AND SHOULD I ASK FORGIVENESS

AND SHOULD I ASK FORGIVENESS

And should I ask forgiveness, who do I ask it of

and for what, being unredemptively what I must be?

Descending into moonset or failing to rise?

Maybe my eyes let the stars down somehow,

for all the years I’ve been intrigued by their shining,

sat by rivers in the deep woods, cherished their names

like the legends of jewels in a thousand and one Arabian nights,

but wasn’t dark enough inside to feel them

burning in my blood, reconfigured like a starmap

that turned the light around so they could see,

not just the radiance, but how I’ve embodied

their shadows as well. No part left out, included

so many eyeless nights, so many occultations and eclipses,

the broken plinths of the all the sorrows of a lifetime

attached like thorns to the charred rose of my heart.

I was the child whose innocence was cast aside

like a momento mori of a lethal sword dance

that wished without intent I was buried along with it

because it was pain to look upon me and remember

the union of blood indissolubly holding hands in me

when I was a symbol of happier, more hopeful times

and it didn’t hurt so much to love me. Human enough

in the mysterious irony of being cast out

like the collateral damage of incommensurable lovers

trying to turn their evanescence into tangible flesh.

By seven, I was already a failed experiment

and the sea that surrounded me like an island,

a desert of salt on an alien planet for wounded pariahs

that had been driven out by other people’s sins of omission

at the cleansing of the temples. One of the untouchables.

I hope it’s wisdom that it doesn’t matter much anymore.

That I don’t accuse the universe for the way things are

and, perhaps, who knows, had to be because

that’s the way they irrevocably happen when paradise

is flawed enough to have a falling out with itself.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger for more of the same.

You end up ploughing a garden on the moon with a bayonet

to avoid the plagues of locusts that beset the earthbound.

You come to regret your strengths in a left-handed solitude

that leaves you stuttering like the vocal cord of a nightbird

struck by lightning like a weathervane in the heartwood

of a burning guitar. Absolute among zeroes your compassion

grows cold as the world view of a telescope

with a diamond lens that will eventually melt

if you look at the stars long enough from a parapet

on a palace of salt where your mindstream meets the sea

like a waterclock of myriad moments where time

has no future to speak of and the past is the mere muttering

of troubled rocks in their sleep in a homeless shelter

for dispossessed rivers of thought, besieged by exiles.

Once you’ve suffered through your own life enough

your eyes are clarified, though you don’t know why or how,

by the blood that’s been flowing from them for lightyears

like the secret wound of a prescient mirror

that picks up the pieces of a war torn chandelier

and reassembles them into the shattered menagerie

of a starmap smeared by the silver lipstick

of morning snails fallen to the ground like the dew

of dirty kisses sticky with life in a Sunday cemetery

where the dead are buried like teen age Neanderthals

with gravestones on their chest under an avalanche of cherubs

the ice and the rain are performing crude autopsies on

like the cadavers of roadkill along the byways back to heaven.

That said. A young man shows up at my door,

at eight in the morning, a brain-blasted poet,

surfing his dopamines like a shipwreck jumping

from plank to plank in a torrent of free association

to borrow fifty cents and read me a poem

he’s written for me in praise of an elder mentor.

Not bad for a voodoo doll in a bullfight with a matador,

pierced through the heart by the seven swords of the sun.

He used to belong to a cult of treacherous doves

but now he realizes how clearly the fire of love

burns in the solitary intensities of a cold-hearted dragon

that never wasted his life by not telling him the truth

about being driven out of the nest like a scapegoat

bearing the impurities of wingless serpents

that sting like poisons crazing your heart

with the terror of going mad alone like a mirage

in a desert of salt with an open wound that pours you out

like the taste of bad water, toxic as the skull of the moon.

I can tell by by the unhallowed soil, the carved turtle,

the crow feathers he’s placed in the medicine bags

under his eyes, he’s suffering. He’s disintegrating

like the golden ratio on the event horizon of a black hole

pulling him down into the grave of his messianic devastation.

He talks about the anti muses of his creative dismemberment

as if things were about to go Orphic. He’s bitter and resentful

but tries to pale his feelings like black dwarfs

in the dawn of transcending everyone he’s ever tried to love

who’s misunderstood him, through the new salvation

he’s discovered in his heart like the false promises

of poetry and painting. I listen, unemotionally compassionate

as if I were thirty years younger than tomorrow.

He says he’s amazed I’ve lived as long as I have

like a hermetic revelation in a cosmic cave in a desert of stars

which makes me feel like an astronomical gnostic gospel,

but I can read the loss, the sorrow, the confusion in his eyes

like a dead language no one’s ever spoken before.

And it wasn’t a bad poem at all, so I say,

by way of returning the gesture like a subliminal question

trying to play on my vanity like light on the surface

as if I still had any faith left in my susceptibility:

Young, you’re a passionately, excitable mammal

apprenticed to the evanescence of your heart.

Older, and more of a non-entity than when you were born

you look upon this long discipline of life and art

through the clear eyes of a master of selfless beginnings

with the equanimity of a reptile born of rock.

PATRICK WHITE