EVER SINCE I BECAME A POET
Ever since I became a poet
my whole life is an open wound
I’ve been bleeding out of
like a ribbon on a gift addressed to
everyone.
Started out an astronomer
and then came poetry and painting.
And ever since, on days like this,
feels like I’m hanging in mid air
like Sri Lankans do to prophesy at New
Year
with a great hook of a question-mark
through my gut. And I do. I prophecy
just to get a grip on the blinding
pain.
Probably prophesy too much.
Wish I was talented enough to say
nothing
and wasn’t compelled to scream out
like this in agony
like a screech owl with blood on its
claws
and huge wise eyes that can see in the
dark.
End times. Sixty three years closer
to being reborn again as someone
I can identify with. And the stars have
aged
a lot slower than I have. I look back.
I look omnidirectionally ahead like a
star
and when I feel like a wolf, wild,
free, alert and wary,
what a long, dangerous, dark, strange,
radiant trip it’s been,
but when I’m a salmon, in the Druidic
sense of the word,
It seems I’ve been swimming upstream
most of my life
through a fluid, shapeshifting
waterclock
of a space-time continuum that summons
me
like a ghost to a seance where I
spiritually spawn and die.
Arta longa; vita brevis. All things
expire
in the same creative medium they were
born from
and came closest to mastering. Like
childhood.
Fame was a temptation in the beginning
but only as an aid to intriguing women
with the exquisite ferocity of my
ability
to suddenly break into stars when
things were their darkest.
Women have always been the gates
to the land of enlightenment for me,
the window with the view that opens out
onto whole new vistas of God so
encompassingly beautiful
half the time their beauty was freaked
with mystic terror
like little threads of lightning from a
passing storm
over the darkening hills as the stars
and fireflies came out
and charmed me back into having
the courage to open my eyes again.
Lightning, stars, fireflies, three
avatars of insight.
My sex life has strangely paralleled my
literary career.
I call myself a heretic. But in fact,
I’ve always been
sacrilegiously sacrificial when it
comes to poetry or love.
I let the lamb put the lion on the
altar for a change.
It’s my oxymoronic approach to God as
a woman
in whom all opposites are reconciled in
a unitive state
that can be more accurately
approximated as not-two, better than one.
And I don’t expect everybody to know
what that means,
or how much pain there is behind those
few moments of bliss
you just seem to blunder into indelibly
out of the blue.
Karma, atma, anke, fate, synchronous
happenings
in a charged particle field
in a dynamic equilibrium of reversible
polarities.
Call it what you like, one brief kiss
and you’re an addict for life.
The muse comes your way
and you’re overtaken by the path
you’re on,
and you realize, as you stand there
gaping,
as a poet in the presence, you’ve got
nothing
of any consequence to say until your
mouth learns how to listen
and no one can teach you to do that
better than a woman.
So, yes, women for most of the duration
and then
the beginning of this long spiritual
journey
that starts in the heart with
separation from someone.
As if the stars just threw acid in your
eyes
and forced you to look at things
another way.
And then you understand how even
a wild, single-petalled rose can open
the eyes in your blood
and when you cry, it’s haemoglobin,
not tears
that wash the blindness out of them
like an oilslick.
And reversing the spin on the eclipse,
you grow to be grateful
to the things you either didn’t know
how, or were afraid to look at.
Sight is a kind of love, and there’s
no end of the seeing.
You can walk in darkness like a diamond
in a lump of coal
for millions of years and never suspect
you’ve been shining all along,
you’ve been decaying into light.
What is the most fervent longing of the
trees
if it isn’t one day to turn
themselves into the light
they keep reaching out to like
Dutch elms with six millions leaves a
piece?
To be rooted in the very source of life
they aspire to.
That’s why so many flowers look
uncannily like the stars.
And the Sufis say you take on the
characteristics
of anyone you’ve been around longer
than forty days.
And by the time you’re as old as I am
you look in the mirror, and you see
the features of the universe that’s
been living you
for as long as you can remember, moment
by moment.
