SO FAR FROM HOME FOR SO LONG

SO FAR FROM HOME FOR SO LONG

So far from home for so long I’m beginning to feel

I belong to this self-imposed exile that keeps whispering

like the miles and the stars and the far off voices

of the waterbirds lifting off unnamed lakes at night,

move on, move on, through the next gate, doorway,

field, rite of passage, into a deeper, darker space

where you can hear the loneliness of the light

singing to itself as its fingertips read your face like Braille

to see what kind of man you were before sorrow taught you

your eyes were bells of water hanging from a blade

of stargrass that never really knew what it was crying about

except for the hidden mercy in letting go into a farewell

it remains to be seen will last forever or not.

You haven’t come far enough if you can still

recognize yourself as the stranger that left home

as an old man or woman apprenticed to a child

you couldn’t discipline like an impetuous life

that admits of no masters. And takes possession of none.

Once you get over the mixed emotions of the tears

in your eyes at a blissful insight into your liberation,

the amazing moonrise over the birch groves,

the broken menagerie of an ice-storm’s chandeliers

you discovered reflecting as much light in pieces

as it did when it hung like rain from the lobe of a lover’s ear.

And then comes a night that closes over everything

you could possibly dream of being, like an iron eyelid,

and you’re chilled to the marrow by the mystic terror

of your cosmic solitude, and your heart is a bucket

the bottom fell out of as if time had stopped its waterclock.

And there’s no plausible way to say what’s happening

to you, except you’re alone in the world like a secret

you can’t even share with yourself because you’ve run out

of opposites and your shadows are no longer attached

to the light that cast them. Unruly forms bite their tongues

like lightning rods, and the silence stops stammering

in metaphors that reveal the dissimilarities of their likeness

to everything that preoccupies the moment

with an awareness of the unitive life of existence.

Neither zero, nor one, but not two, not two, not two,

neither denying nor affirming, not waxing, not waning,

as if you could feel the pulse of the universe beating

in your own heart, and there is no God, and there is no you

to be known in isolation, except for the fallen plum of a sparrow

in the palm of your hand you absurdly cherish

like the wounded death wish of a lamp that hasn’t gone out

when death is the inspiration that keeps you

perishing deeper into life as if you were staring

a dragon in the eyes on the inside alone together with everyone

as they were when they were a child closer to each other

than they are now. When we trusted the unknown more

than the nothing we can know about it, and innocence

were a perennial state of life like an entrance without

any sign of an exit closing like a barred door behind us

as if there were no need to ever come back this way.

PATRICK WHITE