SOLITUDE, MY FRIEND, LET'S GET OUT OF HERE

SOLITUDE, MY FRIEND, LET’S GET OUT OF HERE

Solitude, my friend, let’s get out of here.

Sick of looking at the same old deathmask

in the mirror like this afterlife I’ve carved

out of my heartwood like a straw dog

I cling to with too much affection. I forget

who said the mind is an artist, able

to paint the worlds, but it’s true. What

you see in the world is always a self-portrait

of what you look like from the inside.

Some colour within the lines like a choir of crayons

and others mix up a palette of homeless hormones

as if they were putting icing on a wedding cake

they were trying to keep the flies out of

like a seven-tiered ziggurat keeping an eye on the stars,

or a painting knife that slashed at the canvas

like an image of grace that wanted to paint its face

in scars of thick, dry pigment irresistible

as wet cement to a kid before everything goes solid

as ancient starmud on an effluvial flood plain on Mars.

Solitude, you’re the mast I bind myself to

whenever I hear a woman singing through an open window

as if the only way for a heart like mine

to have a long-lasting love affair with life

is to shapeshift my way like rites of passage

through all the stations of being water goes through.

Ice, fog, rain, clouds, seas, glaciers, rivers, mud-puddles,

water droplets, dew, lakes, tears, locked

in the comas of comets, frozen watersheds on the moon,

in these bodies we’re always leaking out of as if we had

more exits than entrances, and never last

and never least, this mindstream I like to sit

with you by like wildflowers in the sunset,

and drown my thoughts as if I were restocking

ten thousand lakes with the stem cells

of small-mouthed bass and northern pike

just to keep the game I’m playing with myself

dangerous and honest. Whether you exhibit or not

all visual art was born with the eyes of predators

painting their hunting magic on the walls

of their caves as if they’d found a way inside

their skulls to petition the great mother

with the mystic signage of their sacred gratitude.

Add a bird bone flute or two and it’s the picture music

that still echoes like a subterranean dream grammar

quoting the chapter and verse of mandalic metaphors

like the farewell of a waterbird to a fledgling arrow

of an albatross arcing through the sky like a paintbrush

with the taste of blood in its mouth, and its wingspan

unfolding like a book of sorrows too deep to curse.

Solitude, my friend, let’s get out of here.

I’m tired of counting the dead on the abacus

of my tears, black as new moons on my spinal cord.

Anywhere you want to go just say the word

and I’m there. Let the dark evaporate like a black hole

if Stephen Hawking is right, and if he’s not

we’ll work out some kind of cosmology along the way

of smoke and mirrors like a working telescope.

Make something up out of the ashes

of our former insights like a habitable planet

that doesn’t rely on the reflected light

of a middle-aged star for an exterior light source.

Let’s wander down that road no one’s ever

given a name to, forever further than we can go

like a new universe breaching the waters of life

with a birthpang of light that doesn’t wash

the baby out with the bathwater in the normal course

of love and life like a cradle or an ark

in a Red Sea of bloodlust that keeps saying to itself

apres moi le deluge. Let’s keep things in perspective

and make it huge enough to let parallel lives

meet like rivers mingling their way into each other

like the slim threads of one big tapestry

of marine life in a membranous multiverse.

Let’s go write crop circles in the abandoned fields

that read like the journals of the farm wives

that once lived around here as if there were

more intimacy in their solitude than there was

in the estranged company of their communion with town.

Let’s make a starmap out of the broken windows

that we’ve looked through as if someone

smashed their crystal skull like tears on a rock

scarred by glacial striations of the last ice age

that taught us to dance around a fire at night

to keep warm under the palatial chandeliers of the Pleiades

as if we had something to aspire to in life

that was higher than us. And it might sound weird

to someone who’s never haunted a house of life

they haven’t lived in, like a shrine to their own solitude

founded on a tradition of chaos that kept

the whole thing afloat like an empty lifeboat

anyone was welcome to crawl into anytime

they needed to without a passport to the moon.

Out of nothing, my solitude, we have both been made,

and that makes us wholly compatible

with the best and most abysmal in life,

this vapour of patchouli incense in the nostrils of God,

the smell of burning tires like black haloes

around the necks of humans nailed like crosses

to their bodies and minds like an excruciating witness

to their life and times. O who’s to say awareness

isn’t a miracle because they live like a lab rat

under a periodic table? If only with you, my solitude,

just to be here, however long it goes on

explaining itself with every thought and emotion

you’ve ever had it’s that close. A breath of stars

on the air at night, as if someone were breathing

inside you, every moment, the inconceivable absence

that fits you like the skin of an iridescent,

supersensible spherical mirror of a soap bubble

of intelligence, or a contact lens at one end

of the Hubble wearing glasses among the celestial spheres

to focus the multiverse and all of hyperspace

into the endless immensities of one single life

in any form, whether it’s candled out like a black dwarf

or blazing like the Pleiades, because one

flash of life across the nightsky of your deepest intuition

and you’re the stem cell that envisions

all the others like people and trees, fish, birds and animals

that all speak the same dream grammar as if we all see

through the same eyes, we’re the arcane wisdom

of an abyss singing to itself in the dark

as if it were well understood by virtue of our solitude

it spoke the same language as us, whether

we’re here to hear it or not. I’ve got you, my solitude,

like the cup-bearer of the muses, topping me off

as I watch the full moon tangled like a nocturnal waterlily

in the waterfall of the willows rinsing the stars

out of their hair into the river like bubbles of light

pierced by a thorn of joy in the cool abyss of the night.

PATRICK WHITE