IF ONLY THERE WERE ONE WORD I COULD SAY
If only there were one word I could say
that could reach out and touch your
sorrow,
a cool kiss of moonlight on the eyelid
of a widowed rose.
If there were a way to make it better,
to wake you up from the pain you are
living,
a dream of rain on a kinder windowpane
in the morning.
If I could mend what was broken
beyond feeling and thought and goodness
how could I not feel the piercings of
the wounded voodoo doll
victimized by her own mortality
as I am by my own
and pull the pins out of her
butterflies
as readily as I would pull the quills
out of a dog’s nose?
Accustomed to grief, accustomed to
hearing
someone crying in the backyard of the
house next door,
at three in the morning, accustomed to
observing
the angry solitude of the skate-boarder
always out alone on the abandoned
street
as if that were his lonely girlfriend,
trying to figure out why the embittered
old woman
never smiles back, or a child will
sometimes look at you
as if it were a vicious heart attack
that wanted you to feel as paralysed as
it does.
Accustomed to the skin that grows over
our eyes
like mother-of-pearl cataracts
so we can fake something beautiful of
our indifference
because how much helplessness in the
face of pain
and complicit suffering can one person
take
before they go mad walking in a world
of nettles
with no skin on, no atmosphere to burn
the meteoritic slag of incoming
astronomical catastrophes off before
they hit ground zero?
Accustomed to the agony of enduring
innocence
inspiring the genius of the malignant
to greater atrocities than anyone’s
even aware of,
accustomed to the shock of depravity
leaving a more indelible impression
upon my blood
than the acts of the heroes who show up
in desolate dangerous places with tents
and oxygen
to stay longer than the news, whose
life
isn’t half a sin of omission, and the
other half
constrained by a straitjacket for their
own good?
If there were a way to imagine pain
away
as easily as we imagine it into being,
and have the work of one be the healing
of the other,
before sitting here in silence as my
only bedside manner
before the dying and the dead
painting death masks for the living
that might make them feel like children
in disguise again,
I’d greet them at the happy gates of
hell
like some spiritual good guess of an
earthly intuition
that a liberated imagination isn’t
just
the placebo of another culpable
superstition,
but a way to reverse the curse we’ve
laid upon ourselves
like a sacred syllable of innocence
said backwards in the mirror
without slandering our own human
divinity
by denouncing our delusion at the
expense of the real.
It’s been well said that the mind is
an artist,
able to paint the worlds, and I would
add,
for the slow and thorough like me,
it’s also a carpenter, able to build
them
and that’s how you understand the
world
from the ground up as if everything had
to be on the level,
or the healing herb of a nurse, the
first
to arrive like spring with a white
flower on her head.
Or a lumbering bell of wisdom and
seasoned sorrow
sees the world as a tortoise that’s
been asked to dance
at its own funeral as if there were no
more weddings to celebrate.
The same eye by which you see it
is not the floodgate between
imagination and reality
as if one were the shipwreck of the
other,
as if the mountain were separate from
the avalanche,
but the way you’ll live to be it
after awhile.
A tear can no more be distinguished
from the rain
than the light can be from flowers,
than eternity can be from time
or you from the mysterious powers of
mind
that are living through you
in a creative turmoil of absolute
freedom
that isn’t second-guessing what kind
of universe
you want to live in, if you were to
live in it alone.
If the stones to you are merely dead
languages
that have had their say, having said
nothing
for millions of years, if you can’t
see
your home constellations
gleaming in the starmud all over your
feet,
whose skull, other than yours, rolled
the bones
and came up snake-eyes in your vision
of life
as ritually unluckier than death, if
not yours, you, who else?
If there were one mondo, shibboleth,
mantra, or blessing
I could say that would show you
just as a mirage is a near relative of
water,
the dream of what the desert’s
longing for,
the memory of what it used to know,
so delusion is just as much a friend of
reality
as the left hand is to the right hand
of the wheelwright.
Nor pain the enemy of joy, nor winter,
spring.
No more than the silence of the dead is
hostile
to those who would sing, nor the
helplessness of who you were
a hurtle in the way of the sufficiency
you’ve become.
Out of its dark abundance the
inconceivable illuminates the flower
as well as the star, the mind, the
heart, the tree, the rock, the river,
and the candles cry along with the
abandoned lover
as once they lit up like fireflies in
an ecstasy of insight
that made them wholly, solely,
hopelessly the other
in a union of one revealed by the bonds
of separation.
If only I could speak one improbable
word of truth
that might absolve you of seeking
irresolute resolutions
for the empty grails and fables of pain
you left like the skulls of milestones
and wounded roadsigns along the way.
It wouldn’t matter at all to me
whether your chains were iron or gold,
or you were snared by the crescent
thorns
of the birdnets and dreamcatchers
that slipped like fireflies between the
lines
like insights into time and space
that couldn’t be grasped until
it was well understood and forgotten
the life isn’t solid, it’s real.
If only there were one word I could say
one sound, sign, star, drop of water
I could offer you in the goblet of a
flower
that only blooms an hour in the morning
like the tear of a distant ocean of
time,
that would lay a kiss upon your heavy
eyelids,
or that stone of a forehead you’ve
dreamed upon
so long now like the pillow of a
sleeping mountain
that circles it like a cloud that
refuses
to believe it hasn’t already risen
from the dead
and leaves an unsigned loveletter from
a shy star
just like you who are learning to shine
underwater
as if there were no end of the message
or the messenger.
PATRICK WHITE
