MY LIFE AND WORK

MY LIFE AND WORK

My life and work as much the oeuvre

of all the poems I didn’t write as those

that made an impression upon my voice

like the Burgess Shales, a firefly

flowering on the wind from a seed,

the lapwing of a gate on one hinge

someone left open years ago for me

to walk through now into the high fields

between the lyrical vetch in the grass

and the picture-music of the stars.

Myriads of simple things I never

laboured at nor mastered like how

to treat my heartwood like a real craftsman

instead of rooting it in a long line of beginnings

on a clear cut slope of a mountain like a tree

or a nightstream that just got on with me

like a leaf drifting on my own mind

as if the point of every wavelength of the journey

were the going and the going were the destination

I arrived and departed from every instant of my life.

If I’ve had to live at times like a black hole

in absolute stillness like the pupil of an eye

or a trap door spider that locked itself out,

how else could I have come to understand

that isolation and darkness are two jewels

of an underworld where the dead are full of surprises

like the urns of angels with a message of ashes

that heralds the demonic like an aniconic oracle

of the new moon that resides in each of us

like the tooth of a dragon we’ve sown at first crescent?

Never felt the need to make a dolmen out of it

and hang it around my neck like a talisman

I could shapeshift with my fingers when I was

scared and alone in a house of life that was built

from the ceiling down with somebody else’s hands.

A tent’s always seemed a more habitable planet to me

than cement. The deportable thresholds of the homeless

more a passport to the promise land,

than the forged documents of a denatured citizen

who alienates his own humanity to belong

to the effluvial detritus of whatever’s left

as if an atlas were anymore real than a colouring book.

Getting mad. No. Not Now. Won’t do. Won’t do.

This is one of my more abstruse meditative moods.

I want to stay clear, peaceful. Like a mud puddle

enraptured by the serenity of the stars that bloom

like waterlilies in the eyes of fractured mirrors

without getting lost in the distances between us

like a lifeboat too far from the hill in the fog

to hear anyone calling as if they were desperately praying

are you there, are you there, were you ever there

or are you just another hidden secret that wanted

to be known, and you were, and drowned in your own despair

at the thought of something that couldn’t be undone?

The shadows are getting longer than the things

they represent but never embodied and it makes me

so sad so much has to die unfulfilled because

it never stood up to the light within it

as if there were nothing to be afraid of

or the sunflowers wouldn’t raise their heads

to make eye-contact with the face behind their masks

we all wear as if it were mystically tailored for us.

In the expanding space of an abyss as big as the universe

and yet, somehow, seems dwarfed by the human heart

throwing cornflowers and roses into a grave

because they say better than we do, what must remain

unsayable to us though it’s well understood

what a flashbulb our time is here on earth

standing on the red carpet of the bloodstream

that’s been rolled out for us like a poppy in a dream,

what strange music arises out of the heart

when it learns to cherish the things that life

no less than death, is indifferent to. As long

as there’s a space for one drop of compassion

in your art, even a genius far greater by comparison

will seem like a fool beside you as the entire universe

fits you like a skin it’s growing out of like an eye

about to break into tears when you’re mourning

for the world like a homesick farewell. And autumn comes.

The thief leaves the moon in the window

as he usually does, and love, hang on to love

as long as you can, and when it’s gone

so deep inside you like a waterbird disappearing

into the twilight, try to remember we’re

a vaporous kind of sentience, evanescently aware

we’re pilgrims of fire on a long road of smoke

to the shrines of the stars to perfect our solitude.

Don’t try to climb your burning ladders

like a snake of scarlet runners up to heaven

just stretch your wings out and try to ride

the thermals of serpent fire at the base of your spine

like the cinder of a red-tailed hawk in the third eye

of the sun, or a dragon, if you want to have some real fun.

Don’t try to turn back the helical lifespans

of the waterclocks. The shadows of time

are softened by the patina of the moon on our eyelids.

The peaks and the valleys of anyone’s life

eventually fall into each other’s empty arms

like quantumly entangled annihilations of place and time,

bright vacancy, dark abundance, the two become one

and the one, well, you’ve got eyes, see for yourself.

PATRICK WHITE