THE
BOY IN THE FIRE
My
blood a riot of flags
celebrating
the liberation of a country
I
no longer belong to,
that
has revoked my passport
to
a library of prophetic skulls, I address
my
solitude like a bullet, like a mushroom
at
a gala of mocking roses, realizing
it’s
too lame to dance, too deeply lost
among
the visions within
to
flirt with thorns and razor-blades.
And
it’s sad the world gets in the way
like
gravestones and footnotes,
that
the new skies I’m wearing as corrective lenses
are
bitter with rumours
of
sidereal defections, that time,
bows
my head and forces me
to
drink to the lees of my own reflection,
the
dregs of brutal truths
that
fall like petals of blood
from
the virgin sheets
of
emergency marriage beds.
Reeking
of sundials, like an era that has past,
or
a century without a manger
to
show for all its heroic disclaimers,
I
am yet well pampered
in
the brothels and hareems of anxious ghosts,
the
nunneries that cake salvation on
like
make-up and swear
they
will carry me to term
and
see me born again
in
the abandoned theater of their wombs,
the
last echo of a spiritual actor
trying
to decipher the hieroglyphs
of
an ancient climax that eludes him,
if
only I would return with them to the darkness
after
I’ve ravished them like a comet.
Some
thoughts are born without eyes,
some
feelings without mouths, and there are rivers
sterling
with stars
and
the charred harvests of the moon
that
go mad in the desert
gagged
by the ferocious hermetics
of
a godless wind
leeching
its likeness
from
an ancient face
it
can’t wash off the water.
Like
a mountain
that
spews its rocks across a highway,
aging
is learning to make an orthodoxy of insanity
by
slaughtering the priesthoods of your youth,
maintaining
the equipoise
of
a fearful acceptance
even
as you gnash your teeth in the void
of
a terrible attainment.
Not
spurned by the hours
or
baglady days, not
denied
pasture in the starfields of night,
a
legend of passage
among
luminaries born enlightened,
as
the years grow vast, joy
runs
out of heartroom
looking
for doors
to
hide behind and jump out
in
ambush, delirious with surprise.
All
the old spots
are
crammed with wraiths and shadows
and
the taste of the lightning is flat,
the
tongue of the thunder, a wet match,
the
storms that overtook you with exhilaration
on
your overindulgent crusades
to
heretical shrines,
reformed
muses
in
a habitable choir of dissonant mirrors,
new
hymns for old hymeneals.
And
what can you say to the young
learning
to eat one eclipse after another
at
a feast of shadows that never ends
in
the whirling of the dervish clock?
Though
they shine, they appear like sunspots
on
the greater brightness
that
surrounds and blinds them,
so
much of their lives
tossed
out like trash from a passing car,
unknown
jewels to themselves
crazed
in the light of a dawn that doesn’t see them.
Robbed
of beginnings on the road
that
entices and waylays them,
let
them dance to the funeral bells
in
the echoless valley of sorrows
that
dogs them like the future
that
waits on their bones. Soon enough
another
generation of strangers
will
kick through their aberrant faces
like
a black wind through autumn leaves,
rebuffing
the long melancholy of the fall
with
a joy too stubborn to be reproved.
It’s
enough if now and again, for a simple hour,
a
moment or two out of eternity,
they
wear the vague halo
of
a black hole, a feeble reprieve,
and
the night doesn’t taste of suffering.
By
the time they’re old enough
to
be grateful for all
they
do not know
the
secrets grow vicious
with
answers
and the mysteries
that
were the empires of the wise
wither
like wines without rapture.
So
I keep faith with the silence of the sea,
the
dignity of rocks,
the
serenity of the sky, sitting
well
past midnight
with
a whispering candle
and
a newly washed corpse
the
universe isn’t big enough to bury;
and
I say nothing, think nothing,
ask
nothing
of
the darkness within
that
dwarfs the darkness without
and
makes of the sun and moon,
two
coins
not heavy enough
to
refute my eyes or convince my heart
this
afterlife that pans me from the mindstream
like
a miner looking for gold,
a
crow gathering silver,
a
mad jeweler
plucking
stars from the wind,
or
a god worlds from the flowing,
isn’t
just waiting for something
that
will never happen, isn’t
just
knowing that it will,
isn’t
just the boat of my blood, full
of
moonlight and illegal refugees
bidding
farewell to a wharf of bones,
or
a cross without a flight plan,
but
another survivor
of
the birthless beginning
that
abandons me
like
a changeling, a crutch, a genome
on
crippled stairs turned circular
in
a wilderness of burning ladders.
Any
moment now
the
night will give me a name
and
the wind that drank my eyes
come
like a drunk
singing
on his back beside the road
and
opening the encyclopedia
of
forged passports
and
club-footed interpretations
that
calls itself the world,
point
to the broken columns
of
an erudite temple of sand
and
tell me,
smashing
the false idols
of
the mirror and the hourglass,
the
glass retort of my putrefaction,
this
is not who I am.
PATRICK
WHITE
