I COME TO A WALL

I COME TO A WALL

I come to a wall, the morning intellectually numb,

soft grey rain on rough-cut fieldstones that have stayed in place

two hundred years like the masonic cemetery of buildings

around town, lodged in time like books on a shelf for show.

I imagine honest, capable men, for the most part, with broken hands

that mended like starfish learning to throw a knuckle-ball.

There it stands, their work, in space and time, functionally sublime

long after life has run out of use for its makers.

Sturdy work, skilled and dirty, did they eventually

ache their lives away, old men with back problems,

sitting on a porch overlooking their wives’ flowerbeds?

Were they fastidious as Michelangelo in the quarries of Carrara

about the marble they chose for their headstones and who,

if their fingers couldn’t grip a chisel anymore, determined

not to lie under shoddy work, would carve them and set them

like jewels back in the earth they took them from? Here

and there the sway-backed stone bends under its own weight

as if it carried the world on its shoulders like an avalanche

it hasn’t let down. Someone solid you could stub your heart on.

How insubstantial this art of the evanescent that practises me

as if silence were making its own reeds for a woodwind

and I was the shriek of a blade of grass between its thumbs.

Discarded stereotypes of the man I would have been

if I hadn’t been born by nature and nurture to seed the sere

with the colour green, and listen to the mute stones sing

of the intangible mysteries of spring that seize them by the throat

like swallows building their nests like begging bowls

in between the cracks of the stone-walling earth. By other means

I build castles for the pageant of the wind on tour

to eat out of house and home, I lay the foundations of zodiacs

to come that will shelter everyone under the eaves

of their shapeshifting signs, symbolic as a guild hall

in a country parade where everyone is represented as an individual

apprenticed to the masterless trade of being themselves

just as they are, each a candidate for their own constellation

like a shire reeve that wins by acclamation. No one else

to run against with the experience of a trained eye

to keep the black and whites of their eighty-eights straight

and on the level like the skeletal keyboard of a celestial piano

playing to a full house of musically inclined ghosts.

I work in quicksand. I work in starmud. I work

on a nightshift of stars like a watchman holding up

the light he’s been given to go by like a lantern in the shadows.

Once I feared madness, but now I know,

as the waxing crescent of the moon sets above

the all night grocery store, it’s an unparalleled labour of love.

It doesn’t matter who or why. Is the rain out of focus

because it has a million eyes and there’s no end of the seeing?

Even in the way it weeps whole firmaments in every drop

along the seam of a blade of stargrass, you can’t halt

the flourishing of life along the unplotted course of the mindstream

making its way to the sea and source of its awareness.

Water remembers everything like the taste of wild irises

because it’s inspired and alive, the legendary beauty

of the fires it fed like daylilies and the ashes in the urns

of the single-petalled roses that flared for a day and a night

before the wind blew them out like loveletters it held over a candle

to read between its tears in the dark the horrendous farewells

of passion and blood that liberate the light from our starmud

and elevate our private sorrows like root-fires into the realms

of the rain that falls like compassion on everything alike

in a world where every experience is a simile of who we are,

imagination individual as a fingerprint in a mirroring consciousness

with no identity of its own, together alone with everyone

bonded like the weather to the sea of awareness we seek shelter in

like a posthumous work of spiritual hospitality that’s been

opening its door to strangers for the last 13.7 billion light years

after the first foundation stone of the universe was laid reciprocally

without pomp and ceremony on the creative side of a singularity

that popped like a mad rabbit out of the white hole of the hat

of a wise magician still gaping like an open window

at her vision of a crazy life before birth and how on earth she did that.

PATRICK WHITE