I'VE BEEN A STRONG ROPE AND I'VE BEEN A MILLION WEAK THREADS

I’VE BEEN A STRONG ROPE AND I’VE BEEN A MILLION WEAK THREADS

I’ve been a strong rope and I’ve been

a million weak threads. I’m waiting

for something green and vital to take root

in my starmud, but I’m oozing eclipses

like the La Brea Tarpit and there’s

the white swan of the moon in the window

across the street swimming through asphalt

and liquid bitumen like a chimney sweep.

Underpainting in. I’m labouring. It will

do for the night. No point trying to put

horseshoes on the muse when she’s digging

her spurs into your side as if you were her ride

for the night. Let’s go anywhere. I want

to step out of the light for awhile and forget

that I exist to witness myself struggling to live,

always wrestling with the next angel in the way,

looking for something illuminating in every defeat

just so I don’t waste that much pain on nothing

like a sugar maple being garotted by its own tree rings.

The silence of the town is peopled by ghosts

that feel like dead air when they gust against your skin

to let you know they’re still there as they’ve always been.

Clear night, but the darkness hums to its own madness

like a hermit thrush, and love numbs the heart

to protect it from worst to come. I was struck

in the throat looking for an antidote to myself.

Even when they’re defining things words are

perpetually expressive of the writing between the lines

of a vicarious human nature that doesn’t know how

to stand up to itself without hurting its own feelings.

Every step I take I’m bridging an abyss like a waterclock.

I pour the waters of life back and toward me

into the emptiness as a sign of uncontaminated respect

for the mindstream I drank them from. I’ve long

been a mirage of starmaps trying to fix by parallax

where the radiant of the light, in terms of tracing back

all these meteors and fireflies of insight to the source

they originate from is, if it isn’t non-existence itself.

The traffic lights must feel as useful as I do this time of night.

Red, yellow, green, they should try mixing

their palette up a bit and start adding a few more

complementary greys to the nature of their outlook

upon life. Hard to distance yourself aerially with the blues

when you’re always in the foreground of your own face

up close and intimate as primary colours

in their second innocence. Green, yellow, red,

like an apple ripening thousands of nights and days

without ever falling from the bough. No windfalls

of low hanging fruit there. The sun ignores the dusk

that has come upon it as if the sky were full of crows

pecking at the eyes of a fox on the run until it’s dead.

Night and blood. Blind before the rose. Is it

prophetic? A big life in a little death or the other

way around? Am I drinking from my skull, down

to the embryonic lees of a stillborn afterlife among

the enlightened who sometimes water the wine down

with vinegar just to rinse the taste of a miscarriage

out of their hearts, or do these mirages of black matter

sing and dance in their own desert starfields

as if there were a watershed the moon could drown in

like a nightsea of awareness in the heart

of a drunk poet reflecting on the hard beauty

of a forsaken life devoted to the unattainable truth

of knowing whether it was worth it or not, somewhere nearby.

PATRICK WHITE