THE WAY I FEEL ABOUT MYSELF OVERALL WHEN I'M SUMMONED

THE WAY I FEEL ABOUT MYSELF OVERALL WHEN I’M SUMMONED

The way I feel about myself overall when I’m summoned

out of my blue evanescence to be embodied again and again

as an individual with egocentric limits as if

some cooper of flowers had bound up my petals

into whiskey-barrels for the long night ahead.

Not wise to let apprentice mirages pilot the mindstream

but everybody’s got to take their hand off the wheel sometime

and let the facts learn to trust the true nature of illusion

isn’t a mask the truth wears to conceal its face in public

as if it had a bad reputation that smelled like the moon.

Realism is the death of theatre on an imaginary stage.

A spontaneous image out of the void doesn’t

make you a mage, but I thought I’d be wiser

than I am now, when I was twenty-two and sure of myself.

A lot of trial and error in learning how to love

your own and others’ humanity like the shadows cast

by the flames of desire like a bestiary of extinct simulacra

painted on the wall in carbon and red ochre behind you.

We gather and we hunt as before. We acquire and dispense.

And the pain of letting go is insufferable. Trees

in post natal depression after a windfall. It helps

when humanity appalls you to remember the children

these monsters once were, and how dangerous innocence is.

Love feels like the labour of a lifetime

but if you get up close and intimate there’s

no progression in the work. Intimidating spontaneity,

it’s chaos reversing the spin on the order of the cosmos

so you can see the long and the short of it

through both lenses of your hourglass telescope

and you owe as much to your mistakes as you do

when you embraced as if the gift, the giver

and the given to were three waves on the same river of bliss.

Like greys in a painting, all those beautiful hues

of inchoate confusion, complementary colours

of lament and celebration, harvesting the dark abundance

of the full moon, sowing eclipses in the bright vacancy

of the new, wallflowers of the quotidian suddenly

going supernova in the eyes of unlikely mystics.

Love doesn’t sponsor a school, a cult, a coven, a lab rat.

If you’ve ever truly experienced it, then you know

you’re only experimenting with your own homely absence

when it’s gone. It foreshadows a kind of negativity creativity

that makes you feel as if you were backing out

the front door on your own house of life

and all that used to shine like the glazed bricks of starmud

you built it of to shelter your solitude, had

rejected you like a changeling on the threshold

of your birth sign like an illegitimate passport going into exile.

Just as loneliness is merely the table of contents, the shell

of what it means until you put it in the context

of being with someone and the self-contained monad

of cosmic sentience you are is horrifically amplified

into a bubble in the multiverse that’s about to burst

into a new sense of the vastness the light has to traverse

to enter your eye as if time were too slow

to keep up with the moment, so the present

is never any younger than the past, and the future

is always older than you conceived it to be.

Put your finger on the pulse of love. It’s an ageless waterclock

one wavelength long, one bloodstream wide

with no far shore on the other side. High

as your eyes are deep, a dream that keeps you awake.

Born into poverty, leave home, fourteen, then

fifty years a poet scrounging for life

in the flesh and dirt under the black crescents

of my lunar fingernails, doing without

to keep on doing within whatever I’m inclined to

like the axis of Neptune in orbit, turned on its head,

or the dark matter of turning the starmaps over

like a pilot light in an underworld full of untapped potential.

The severe clarities of the blood oath I took

to remain faithfully disobedient to whatever

I might come to believe too sternly about the world.

The curse enlightens. The blessing corrupts.

Whatever my imagination has done to me

in the name of love you’re either scarred by service

or suicide. And heresy looked like the only green bough

among the dead branches on the tree of knowledge

I could sing from like a serpent with wings

in a choir of fanatical bluebirds on my shoulder

shrill in the false dawn of another morning of mirth.

Despair might have gouged my eyes out at times,

but I never struck gold until I learned

to see like the blind what’s reflected in the black mirrors

of the mind that turns the light around on itself.

And as much as joy might have to say, sorrow’s

always said more than the genius of my silence

could articulate. Not a sententious adage of mine,

but I’ve learned never to trust wisdom if it’s

got a bad voice, too much creosote, too few

blackbirds in the chimney building nests

to make sure the song never dies and the lyrics

are as sweet as music to your eyes when you open them

for the very first time and the endless sky

smiles down upon you, day and night, like a birthright.

PATRICK WHITE