I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M HERE FOR

I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M HERE FOR

I don’t know what I’m here for.

I just write. I just paint. Like breathing

in and out. Inspired expiration. I watch the rain,

blankly, sometimes for hours, washing off the dust

from the leaves of the trees in the traffic.

I stare at the comatose clouds through the grime

on the windows and wonder what the stars

are doing backstage. My skymind

unfolds like a star map and I disappear into it

like a nightbird with a message it doesn’t care

is heard or not, because when I’m singing,

I’m not singing into a mirror. Verbal expression

isn’t thinking, and I’m not spider enough

to hang suspension bridges between

my words and my thoughts to harmonize the web

everybody gets caught up in like packing tape

as my bodymind tunes me up like a guitar

to the electrical buzzing of flaws in my argument.

I don’t know what I’m here for, but I often think

it’s pathetically petty to go looking for a meaning to life

like the light going round and round trying

to catch a glimpse of the shadow it casts like a tail,

when we’re the life of the meaning from beginning to last.

One meaning for everything? One size fits all?

The same collective death mask for every individual?

I fall asleep dreaming and wake up

like a mirage in the morning trying to sort out

the grain from the chaff, what’s real from what’s

merely the facts of the dark matter. But by the time

I’ve rubbed the crumbs of starmud out my eyes

and the lake mists still clinging like hungry ghosts

to my visions of last night have been exorcised

like lunar atmospheres, I can see clearly enough

I’m just the space all these thought waves travel in,

and as they say in Zen, the eternal sky

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

What is space here for? Or light? Or water?

Or the colour, red? And what meaning for love

was ever necessary in the throes of it?

Should this long, dark, radiant firewalk

in our sleep along the Milky Way ask my feet

what the meaning of going anywhere is, why we’re here

extrapolating ourselves back into the past

as if who we were yesterday is who we are today?

Evolution’s given me a taste for the evanescence

of a self that keeps on shapeshifting like space and time

in the live-streaming dreams of a belated Etruscan

watching the river turn like smoke in the air.

Poetry is the art of expressing what you can’t define

though it sounds as if you knew what you were

talking about at the time as everyone listened

sublimely in silence to a nightcreek babbling

through the woods in the dark like the waters of life

in the laughter of a child lost in the seriouness

of playing opposite herself for awhile like a new moon.

Ever wash your hands and feel somehow

you’ve stepped far enough back from yourself

you’re not the one who’s rinsing them off

and something eery and intriguing overcomes you

when you realize not even your fingers are your own?

I don’t possess my thoughts. I don’t own my emotions.

I’m a great creative collaboration with the unknown.

I’m an unpaginated encyclopedia of minor miracles

that come and go like sparrows to a tree.

And when it rains, the eyes of the universe are upon me.

But I don’t know what I’m here for. Does it

matter anymore? When I die is it all that radical

if I don’t know why? All my life I’ve fallen in love

with less reason than that. And do I really need

a philosophy to separate? A modus intendi

to back up my alibis for why I’m not always loveable

when I can see it in my lover’s eyes when she cries

on a winter night like an abandoned housewell

that the lightbulb’s gone out that used to keep her warm

and she doesn’t know what she’s here for anymore.

Nor do I. As we both agree to an honourable death

as if death would otherwise rebuke us for disloyalty

and the three quarter inch copper pipes

slash their wrists longitudinally the way

you’re supposed to when you’re serious enough

about renewing your virginity sitting naked

in a bathtub full of fireflies trying to freeze-dry your wounds.

If you don’t know what you’re here for. Go for it.

Or don’t. Maybe you can start a new religion

of your sins of omission and the left-handed virtues

of all the things you didn’t do, right or wrong,

and won’t. Or win a prestigious literary award

in a cherry-picked succession of unremarkable poets

who hang out like flypaper at night with porchlights

hoping among all the insects they attract

they might find one black dwarf of a first magnitude star

that sticks like a burnt-out match head to their chromosomes,

a mutant cinder of genius that doesn’t get in their eyes

so they don’t have to start crying all over again

like a watercolour in the rain to wash it out.

Can’t find any training wheels on why you’re here,

and all the scarecrows you made out of your spare crutches

to keep the birds from raiding your secret gardens,

are chafing under their armpits like medical skeletons

working on a cure for themselves that doesn’t

come too late to do them any good? Maybe it’s time

to walk out on yourself for once and stand up on your own

among the homeless who have no one but themselves

to rely upon. Or maybe you prefer a life that’s become

a hospital where the healthy aren’t welcome,

and only the worst atrocities of mediocrity

are admitted by the emergency nightshifts

to the asylums muttering in their dreams as if

they’d been medicated by the full moon threshing

short straws of genetically modified wheat?

For the last two years I thought I was here

to walk along the banks of this seance of rivers,

late at night by myself, under the willows and the stars,

revamping the images of old lovers like the wavelengths

of spectral flowers reflected back like old radio programmes

from hydrogen clouds in deep space that kept

their ghosts intact out of earshot of the facts of my life.

Somehow the candles have gone out

in the bright vacancy of noon like the shadows

of sundials and I weary of my purpose in life now

like a compassionate man who has been overly generous

with his lies at the bedside of someone dying inside.

I’m waterclocking my way like moonset into a new abyss

just to pass the time rinsing the blood off my hands

of the hemorrhaging roses I put my heart into

trying to save from the endless sacrifices

they made of themselves on my behalf, but couldn’t.

I hear the voices of dead singers from my past.

Or You tube conjures their images like Merlin

and I know they’re skin and bones by now

and their fingernails have grown out like guitar picks,

and their skulls are more oracular than fallen meteors,

and I am overcome by the poetic sweetness

of the sad shadows that once drove us to drink

as we firewalked the whole length of our lyrical cremations

just to fill our urns with something as inextinguishable

as lace and pretty flowers, dragons in the lockets of angels.

I rehumanize the simulacra of their fossilized remains,

images of pixellated skin, echoes of the refrains

I remember like the mantras of my youth when the dawn

was as shrill as a killdeer in the spring, and nightfall

was a hospital for wounded nightingales

and washed-up phoenixes weeping on their own parades

sat at kitchen tables long into the night ruminating

like candles on the glory days of tragic heroes

making a farce of their legends by living them

like morality plays mythically inflated at the end

by a lot of repetitious zeroes getting carried away in chains.

How strange to be singing a friend’s song to myself

long after the whole world’s outlived them,

and their names are being ushered funereally

like rare antiquities into grave robbing halls of fame.

And who knows? Maybe that’s how legends are made,

what we’re here for, born for, die for, like a vow

of silence we made over the graves of tomorrow

we revel in breaking like a curfew of sorrow today.

Que sais je? Montaigne’s motto. What do I know?

And even if you could. Me and my mantra. Who can say?

PATRICK WHITE