VOICES IN THE LABYRINTH

VOICES IN THE LABYRINTH

Voices in the labyrinth at the end of this heartless space

I seem to have wandered into, weary of sorrow, numbed

like a sand-blasted hourglass to the passage of time

not going anywhere it hasn’t been before, each day

greeted like the potato of an old lover with the charms

of a rose, though I can say no less of me, as we stop

to dogpaddle in each other’s mundane mysteries

without being drowned like dolphins caught in fishing nets.

No more wise sententiae please that slam my fingers

in the door, no more trying to squeeze mystic wine

from the blisters on my winged heels trying to shake

the pebble of the world like an avalanche off the road

between the mountains and the Skeena River from Terrace

to Prince Rupert, knowing it’s not safe to stop for long

without being buried in an asteroid belt. The harder

people try to be happy, the more miserable everything gets.

Happiness is more like luck than a premonition of things to come

if you’re flawless and patient enough to labour at it

like a nightshift in a coal mine praying for diamonds

that taste like the waters of life on the blackened lips

of a thirsty man in a desert of stars swimming toward

a lifeboat on the horizon of a delirium of mirages

like an aviary of dead canaries at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

Every insight into the nature of what I’m doing here,

my awareness arrayed before me like a well-soiled world

or a tree full of crows that know their way around

like undertakers of the occult in broad daylight

being chased off by smaller birds like pickpockets

seems like a seed of light embedded in the starmud

of a whole new world I won’t have time to explore on my own

like wildflowers in the starfields of what will bloom after me

and come to fruit on its own, by which, it’s been rightly said

a man is known, though he lie like a windfall of habitable planets

under his own bough, ripe, sweet, fulfilled, dead.

Thousands upon thousands of poems I’ve shed

like oracular eclipses written on the skin of snakes

like the fingerprints of emission spectra on the wavelengths

of first magnitude stars redshifting into old age

like apples on the low-hanging branches of the tree of life

more tempting than the bitter innocence of knowledge

that devastates itself like junkie hooked on his own amazement.

Not how I’m here, though that’s surrealistically

intriguing enough, but that I’m here at all in this dream

with these disembodied dream figures passing in and out

of awareness like swallows flashing by the windows,

gone by the time you turn the light around to look them in the eyes.

Constellations of fireflies exacerbating your astrolabe

like a shapeshifting model that won’t sit still long enough

to have her portrait done like the myth of someone’s origin

somewhere in the universe the stars aren’t fixed like a corrupt casino.

PATRICK WHITE