HOW MUCH PAIN CAN YOU HOLD INSIDE UNTIL THE RESERVOIR EVAPORATES?

HOW MUCH PAIN CAN YOU HOLD INSIDE UNTIL THE RESERVOIR EVAPORATES

How much pain can you hold inside before the reservoir evaporates

into the great sky of awareness like a watershed waterbird

crying out in anguish for something that’s frightened it

looking into the long dwindling journey ahead.

The distances. The distances. The distances

from one sea to the next like a waterclock that never stops.

Like the human heart with a wheelhouse pulse.

The eye of the storm your only oasis for miles around.

You become spectral, dissociated, unglued, unbound

as a Promethean god freed by Shelley,

metastasizing in your liver like vultures eating it

for crimes of fire you were a good thief at.

The damage unto the privilege of the fatuous gods

you have done and there’s nothing but nothing

they can do back to you now for it but chain you

to a rock in the Caucasus and hope it hurts.

There’s a fire in the starfields I can see from here

and a scarecrow poet try to blow the flames out

on his jester’s long sleeves. The fire god came looking for fire

and he found it under my t shirt like a burning fox

I didn’t tell anybody about on the bridges I’ve crossed.

PATRICK WHITE