I SEE IN THE EYES OF SO MANY PEOPLE THESE DAYS

I SEE IN THE EYES OF SO MANY PEOPLE THESE DAYS

I see in the eyes of so many people these days

this unclaimed look as if their heart had never belonged to anyone

or only long enough to hurt, as if they’d spent

too much time in the lost and found isolated

by a longing for reunion with someone who forgot.

Above ground and usually happy about it,

the days pass like most of the lives of the people

in this town, hawthorn and lilac, locust tree

and willow, goldenrod and aster, loosestrife

and waterlilies that decay like cheap ice cream cones,

all the temperaments and moods, tumult and truce

of humans putting a good face on their wounds

like the scab of the moon that keeps them

from bleeding out into space like a lost atmosphere

or hemorrhaging in public like the miscarriage of a rose.

Lunar silts of the affluvial moon’s cheerless floodplains

talc the private conversations we keep overhearing

with ourselves, as if strangers could understand us

better than the people we cherish the most. For some

that means sleepwalking like ghosts through their dreams.

I’m devastated with sorrow at times for how much pain

I can do so little about, or even find a way to lie to myself

it’s mystically gratifying to forgive as some kind

of abstruse wisdom that seeps into your understanding

like ripeness in an apple that took a bite out of your heart

and threw the rest away like a flavourless poetaster.

I’m creatively fascinated by my solitude, never knowing

what’s not going to happen next, or is, and does

as I’m watching my mind walk on its own waters

like a spider messiah looking for the catch of the day

in green wavelengths that go ping on the other side

of a universe occult as the dark matter of the universe

or the subconscious if you’re afraid of wandering

too far from home without enough metaphors

to make it back the way you came. The light years

don’t leave breadcrumbs of the dreams we left at home

in the corners of our eyes for the faint of heart to follow.

And there’s no wind on the moon to cover your tracks

so you’re lost either way, unmoored or tied to the dock.

The more familiar I become with myself in the world,

the stranger it gets. Suffering, for example, or

the erosive torment of breathing time in and out

like an hourglass that has to be turned on its head

like a long term patient in a hospital bed now and again

on the interminable nightward of modernity. Amen.

Madness isn’t for petty people. But compassion, by comparison,

is a cult of one that identifies with everybody as if

they had no home to return to. Their solitude, an orphanage,

and their eyes, forlorn as the faces they’ve drawn on the windows.

Avalanches with big dreams of the Taj Mahal

if things fall out the right way. Quantumly entangled

with ourselves in trying to live our lives

as positive as twelve grain gluten-free bread

we’re double-crossed by our own aspirations as if

we’re more liberated by the defeats enlightenment

keeps trying to bang into our heads than we are

by the victories that don’t carry us away far enough.

I try people’s voices on for size to listen

to what they’ve got to say about life deep inside

but if they don’t fit, or they’re an idiot, I don’t

look for a mirror in which they do or try to upgrade

my introspective capacity for being anyone,

or haul Rosetta Stones to the Tower of PsychoBabylon

like simultaneous translators with earphones on.

Even divining you’re connected to everybody

like a party-line in the country where local history

is a geriatric farm girl listening in on everyone else

as if she weren’t eighty years old alone on a farm

that’s taken hold of her like a memory system a Roman orator,

it’s still crucially important to know when to hang up

like an auditory imagination at a seance that’s tapping into you

for secret rumours of life written in the runes

of the purple passages that scar your heart so glacially

even ten thousand years from now when the seas

have boiled away like the tears of shepherd moons

and the sadness in their eyes has evaporated

and drifted aimlessly on like a road off the clock

to make a small, mysteriously heartfelt offering to the stars

for being there all those lightyears for the blind to dream on

like Braille polished and bevelled by a billion eyebeams of the rain

it will still be disdainfully legible and mysterious

as a wounded rock that had its heart cut out

by the very sword it poured from the ore of the forge

and tempered in a trough of tears to keep its cutting edge

hard and sharp as the thorns of fire burning like Orion

on a winter night above a habitable planet

with a hovel of starmud nearby lavishing palatial compassion

on the vagrant in his own doorway who aches

like a frost-bitten heart to come in out of the cold

and thaw out in a space that’s undemonstratively

embrasive, human and warm, true to the perennial nature

of its own homelessness in a world of companiable form.

PATRICK WHITE