AND I WONDER AND I WONDER AND I WONDER

AND I WONDER AND I WONDER AND I WONDER

And I wonder and I wonder and I wonder

even in the midst of this harvest of wheat,

this windfall of apples, the siloes of the sun

full, and this blue moon coming back on

for an encore, if I have kept the blood oath

of my word, to God, the abyss, my mother,

myself. I have lived and died like a poet

starmapping the waterlilies in a swamp.

I have been true to the creative revolution

of the sixties when imagination was given its due.

I have not practised more than a verbal violence

against the churches, slumlords, social workers,

truant officers, and their children who sit

on the garbage can lid meditating like frogs

on a tin lilypad while people are entangled

in the drowned roots of the slime they’re engendered by.

I have ruined my life in the pursuit

of an earthly excellence the mediocrities were not

capable of. I was a golden boy for awhile

with an overachieving future prescribed for him

down to the women I dated and left

because of their attitudes toward people

on welfare, who, in politics that matched

the couch in their minds. were the reason they suffered.

You know how many beautiful women

are ignorant louts inside with about as much love

as a praying mantis for a sulphur butterfly?

Some mirrors are meant to be smashed.

Yet these were the people I wanted to impress

and be accepted by to make my Mum proud

of her womb, and say, hey, there may be more

like me at the bottom of the garbage can.

Why don’t you stop by sometime and take a look.

I was young. What a laugh. So I made my own way

book by book swimming through hidden watersheds

in the moonrock I polished into crystal skulls

like the lenses in the telescopes I used for easels

to paint my way home, because my mother

had been an artist, but I ran out of Prussian blue,

and the plain truth is I’ve been homeless ever since.

Alone. Though women have tried to do

the best they could. And I’m grateful for

the poems they inspired in me, and the days

I let my sword be used as a ploughshare,

and the fields I rocked like cold meteors

in my starmud in an attempt to be fruitful and multiply.

Possessed by their beauty and their guilt,

I was demonic enough to understand the exorcism

when it drove me out into the wilderness

pelted by ostrakons for being more intense than appropriate.

Who am I to say anything was wrong

with their ongoing assessment of the mystery?

The cooper cut his barrel in half

and burned out the last of the whiskey,

but I wouldn’t mistake me for a flowerpot

just quite yet until you see what I’m growing

when I sow my path with dragon’s teeth

instead of the usual rose petals and thorns.

Far from the bunting lambs and goats

of sacrificial religions cutting their own jugulars

like psychopaths, I keep the scimitars

of the moon sharp and haven’t forgotten

the point of my horns among the stars

in the long days and nights of these

circumpolar ways the ancient dolmens

taught a tiger burning in black and white flames,

taught a dragon at the forge of its sword-making soul,

to keep the princess of the spring equinox

and the pauper king of the autumn in exile

in the same heart-shaped locket they’ll be buried in

together, illicitly forever, like blood in holy water.

PATRICK WHITE