O WHAT DO YOU DO NOW?

O WHAT DO YOU DO NOW?

Day 11: Thank-you for the sunamic outpouring of love and affection

I received from everybody yesterday. Plank after a shipwreck I could

cling to to keep me afloat, and, man, it felt better than a door. I’ve been

trying to respond to you each individually with a syllable of something real

and tangible behind all these pixels and bits. An indefensibly, imperfectible

human constituted of starmud, flesh and blood. Definitely a heaviness

going through all this. But one of the great, lingering sadnesses for me,

and it might seem small and trivial to someone who isn’t a Virgo, is

the compulsory neglect the disease imposes upon me in terms of

the energy I’ve got to spend on the poems, the rush, the intensity, the meds

they’ve got me on, the wonder, the horror, the intrigue, the death,

listening to a good, sensitive man who’s got healing in his blood,

it’s cellular, a calling not a career, the way I’ve got poetry in mine

as he’s trying to explain out of compassion how if the cancer

metastasizes to your liver it’s relatively easy to scrape that off

surgically, and it’s all bizarre and weird as you try to figure out

how some artist you can relate to, because he was you just a few

thousand million years ago, got the effect that he did in a small

painting above the clinically starched bed where they ask you to lie down

on the raspy clean sheets that feel as if you were sleeping with the bride

at a wedding of leaves. And you’re nervously, peculiarly jovial,

laughing at everything with Zhuangzi in the autumn leaves

that are shedding their way into eternity outside the soft lustre

of the small window that let’s you see the light as if there were

some meaning to all this you haven’t discerned yet, that might come clear

if you stayed calm and quiet, cool and continuous enough.

I have all my life given nothing less than everything all the time

to poetry. That’s what I am. A poet. So it’s never been charity

or heroic in my mind to do so, but a reflex inflection of my very nature

to be myself, whatever that really is, even if it’s nothing. What else?

And the way I’ve lived my life is precisely the way I want to live my death.

Giving nothing less than everything all the time to my art.

It’s my joy. It’s my immensity. It’s my intensity. It’s my heart.

Best part of me, in my estimation, if I can say it without colluding

with an ego delusion that’s on the verge, never known one

tentative day of life on earth when it hasn’t, of threatening to prove

to me, what a fool I am. And it might well win the argument yet.

But I’m the kind of seahorse that rides off into the moonrise,

not the sunset, fortunately born too stupid to be a cynic. So I go on

dooming myself to trying to attain the unattainable, knowing

it’s not something you perfect through your craft, but you might

just reflect a little bit of it if you get lucky, and stay circumspect

enough to slip under the fence.

Literally wrote myself into an oblivious stupor last night until

five in the morning, so I didn’t have to flip through the drastic

album of pictures alone in the dark, curled on the futon before I slept.

Knowing I needed sleep but couldn’t. And there’s an element

in writing all these poems that is undoubtedly therapeutic for

a person like me, but over and above that, there’s a poet like a nightbird

trying to pour his heart out to you without singing mere documents

of hysteria. So the poems, as rightly they should, ask a lot of me

and I give it to them to the best of my abilities. Zorro on a burrow

sometimes I’m sure. And when I’m not him, I don’t know who I am,

but it’s beautiful and fast. I’m watching the way it moves in the grass.

Fire alarm. Strange reversals of words and suffixes, swarms of blackfly

typos like learning to walk all over again, I’ve been sending good gangs

of outlaws after to hang them like a posse of mistakes. Think it’s

the pressure of the tumour putting pressure on my brain, or the effect

of the meds, and I’m sure some of it must derive from pure exhaustion.

Realized when I was wobbling my way up Wilson Steet the other day

like a drunk in a public place, to fill my first prescription, I’d been

consciously placing my feet as if I were following

the painted footsteps on a Fred Astaire dance floor

for eleven blocks, and instead of listening to the conversation

the crowns of the trees were having with the sky, all I was doing

was dancing with cement. Poor me. But just the same it’s

sad and frustrating, not wholly debilitating yet, to have to practise

a vigilance over these things that yesterday you didn’t have

to think about, it just came naturally because you’ve done it

all your life. I’m being honest with you here because there’s

no point to any of this if I’m not. So if you would be so kind

as to let me lean a little on your good minds and eyes to point out

a spelling error or a typo that got by me, I would be deeply appreciative.

Might seem like a funny favour to ask, but, believe me,

in the way I see things, it would mean a lot to me. And you’d

have my heartfelt thanks for it. You don’t want to go out in public

looking so cool with a piece of toilet paper sticking to your cowboy boot

like a comet from a bevelled heel. lol There. There’s an antidote

to an sos. I feel better already. So little time it seems to say it all in

but trust me, it’s all there in these one or two little sacred syllables

we rely upon to express what we really feel. Thank-you for caring.

And the way you touch.

O what do you do now? Sit here in the loveable deep shadows

of the mindstream with the other fish all over the world tonight

wondering if they’re a wavelength, a widow-walk, or a river reed?

Go tell a parachute from a milkweed pod to go find

a Monarch butterfly and try not to poison it if you can?

How much of this is a drug singing to you, how much is a tumour,

and how much is a man? Hard to assess, but I’ll

keep an eye on it for you if I can. Duress. Excess. No.

Let’s sit down on the ground somewhere and have a good laugh.

It should end in laughter, if the laughter really ends,

and to judge from the amount I’ve been laughing lately,

I doubt that it really does. You want a nice thought.

Try this. A demonic firely with the soul of a star in its heart.

Power with a switchblade knighting flowers. There.

That’s nice. Going to keep that. Like a pair of cowboy boots

I expect to be buried in among the waterlilies when I die.

Don’t want to make anyone cry. Want to make them laugh.

What else am I supposed to do with this? Laugh, laugh, laugh

at how silly it all is, and profound and eternally enduring

to have pulled this off out of all those atoms. To be

a human, I hope I have, among humans in the same lifeboat

of a heart that’s been calling to us for a long time now

from a foggy hill. Over here. Over here. Maybe we should listen.

Or what were the sixties all about? You soaked your jeans

in bleach all tied up in knots a little too long this time?

That was my seed-manger. This is my flower, though

that makes me feel a bit like a little teapot running off

at the mouth again at a Japanese tea ceremony where

they mend the cups that have fractured with gold. Wonder

if they can do the same thing with this skull I’m drinking from?

Here is my handle. Here is my spout. Aquarius

with all the stars pouring out as if somebody were

preparing a bath for someone they cared about.

The candle. The flower. The water and its shadows,

and the bubbles, yes, the bubbles that broke like hearts

of quantum foam, and the dolphin you look at

in amazement because it looks like a human that’s gleaming

naked in a bathtub as you add the wine. Nice touch.

PATRICK WHITE