A THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW
A thousand years from now
who will remember me
once I’ve disappeared
from this windowpane,
a vapour of breath with
awareness,
a nebular stain on the
clarity
that will wash its hands
of me
like a scar of water that
has clung too long?
I’m not trying to embalm
the elegiac content of
these obvious sunsets in words,
and it’s hard to shake
honey out of these mordant bells
that lie like duplicitous
lifeboats to the gullible compasses and maps
that keep crashing like
doves that don’t have the wingspan
to come back with news of
land
to this museum of DNA, two
of every kind,
I keep scuttling like an
ark on the top of every wave.
And what is a grave if not
an abandoned embassy
that didn’t have time to
shred its dreaded secret?
And sometimes, when the
emptiness and the silence
are beyond bearing,
I hold myself up like a
passport at the panicked gates
that have made me an exile
and a wounded threshold in my own home
and clamour like a
continent
to be repatriated anywhere
that isn’t a country
whose borders are stretched out like refugee lines.
But it’s a foolish wish.
And if there’s a dragon
to slay,
I realize it’s only more
shadows and swordplay,
and I think of the return
of the rain lifted from the sea
and how the sea never
feels anything is missing,
and everything is passage
without arrival or departure
and how the arrow never
leaves the hand of a good archer.
It’s human nature to
understand,
a sacred mode of
disobedience
to look into the eyes of
our worst fears
even if it’s just to
flare like a star without rescue
and scream out in light a
moment against its own extinction.
But who or what or nothing
is ever there to listen
as we go out like flies
and stars in a toilet bowl?
And a love of laws is not
the law of love
and there have been so
many dragons
left out of the chrysales
of their questions like answers
that the heart is not
sustained by the impersonal blessing
of ubiquitous entropy in a
long, lab coat
as the spirit longs for
transformations
a star and a night beyond
itself
that might astonish a
human
with something enduringly
human
like a next breath that
can’t be smudged by death
or something drastic in
the dust that remembers us
when we were stars
that thawed through the
windowpane
as if we were looking
through the lenses of our own eyes
to discover everything we
live is how we die
and we’re always a
plight and a plea away from knowing why.
Imagine, one night,
looking up at the sky
and there were no death to
raise the moon
like a calendar above your
neck,
and everything you saw
around you,
crows, kites, keys,
last year’s pine cones
on this year’s trees,
were not denuded of their
mystic specificity
in this mortal profusion
of origins
that ends where it begins.
Imagine,
one morning, not getting
up from the dream
to pan the mindstream for
the nugget of a skull
that might be gold, and
the luster of the radiance
never grows old like the
taste of the moon in your mouth.
Wouldn’t this onceness
then be eternal,
and what I’m saying now,
indelible
as the space that prompts
the stars to shine?
Learning wisdom is
learning the universe
as if it were your own
face, on the inside,
and you were its only
eyes,
disappearing from view so
that all that remains is you.
Birth, a breathing in;
death, a breathing out,
before the first and after
the last, this pulse and suspiration,
muses around the
wellspring, witches around the cauldron,
planets fluttering like
moths
at the windows of the
constellations. Like the moon
I pass my hand over like
an eclipse as if it were my own skull,
I have been creatively
maintained from the start by my own expiration.
Are there no orchards in
the hearts of old women?
Are there no graves in the
eyes of a child?
PATRICK WHITE