Bless, curse, heal, scry, prophesy,
deepen, praise, purge,
improve, reform, redress, delight,
teach, or celebrate,
when I can’t find any meaning in my
insignificance
it’s great to think that poetry might
do all of these things,
but the more I write, the more I begin
to counter-intuitively suspect poetry’s
got an agenda of its own
you catch a glimpse of from time to
time in the depths
and in the millions of subconscious
harmonies
that show up spontaneously on the
surface
in the course of your life’s work
that defy explanation
except as a mode of participatory
collaborative creation
where you don’t always know who
you’re working with
or who is working you, as the case may
be, so you
often feel like a bit of a fraud to put
your name alone
on the fruits your labour, as if a
single tree
took a bow for the whole orchard
and the sun and the light, the earth,
the rain,
had nothing to do with what lept from
your brain
like the myth of the origin of Athena.
And I hope it does some good in the
world
like a wheelbarrow you bring to a
garden.
I hope I’ve made a gift of a gift of
a gift of a gift
though the way life is that’s as hard
to determine
as who the real giver is. And as a
pragmatic mystic
and practising artist, with my head in
the stars
and my feet on the ground, not really
any of my business.
And speaking of that, I loathe the way
poetry
has been heartshrunk from a noble
calling
into a petty business card. And as for
those few among many
who still have the courage and the
clarity
to risk the revolutionary dangers of
their sincerity,
it fills me with savage indignation to
see
their imaginations chained like young
trees
to a four by four square of permissible
earth
surrounded by a lifeless prairie of
parking lot asphalt.
That’s how scared parking lots are of
trees.
But things will change, and change
again
because people get sick of the obvious
soon enough
and the bling of tinfoil on the midways
of life,
and stepping out of the blazing of the
circus
into the darkness beyond, look up at
the stars
and long as they have done and will
always do
to lose themselves in the mystery
that’s shining all around them as if
the light were emanating from the
inside of the lanterns
they hold up like their hearts to the
darkness.
And believe me, as much as I love
astronomy
and the shape of a telescope has almost
as much sex appeal to me as the genius
of a woman’s body
it was poetry that taught me how much
further
one of these little lanterns can see
into the mystery
than the most gargantuan spaced out
observatories can.
The seeking is always more beguiling
than the finding,
depending, of course, on what you’re
looking for.
And losing yourself in something that
absorbs you wholly
is still the quickest way to dust off
the staleness of life
and polish the mirror to brighten the
stars in your eyes.
Or if you’re having one of those
demonically possessed days
when it seems you keep knocking on the
front doors
of the hives of killers bees that keep
swarming you
with the ferocity of mass mundanities,
hoping one of them
might turn out to be a pinata full of
treats
at a Mexican birthday party, if you
persist in risking enough.
Poetry, if you give it more than you
even thought you had to give,
will give you in return, when you need
them the most
the arms to take up against a sea of
troubled dubieties,
and sitting down at your desk, out of
breath from running,
empower you to give every bee and demon
back its stinger
by giving each a name, and writing them
to death
like a constellation of black dwarfs,
as I have here
just to irradiate the air again with
northern auroras
of solar flares lifting the veils to
reveal
the intense clarity in the eyes of the
mystery
that all things are as they are,
because just like atoms and quasars
when all is said and done
everything comes down to metaphors.
And the esoteric teachings of inspired
shape-shifters,
whispering cosmically in the dark to
themselves
the secret spells of black matter that
landscape the light
with imagination, insight, and
intuition
and without nudging a single atom
with the slightest notion of thought
bring whole new worlds to fruition
with every wavelength of the mystery
that abides within like compassion
shy in the shadows of love, waiting
for love to open the door from the
inside
and see what it’s done to the place
in the absence of the stranger
standing on his own threshold in the
doorway
of the homelessness that throws its
arms about him
like space, time, light, love, light
and life
and welcomes him back like the return
journey
of the way he left in the first place.
PATRICK WHITE
