IF I WERE TO CRY NOW AT THIS AGE
If I were to cry now at this age
it would be a grey, September rain,
running down
the half windows, half mirrors of my
eyes.
Alloys of light. A veil of rivers and
roads
I’ve firewalked on burning diamonds
to get here.
A waterfall of waterclocks. Time run
amok.
A dog let off the leash of a long
continuum
to remember tomorrow as if it only
happened
yesterday. No more eating the dust at
the heels
of Orion as if he were chained to a
parking meter,
the dogstar sniffs at the ankh-shaped
fire hydrants
as it will, free of the master and his
noose,
Black Dog shadowed by Blue Flower on
the loose.
If I were to cry now at this age
it would be as a sage washing his face
in his own ashes
to get the greenwood creosote off the
glass
he looks through darkly into oracular
dragon fire
dreaming the world on a lotus of flame
to ember in the blaze of two year old
red oak
with cracks through the tree rings of
former springs
to testify it’s aged right as eyes
and wine,
and still burns hot as blood in the
caldera
of a volcanic heart. Prophecy might be
the art
of great discretion, but poetry should
be as
open-faced as the skull of the moon in
a mirror.
If I were to cry now at this age
it wouldn’t be for fame, sex, power
or influence
among the literary politics of the
nitwits
in the regalia of a kingdom of gnats,
nor yet as any kind of repentance for
the life
that demonically guided me in and out
of the stations of the mystery through
the rootfires
of paradise that blossomed like stars
and waterlilies
in the fetid gardens of the fallen
transforming
their swamp lust into paradigms of
amorous enlightenment.
I disciplined the severity of my
disobedience
into rules of thumb that let more of
the defeated live
than the one-eyed angels with blood on
their feathers
ever did. Heaven condemned my demon to
compassion
for never taking offence at anyone
else’s miscreance.
If I were to cry now at this age
I doubt if I’d remember precisely why
I wept,
but my bet would be it had something to
do
with life not cherishing its own
creations
like a busload of schoolkids at a
railway crossing
with a brutal sense of timing, or
twenty-five million children
who starve to death every year in their
mother’s arms
while farmers pour galaxies of spilt
milk out on the ground
to keep the price of human kindness
high
as a subsidized quota of children that
have to die annually
to reach the projected goals of
unweaned shareholders.
Why so many children open their eyes
like flowers on time
to be flogged by the whips of their own
umbilical cords
like weed cutters along the fence of an
indefensible border.
If I were to cry now at this age
it would be for the beauty I discerned
growing
in the cracks and crevices like
blueweed and dandelions
between a hard place and a rock
that kept rolling down hill at the peak
of life
like the door of a tomb somebody used
for the foundation stone of a corrupt
house of life
built on sacred quicksand that lost its
footing
like a burning ladder of rafters in an
earthquake
that buried the priestcraft of a
snakepit
without the last unction of an oilslick
on its forehead
as if God looked upon the works of
humans
and spit on their eyelids in disgust at
a waste
of quantum foam that frothed like
hydrophobia
from the shrines of the dry seabeds of
their mouths
as if every ditch of hell were once an
ocean unto itself.
PATRICK WHITE
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