I CAN FEEL THE SKIN PEELING OFF ME LIKE OLD PAINT

I CAN FEEL THE SKIN PEELING OFF ME LIKE OLD PAINT

I can feel the skin peeling off me like old paint

around this windowframe I’ve pictured myself

standing in for the last two years like an astronomer

at the shallow end of a lens, or a water snake

shedding another ghost of what’s it’s grown out of

and leaves like a windsock to any passing breeze

that thinks it’s got the moves or the requisite serpent fire

to fit it. For me it was always a nightsky too tight.

A cellophane straitjacket, larva in a chrysalis

who thought the wingspan of dragonflies to come

were like man, the measure of all things. I’ve

been trying to step out of myself like a star-nosed mole

at the end of a black hole that’s turned the feathers of the crow

back to white like the fountainhead of a whole new universe

moving on like a waterclock from the empty bucket wish

of this one on its deathbed spiralling down like a kamikaze dove

that had been shot down in the flames of a spiritual fire

that burned like a dragon on the pyre of its own ashes.

I went looking for the holy grail, even it be

I had to drink the waters of life from my own prophetic skull,

or my eyes ran down my cheeks in sacred tears

of the most indescribable bliss of being lost

without hope of rescue on the vast nightsea of my awareness.

There was no beginning or end of things, nothing

as far as the eye could see, not an archipelago

of spiral galaxies washed up on a deserted beach

like a nautical starmap of sea stars that strayed

too far off the path like a Milky Way of fireflies

who are wise enough to know you have to keep

jumping orbitals like tree rings all the time if you

want to release the photons of spring, and, and, and

like the co-ordinate conjunctions of the rain

dropping from the eaves, I ended up here on the nightwatch

bailing the sea out my lifeboat with an urn

as full and round as the skull of the supermoon

reflected in the eyes of all these unread windowpanes.

Here’s as good as anywhere yesterday lingers

and tomorrow takes its time like an old growth forest.

I don’t drink, so I never have to pass the time

feeling hollow and empty as a gas can looking for a refill

to get back on a road that ran out on you

like a wife and kids that have had enough

of living in a ditch for the sake of love delayed.

In my work, I seek a greater intimacy with words

than merely inking my fingerprints

like labyrinthine firepits in the snow for the record.

I want people to listen to the roar of the oceans

in the rosey seashells of their own inner ears

when the wind is tinting the silver, Russian olives

like the patina of an alloy of copper and moonlight

as if the most expansive visions of life hid

in the mystic details of how to paint the picture-music

implicit in all this like shapeshifters bingeing on the light.

I’ve deepened my understanding over the lightyears

until I’ve lost sight of what I’m doing or why,

and it may be arrogance to pursue this kind

of earthly excellence long after you’re counter-intuitively sure

your eyes have returned to the sea like two waterbirds

evaporating into the aerial blue of the distance

like hidden muses in this dream of life

that cries out in its sleep as if it were drowning

like a lighthouse off the coasts of its own poetic consciousness.

Happy with the divinity of the image we were

born into or not, false idols of creator-gods and goddesses

shaping the starmud of their universe on the wheel

of life and death, and after it’s been fired

in a kiln of stars, and it’s been cooled like the clay

of the flesh in the tears that temper our passions,

return it to the source like a sword drawn from stone,

shrugging the world off our shoulders along the roadside back,

as we mutter some reflexive mantra under our breath

about how, at the least, we tried and tried and tried

as if that were some kind of sign that things were good enough.

Taking big steps for humankind on the moon

or getting up on your own two feet for the very first time

like a bipedal unicycle with a gyroscopic sense of balance

in a gravity free atmosphere has always been as much

the aspiration of the wrong stuff that weighs you down

as much as the right that ballasts your buoyancy

or a god-particle that tweaks your mass by passing

right through you like the contrail of a hadron collider

annihilating the positive spin of the English

you put on the cue ball to take a long shot

at sinking the solid in the sidepockets of the real.

You can think about it all you want, but thinking

is just the life of a flute wondering where the music

comes from that passes through it like a breath of light

appearing like the Pleiades on a windowpane late at night.

Thought falls like the shadows of things in print

across our paths from one margin to the next

like silver-tongued ploughshares yoked to the necks

of two white oxen gouging boustrophedons

like labyrinthine crop circles into the innocence

of our starmud. But where’s the seed, where

are the magic beans, where are the weeds

and the wildflowers the stars envy for their beauty?

Art is deaf, dumb, mute and blind as a starmap of Braille

in the eyes of those who’ve conditioned their eyes

to perpetually looking for the grails of their skulls

that are as lost as they are in the world as if

to find something they were happy with

put a stop to their minds and filled their mouths with silence.

Out of the dark, a vague prompting in the nebular heart

and things start shining of their own accord,

when the solid and the real merge like diamonds

in the waters of life translucent as the music

of bird-bone flutes that have gone on playing like dawn

in the graves of Archaic Indians lying by the Strait of Belle Isle.

PATRICK WHITE