SOMETIMES THINK

SOMETIMES THINK

Sometimes think I’m always

a life too late

to catch up to my own

walking away weary of waiting for me.

Or I’m a star too far ahead of my own shining

and that’s why it’s always dark.

I know the agony

in the stones of an abandoned bridge

that shoulders the world for nothing,

upholds nothing but its own mass

and waits for things to pass.

And even when I fall into the river

to flow along with my own mindstream

without consulting the leaves like maps

I still can’t get the moon off my back.

Look at all these orchards

littered along my banks

from the tent of a single blossom.

And there are nights

when I can smell snake on the wind

as if everything were about to happen again

and I still haven’t milked the fangs of the moon

for an antidote to the pain

or put out the third eye

of the irrational surveillance camera

that oversees the sorrows of the insane

when it’s full.

I like my perfections whole enough

to include what is not

and if I am immoderately empty

it’s so I can make space for the world

like the blood-sea of the rose

that flows out of nothing

into tides that shed their waves

like the eyelids, brides and petals

of a human heart.

My breath is silver.

My breath is gold

I’ve mined from the mystic mountain

that got in my way

whenever I tried to cross

the valley threshold.

I had to evaporate to rise to the top;

I had to get myself together like a cloud

to transform my own delusions

into a glimpse of the other side

that didn’t take a scapegoat for a guide.

Now space is my only familiar

and the being behind the face

of who I was a moment ago

is just another snake in the furnace

of this star that sheds my skin like fire.

Streams of insight

that are not predicated like mirages

on deserts of thought

trying to spin themselves

into mirrors and silks of glass

like a new religion

sweeping the world like sand

advance the gardens

of the water-givers underground

who teach the flowers how to bloom

and drown like stars

in the infinite opening of their eyes.

And I’ve mauled the nets of the constellations

like a man in the morning

walking through a high field

radiant with spiderwebs

and if there’s anything

left hanging in the wardrobe

that used to house my masks and cloaks

they’re veils I’ve torn from the light

to better see into my darkness.

I’m still looking

but nothing has appeared yet

and no sleight of mind

that’s ever mastered me

has ever taught me how

to realize the inconceivable

except in the proportions of a human

whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable

whenever I turn the light around

and discover the dispersing stars

I have followed so long and far

into the unborn darkness where I begin

shining within.

PATRICK WHITE

OUT OF NOTHING

OUT OF NOTHING

Out of nothing, out of space, the abyss,

out of thin air, the fluids

my mother and father were

at the sacred junction of two rivers,

out of the vital organs of distant stars

empowering the darkness

like kingmakers,

out of enlightened delusions

and deluded illuminations,

out of the sea-wrought passions of an island

and a tragic propensity

for the more romantic

desecrations of originality,

and a natural Virgoan capacity

for truing the lies that others told,

shouldering the swamp

in a robe of the sunset,

I am ecstatically baffled by everything.

To be alive among birds and stars and trees,

to watch the moon smearing its way

across the bedroom window

as if it were a snail

undoing itself like a ribbon of silver

and know and feel and witness

in your blood

how strange and extraordinary

the naked awareness of the moment is,

life silently enraptured

by the vital mesmerism

of its own reflection;

and that reflection the whole of you

almost always drunkenly staggered

by the incredible specificity

of your own empty vastness

making you and the world up

as it goes along

like an intimate stranger on a country road at night

improvising a song, a chrysalis,

out of the random detritus of his life,

to announce his presence like a shy warning

and keep the dark at bay

by pretending he’s alone and happy.

Billions before me, billions after,

and not just humans, not just

what we can recognize of ourselves,

the biophobic homogeneity

of our cellular singularity,

but microbes and waterlilies and wolves,

all the arrays of life

that have rooted in water and sky,

or bound themselves to the Promethean agony of a rock,

generation after generation,

autumn after autumn,

bell after bell of the tide coming in

and going out,

as if someone were breathing,

as if there were a dark intelligence

more subtle and refined than light or water

saturating everything like the night,

summoning eyes out of its own torrential abundance

to greet the stars in wonder;

as if there were a single pulse to everything

that birth after birth

has authorized worlds within worlds,

to risk the dangerous beauty

of their own brevity

and overcome it

by realizing the astonishing perpetuity of change

is the unknown road

that leads them back home

to their own feet

like the only two cornerstones of here and now

that were fit to make the journey. Billions born

and billions dead

and still I am as dumfounded as the sky

after all these eras of living and dying

to say what the dawn is,

what the dusk might be

and who am I to inquire

if the night can know its own stars.

Sixty-four in another year,

I can feel myself expiring,

all my diamonds sublimating into vapour,

and fewer and fewer birds

returning every spring to the pond.

It would be an insult to the face

of the ambassador of the obvious

to try to deny it

and like the moon

my face has been insulted enough

to plead for accuracy as a last resort

and go on waning through my phases.

Say it. With a little wishful thinking,

two or three decades left

and those arraigned

by the law of diminishing returns,

and I’m either ashes or in a hole.

But to me

death has always seemed

an absolute constant

faster than the speed of light

because it devours time as well,

it eats the clocks

and the eyes of those who consult them

and the hands of those

who wind them up again

like babies and genomes and galaxies.

And who could deny,

observing the armies, the famine, the hatred, the disease,

the incessant tearing of flesh,

that the true business of government,

the deepest concession of civilization,

those we marvel at under our feet

and those in bombers overhead,

is an inept attempt

to manage death,

that death doesn’t litigate for the living?

In a hundred years

almost everything alive today,

this living weave of myriad forms,

these threads of blood

shuttled by a heart

on the loom of the moon,

will unravel like the smoke of a snuffed flame,

disappear like the compass of waves

in the enlarging wake of a waterbird

into an uncircumscribable openness.

The facts of existence today

are the rumours of the augurs of tomorrow,

and everything we lived as indisputably us,

the very ground and watershed of our being,

the love and the grief,

the wonderment and the terror

and all that we wrote in fire and tears and acid

like homeless delinquents under a bridge,

will swallow us incrementally

like a gaping serpent of quicksand,

unlock its jaws

and receive us like the obsolete keys to oblivion.

Turn away if you must. Change the wallpaper.

Tear down the windows and the view

like the closing night playbills

of a long-running comedy

with an unhappy ending,

or fuss over your afterlife like a pyramid,

or shout out in the darkness

across the boundless sea of this abyss,

believing there’s a lifeboat

drifting out there somewhere,

a new body

you can be hauled into,

a universe that’s still got room for you,

but carry the bride of your life in your arms

however you will across the threshold

on your wedding day,

tomorrow the only emergency exit

will be the flame

that leaps up to catch the bouquet.

PATRICK WHITE