MORE PURPOSE IN THE ABSURDITY OF SHADOWING YOUR DREAMS

MORE PURPOSE IN THE ABSURDITY OF SHADOWING YOUR DREAMS

More purpose in the absurdity of shadowing your dreams

like a star you vowed to be true to, a small candle of love

buffeted like a starling in a hurricane off path as is

the way of the heart, without going out---off course, lost,

but burning nonetheless like a daylily in a drainage ditch

beside the road that’s taking you on a firewalk among the stars

the long way home, less reason to despair of ever

finding a meaning in life that transcends the banality

of common sense with the longing of a nightbird

for immeasurable joy in the hunger of the fire that consumes it

without destroying the mystery in the irrationality of its song.

You want to burn. Not burn out like the infirm heart

of a waterclock that goes on forever with or without you

as if you were always drumming for rain to hide your tears.

Water-sylph, mistress of mirrors, muse, you who whisper

ecstatic clouds of silver insects into the dusk not

in the likeness of life, but life itself, as the starmaps

of the nocturnal waterlilies put their blooming to good use

like a lost expedition of cartographers trying to find themselves,

it’s too late in the day to betray what I’ve loved most

about my life, not so much to add my say

to the white noise of literature, but to listen deeply

to the voices that emanate out of the heart of the things of the earth

as if there were always something beguiling to celebrate,

an intelligence fascinated by its own awareness of being alive

like a river, a rock, a star, a tree, to wonder like a watershed why.

Even in the midst of my most private sorrows,

the light’s been a shapeshifting glassblower that made

crystal skulls of my tears I could look into like the eyes of an oracle

and see the sun and the moon still shining

after the flower wrecking thunderstorm passed over the hills

and the sun drenched the dishevelled willows in gold

and the fireflies came out from under their leaves

as the stars from under their eyelids no longer dulled

like a patina of time on the newly washed air

but clear-eyed and shining like a chandelier at a waltz

not a sword hanging over my head should I speak false.

Ask anything from a god to a grosbeak for instruction

and they’ll relate to you didactically as a matter of course

as if you were listening like a sympathetic jury at your own trial

to the immorality of the facts that have been brought forth

but pay less attention to what you’ve got to say in your own defence

and nature will respond to your petition for disclosure of the evidence

lyrically. Ask God who you are. Who she is. And she’ll

start singing to herself as if you reminded her of a song

she used to know when she was a girl growing up like Helen

beside the banks of the Eurotas, like Isis who hides her face

out in the open like a veil of space no one’s ever going to lift

like a hundred billion stars shining eye to eye with you

as if you were the last place you’d expect anyone to look for her.

And, yes, it’s all been lived and felt and said before, but not by you,

not by the mystic specificity of the supranoumenal persona

that lives like a singularity in the black hole

of your insatiable, light-eating, star-swallowing soul

that occasionally loses its appetite for insight

like a blue whale for krill, or the moon for marine life.

Estranged as an undertaker at your own wedding,

or Joan of Arc in the blissed out ashes of a martyr’s urn,

dragon or firefly, prince of the pent house or Jedi in a hovel,

ploughed under like the archival middens of the popular demotic

or stutter like an accent through purple passages of linear B

there’s a mermaid sitting on the skull of Devil’s Rock in everyone

and she’s been singing like Love Potion Number Nine among the muses

for you, in particular, to shipwreck yourself on the eerie sadness

that haunts her song like the foghorn of your own voice

lost like a ghost at sea, passionately annihilated

by an attachment to the picture-music of your own imagination

that is no less of a Buddha activity than letting go

of enlightenment as the beginning of something delusional.

Factor the errors back into your perception the way

the earth receives the dead without disappointment or remorse,

knowing they will sweeten the roots of tomorrow’s flowering.

Follow your own river like a siren to the source

as if for once you were listening to good advice

and wary as you are of the repetitious side-effects

of going mad without fulfilling a fictitious purpose in life

rejoice in the clairvoyance of going with the flow

of your own mindstream, knowing that none

of the death masks in that collection of mistakes

you keep inter-reflectively projecting on the waters of life

ever gets to wear the same bare-faced lie twice.

PATRICK WHITE