YOU CAN AIM YOUR SHINING BUT BETTER TO
BURN LIKE A STAR
You can aim your shining but better to
burn like a star.
A calm continuous explosion. Just like
the Big Bang
before dark energy entered the scene
and things started to get interesting
as they accelerated. Space grows.
More light years between stars
until the last firefly goes out like a
nightwatchman.
Everything’s like that, people, love
affairs, gardens
at the end of summer, suicides, girls
that have never worn purple before,
wisdom
and the love of knowledge, honour in a
life of crime,
flying carpets that never made it any
further than the windows,
fruit trees, the eyes of luck fixed on
a starmap of dice.
Everything’s evaporating into a
breathless abyss.
One day every cell in my body is going
to feel
like the lone survivor of a homeless
colony on the moon.
The trees, the birds, the stars,
everything will have
transcended itself spontaneously
including
any heaven, afterlife or reincarnation,
or even long oblivious eras lost among
the molecules,
you might have planned on as a pit stop
along the way
gone with nobody left to know it.
Especially when I’m down by the river
at night
in the early fall, and the air is
pungent with duff
after a rain that really messed up
bookbinding the leaves
and the stars are moving to their
winter grazing grounds,
I feel it more than think it like a
deep wound in my heart
this inclusive sadness for everything
that has ever been
or is and yet to be. And I want justice
now
for generations that have yet to be
born
and though it’s as elusively numinous
as trying to make out what
constellation
the fireflies are trying to shape out
of the valley fog
after a lightning storm has just passed
over
and everything is as clean and
disordered
as the dishevelled bouquets of the
wildflowers
beside the singing ditches and in the
vetch bound fields,
it seems like a desecration to have
arrayed
all this beauty, these woods, my eyes,
Arcturus and Aldebaran,
even the anti-mystic details of the
history of war
we keep a record of to consider
ourselves civilized,
and all the hurt, the sorrows, the
disappointments, the sacrifices
and even in the way we born to love
each other like appetites,
all that and more reaching out to
attain the unattainable
and then the startling realization,
like a mirror
recognizing its own twin in a crowd of
unrelated reflections
you are the abandoned crocodile that
grew up
in a slum of radioactive slurry, and at
this time of year,
when the wild grapevines are ripening
like shepherd moons
with life-sustaining seas under methane
ice-caps
and dusty mauve cataracts, without an
eyelash of distinction
you are the wine that life is
intoxicated upon
and extinction is a kind of trance we
go into when it’s time to sober up.
PATRICK WHITE
