you’re crying without

a knife in your hand you wield like a paper cut

of the last crescent of the moon. It makes me sad

that we live more separately than we ever will in death.

I can remember when you first took my breath away,

and now, if you want to give it back, that’s ok,

that’s ok, too, as my brother would say, listening

like an amputee to the one-handed applause of the Buddha.

There are gaps, there are voids and abysses,

there are neuronic synapses, godheads, bardo states

and black holes we all have to bridge sooner or later.

Love’s one of them. Death’s another. And life’s

a country road with so many potholes it’s shell-shocked.

You can efface my name from your memorial wall

but I’m sure I’ll turn you into poetry somewhere

along the way. I’m thawing into tears

like an Arctic ice cap faster than I should

but I’ll hold you in my cold, cold heart forever

like a dolmen without snow nobody knows the name of.

More wonderful things get said in the doorways

of farewell through the veils of our motiveless tears

than you’re ever going to hear on the thresholds of hello

when everyone mythically inflates their uncontested lies

in the name of love. It’s not much of a triumph

to ride in a golden chariot of the sun through a slum.

It’s a little vehicle, and come the first serious eclipse,

you’re on black ice on a highway late at night on your own,

however many corpses you’ve sand-bagged in the rear

to give it some weight. Kitty litter and ashes

for traction are better than rose-petals and thorns

strewn along your path. You get a better grip on things

as you’re turning your wheels into the direction of your spin

or somersaulting over your handle bars like a cow

that jumped over the moon. As for me. The moonrise

raises a spoonful of ashes to my lips and I try

to take my medicine like a solitary nightbird

sipping from the fountain of a dark muse

like a lunar fish in the watershed of a total eclipse.

I’ll never wish you ill. And I’ll try really hard

never to dispel your delusions of me as someone

you might have been able to love. Sorry about the discrepancy.

Mirages on a sundial. Lighthouses on the moon.

Sharks and shipwrecks. Shouldn’t our dreams and delusions,

our secret nightmares, be accorded the same

ontological dignity as any other God particle

in the transmorphic context of reality? They move

the world as much as mass or gravity and they’re

as counterintuitively absolute and constant

as the speed of light. Everyone’s trying to write

their own unified field theory to explain everything

all at once to themselves, as if they were whispering

seas of rising awareness into their own ear.

I’ve lived too long under this cloak of the mystery

I bear as best I can like a mantle of starmud

in the name of a thousand poets who bore it

in their turn to suffer the solitude of their revelry

like the calyx of a black hole in the center of a galaxy

consuming two hundred billion stars in a single gulp

to stay drunk enough for light years to learn

to breathe in the light before they’re willing to let it go.

To kiss the bud of the wildflower into the open

and step back into the light like a shadow at noon

and watch it grow without you. Noblesse oblige.

And I don’t mean it cynically. The wolf howls.

The dog barks. The road leads like a trail of blood

to a dark grove of trees where everything heals by itself

and death is a retroactive edition of a posthumous future

that lies up ahead like road kill. Like it or not.

Sooner or later every persistent absurdity is interred

in an aura of grace, as if we gave the dead

the benefit of the doubt we begrudge the living.

That said. Still hard to kiss the stinging nettles

like hooded cobras on the head spitting in your eyes

like the Taliban just as you’re learning to read

the writing on the wall. So the blind prophets

learn to love the dark. So the candle that’s burning

to shed some light on the night and the stars

goes out in a gust of breath like a secret chandlier

on the dark side of death. And what are we left with

that might remotely stick it out with us

in search of a treasure chest that isn’t

just another bone box of sacred relics? I used to think

scars from the stars that enlightened us

like Medusas of white phosphorus that bit

like high frequency wavelengths in a snake pit

the moon was agitating like ripples and scales

on the skin of a mirror we thought we’d shed

relationships ago. But now my youth has outgrown me

I go well out of my way to err on the side of compassion

more than I ever longed to know the truth

of what we’re all doing here together

trying to stay true to the circuitous path we’re on

by getting lost in each other’s eyes and arms.

PATRICK WHITE