BY
THE TIME YOU SAY IT
By
the time you say it, you’re a bridge beyond the last river of your
lament.
Is
there meaning in this, content? Emerging
from
this cold oceanic reflection, how good
to
wrap the sky around you like a blue woolen robe warmed by a fire,
your
lungs two bag-ladies sorting through the trash
of
your denuded coffin for any rumour of green.
A
back-alley dog sniffs at your limp smile beside a broken wineglass.
Your
passions turn into mouths and eat you; your heart
mistakes
itself for the apple on the tree of knowledge
and
dreads the approach of Eve. Today, for example, over coffee on Gore
St.
(just
so the peasants don’t storm the moat again,
thinking
we don’t know where we’re at)
I
heard you wondering why the moon always ends in et cetera.
Just
to distract you from gnashing your teeth in the void
and
sticking your flavourless gum messiah
to
the underside of the flat earth, I showed you a picture of the wind’s
face
I
painted under an overpass on primeval concrete.
A
fascist restauranteur enraged by the ulcers on his greed
preached
his disease to an unwilling congregation of tables
and
jackaled our money away to the squat god of his digital scripture.
Fascinated
and hurt, you surveyed the distant puppet-masters
of
your own hormonal attachments assemble and reassemble
like
constellations at a crossroads and then
got
up to give your sad friend an embrace on her birthday,
fingerprinting
your own sorrow with someone else’s hand. The albino sun
high
above, opening doors and burning thresholds, was proud of you
as
I liberated another orphanage in your honour.
People
on wheels went by, more nonsensical than this watershed of pain
that
pushes up a mad flower of poetry
through
the startled soil of an intimate, unknown planet
hanging
from the first crescent of the moon like a drop of water
on
a blade of radiant star-grass. You. Above the turmoil
of
your blood-weather. And now the vast night
crowds
into the asylum of my ancient, weeping windows
and
the lamps go on like recovering suicides, their light
experimenting
with brown-out dosages of prozac
like
something electrical trying to live. Alone again on the deck
of
an ark of phantoms beached by the flood
on
this brutal world-mountain, my field of vision
is
heaped with the skulls and skeletons of warrior dragons
who
died true to a door that never opened. And if you listen hard enough
you
can hear a secret priesthood of serpents
singing
the melancholic lyrics of their eerie toxins in lethal shrines
under
the foundation-stones of untenable temples
abandoned
to a slum of birds, fractured stairs and pillars
a
crusade of minerals on their way home, liberated by an infidel.
Is
it continuous or do we make it so; the last fifty years of my life
devoted
like a lover to the strange face in the moonlight
that
beckons me deeper and deeper into her shining as if I were no more
than
a ray of her manifestation, each feeling moment
whole
to the furthest star, every thought
sufficient
as fire, quiescent, an event of fabulous proportions. It’s true
things
change and change is a clock without hands.
Here
now in the jewelled fish nets of satiated gods
that
trawl the mind-sea for luminous, translucent fish
that
have schooled into vagrant poems
for
a gesture of provisional expression
timeless
as now, I stop and bend like light to show you
how
the black water-lilies are night mirrors
returning
your eyes like water to the river. And yet,
most
astounding of all, there is neither you nor I to witness it,
nor
anything that swims like the language of a lost people
through
these imagined depths, not even the gust of a god
over
the stillness of the waves. Consciousness is the shadow of a living
intelligence
whose
awareness and being are purposeless flower and star,
all
the worlds in every directionless direction
resplendent
in the heart of a single atom, dust kicked up
by
a child dancing alone in a dusky summer lane
with
the scintillant gnats and fairies
whose
lives are neither brief nor long, born or perishing.
Here,
by this road of ghosts, touched by a wing,
I
offer you this expansive bouquet of galaxies, endless dancers
wheeling
joy into joy like love into bread. Do you see?
Nothing
approaches nothing and zero gets up to dance.
There
is nowhere that isn’t a tree, no moment
that
isn’t the whole of space embracing it, everything in this event
already
achieved. Why grieve then as if there were holes in the world
when
everything you fall into, someone’s else’s face,
the
violet oceans of an orchid heart, this trance of enlightened play
is
nothing more than your own footprint on an Arab moon
full
of intoxicated rain. Gently, I lay your heavy head
upon
the doorsill of your lover and for the moment, an elder of the wind,
whisper
nightbirds of ecstatic seeing
into
your abundant emptiness. The point is
that
there is no point that isn’t already the whole of the radiant point
drawing
long caravans, burdened with gifts for a bride,
out
of the dream deserts of her lostness and longing
like
a star dictating love poems to a viper-scribe in the sand. Just look
at
the labour of these fools who contrive a hovel out of a palace
and
consult their blood like mud at the mirage of an oasis
for
fishtracks. Here, I’ll sing it again on a page of water
because
you are more beautiful and intelligent than the ones
who
stand at the gate and swear by dawn
the
light shall not pass, because your suffering is transcendence,
the
original home of the many who make one face without flaw,
because
I am drunk on the whiskey-fire of autumn leaves
even
as the spring tunes its green harps to the high-pitched valley hearts
of
ascending birds, every one a nugget of sun panned
from
the empty pockets of a generous dawn,
because
great sleepwalking moons of faith
are
shedding your eyelids like skies and rose petals
releasing
mysterious fragrances of time
in
the narrow alleys of medieval Bombay where blue-white stars
feed
their growing families by cobbling their tongues
like
new leather fixed with nails of light
to
the worn-out sandals of pilgrim gods on the Perfume Trail,
because
even though there is suffering, ignorance, folly and greed,
and
death enough to glut any neon highway vacancy,
and
hitch-hiking saviours galore to lie down with in darkness
and
rise in the light on magic-finger mattresses,
because
there is no less of your whole celestial orchard
in
the butterfly that lands on a dead branch
like
one of your smiles
than
there is in all the thundering worlds
that
fall like windfall apples or wild horses cantering through the night,
because
most people’s seeing is a kind of love blind to music
and
you are rarer than a radioactive strawberry in that regard,
the
divergent snake-roads of your witching-wands, violins of water,
and
because your great insight grows a secret heart within the heart
of
an embryo word and nudges it into flight,
the
ripening celebration in the heart of a dazzled bird
hurled
from a thousand nests like rice from a begging bowl
to
express the joy she is
at
the fathomless wedding of bride and water, drunkard and unknowing
wine,
I’ll
lift my voice again to you and sing.
A
black snake swims across the leprous face of the moon
unwrapping
her bandages on the water like music
to
reveal her concealed beauty to no one.
Isis
and the Sphinx cry out like loons.
A
singing water-lily offers its severed head on a prophetic platter
to
the breeze of a dancing girl, mistress of veils,
who
toys with the weakness of kings.
On
the slightest tongue of the rain, a feast of maggots and stars.
PATRICK
WHITE
