SOMETIMES THE SEA RETURNS ME TO MY DREAMS

SOMETIMES THE SEA RETURNS ME TO MY DREAMS

Sometimes the sea returns me to my dreams

like a drowned man washed up by a wave

like a cinder from under its eyelid on an island

I return to like a message in a bottle from the future

that says don’t risk yourself to save me, it’s hardly worth it

compared to who you wanted to be way back then

when you laboured to amount to more than I’ve ever been.

I’ve been bobbing like this Orphic moon

of a prophetic skull across this dark night sea

for lightyears now singing to myself in the abyss,

the self-abnegating minstrel of my melodious emptiness,

listening for any sign of life in these sidereal realms

that dumbfound the starmaps when I ask

to what point, what for, into a coma of silence

that echoes from mirror to mirror like a spent satellite

that wandered out of orbit like a slack guitar string

that didn’t want to stay in tune with the music

of the usual shepherd moons. But I ask, anyway,

thinking the answers might be quantumly entangled

with the questions somehow it’s impossible to fathom

except as just another poetic lucubration in the void

of what life has made of me for the last sixty-four years.

Maybe it’s all one long beginning that flows on forever.

I hope, of course, though hope isn’t the most reliable horse

winged or not, to bet on, whatever I’ve done

might be to the betterment of God knows what,

but something, whether I’m the last to know or never

and it’s better that way, or, at the very least,

if humanity’s lost the taste for itself and more

robotic sensibilities want to forget who we are

and cauterize their hearts to the civilized savagery

of atrocity, waste, and devastation we’ve wreaked

upon millions and millions of lives throughout history,

poetry was the most graceful and absurd sorcery

of the word I could be apprenticed to like the muse

of a dream grammar that taught me to sing metamorphically.

What a curse humans have afflicted upon themselves

and the robots will be worse, much worse than now.

O may it not be so, but too many languish in the alibi

of inevitability and even astronomical catastrophe

seems to have lost the power to change our minds

like proto-mammals back in the age of the dinosaurs.

And it isn’t if we didn’t see it coming from a long way off.

If you let your oceanic awareness of the multiverse

linger in the shadows of your big, blue, cosmic eyes

there’s still something, isn’t there, perennially true and beautiful

about watching a mother wash her daughter’s hands

in a fountain in a park like the wings of a small bird

when you recall all that had to occur from God particles

to black holes for that momentary act to happen,

all the collaboratively creative annihilations that had

to take place in an unending succession of cosmic events

big, small, incomprehensively, or randomly significant

like fireflies and stars, trace meaning of metaphors

leaving half-lives and contrails of where they’ve been

in the field of view of a few who see them for everyone

like the moon and the sky in a drop of dew, or jewels

in the net of Indra whereby you mark one and they’re

all marked indelibly like a starmap on the waters of life.

Maybe there’s a code-breaker somewhere one day

who’s going to make crystals precipitate out of thin air

synchronistically like a kind of intelligence

that overlooked our starmud as way too sloppy

to be the hard-edged medium their translucency

prefers to work in, but to me it’s this lumpy clump of clay

on a potter’s wheel that can just as soon turn into

a game of creative Russian roulette, this amorphous

nebularity of the vague way each of us is giving birth to stars

within ourselves all the time even if we don’t realize

we’re androgynously pregnant with the inconceivable

like clepshydras breaking water like ripples of rain

in the eyes of a mirror that undulates like the wavelength

of a serpent of mercury, life echoing itself

in the elaborate proliferation of mandalic diffraction patterns,

the evanescence of this endless dream of change within,

without beginning or end, birth, death, cessation or continuance,

beyond ignorance and wisdom, achievement, failure,

the filth we derive our myths of origin from,

or the false dawns of a mythically inflated paradise

that turns its back on the dark energy of the new moon

that inspired it counter-intuitively to conceive of itself

in the first place, this is the dangerous garden I live in

where just to touch a face the mind can feel in astonishment

through the labyrinth of my fingertips and staggered eyes

is a wonder of chaos that it should have been shaped so

out of nothing, I can read it like the face of the moon in Braille

like an ocean where the stars dwell deep within,

light upon light, without any notion of ever having gone

metaphorically blind. However you try to square the circle

of your place among the auroras of air you wear

like the aura of a lifemask that concealed your inner vision

of yourself as adamant as a glacial dolmen

about the size of a thumb stuck in three and a half pounds

of brainmud like a plum pie, o what a good boy am I,

there’s always as much up ahead as you left behind

and take it from me, I’ve tried, just to be true to myself,

however you do, you’re never going to disappoint the mind.

PATRICK WHITE