MORE OFTEN NOW AS I GROW OLDER

MORE OFTEN NOW AS I GROW OLDER

More often now as I grow older, not a hot flash

or photo-op of time, I see as if my eyes

were waterclocks not chromatically aberrated telescopes

with astigmatic tears for corneas. A woman

walks down the street straightening her hair

with her hand behind her in the sunshine,

and she’s beautiful without any awareness of it,

and I see her image in ten thousand generations of women

all doing the same thing at one time or another

by housewells, in mirrors, in the eyes of lovers,

as if it were a kind of symbolic signage

you practise when you dance with your hands.

And the meaning is expressively true and perennial

in the extraordinary simplicity of the moment

when eternity unveils how indelibly intimate it is

with the most off-handed features of human transience.

We pass without passing away like water,

or wildflowers who bloom in the light of the spring

we bear in the eyes we bring to them

like a book of preludes to the eras and hours

as new to leaves on the dead branches of autumn

as the apple-bloom is on the green bough.

Some nights, I swear, I breathe out

and my whole being evaporates like stars,

radiant ghosts glow on the cold night air,

exiles in diaspora lingering in silence for awhile

without trying to grasp anything on the threshold

of their homelessness. Every time I die like this

I am more and more convinced death isn’t

the absence of life but its twin. Opaque abundance

quantumly entangled in its own translucent vacancy.

The darker it gets, the more I’m shadowed

by the light like a star peering through the foliage

of the black walnut trees as if it had just come across

a world it hadn’t detected before, and couldn’t help

be amazed at the fullness of our skulls in the black holes

of the graves we embody like stem cells

of our ancestral emptiness. Even the light of a star

mastered by the vastness of the space within us,

forever in the presence of what we can’t be guided to.

O how lonely the taste of death is in our mouths,

but I ask you, not as a sentimentalist who lacks

the clarity to be honest about their rootless emotions

as if the lucidity of a starmap had planted gardens

at the end of a journey that bloomed along the way,

is life not born of the same solitude it enters everywhere

as if the whole of death were achieved in the very first breath

we ever took, all of life, all of death, behind us from the start?

The many return to the one, and the one returns the favour

like a good heart that hasn’t been wounded

like a sea on the moon by giving it all back like rain

to the myriad rivers of eyes it drank its own reflection from

like the flowers of the stars that strew petals of light

in their own wake as if their shining illuminated the dark

in hindsight and the future memory of our endless becoming

were already a prophecy behind us long before we got here.

PATRICK WHITE