DON’T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT
I HAVE ENDURED
Don’t think I owed it to myself, but
I have endured.
Scarred and broken and as full of
escarpments
some bad mason laid in like a Cubist
stairwell
in the Canadian Shield. Experience the
sum
of all my failures, it’s a strange
book to quote from.
I tell people not to listen to anything
but their own hearts,
but they take that as a sign of
creative sincerity
and continue to listen out of the
corners of their lives,
defying my unmastery by paying stricter
attention.
You’d think someone who had lived
sixty four years the hard way
like a wild mountain goat on a high,
noble path
the rest of the herd doesn’t take
much anymore
as they did when the more siderealized
shepherds
used to drive them to the Zen pastures
of the moon,
would have his act down pat by now.
Still got a few gamma ray bursts of
demonic energy
left in me yet, a black revolver of
comets left in the clip
to take a few more pot shots on a drive
by at the sun just for fun
as it’s going down like a mailbox at
the side of the road
with a waning rooster painted on it
like a fire hydrant.
You can spend your whole life as
preparation
for a moment that never comes. Some
people
don’t want to catch up to their star.
They just want to follow it as far as
they can go.
They want to explore the offroad
mysteries along the way.
Some ghosts radiate like well known
constellations
and others roses in the dark that are
just as happy to emanate.
Not in the habit of judging the ashes
of others
by their constellations or their urns,
I’ve had more of a precessional
inclination
to scatter them like seagulls on the
wind
just to watch them hover motionless
over a precipice,
each fixed in space like a mobile of
sheet music
or the paradigmatic silence of a
symphony
living the moment like a riff in the
heart of time.
Wherever I’ve gone I’ve tried to
leave signs
of where I’d been as delusory clues
for those
sleeping walking in their delusional
lostness,
roomy, lunar waterpalaces of the mind
to move into
with more infinitely spacious windows
than there are condemned houses
in the slums of the usual zodiac of
clockwork origins.
Not infrequently I can see time in a
better light
than it deserves, and I like people
that have been
sand blasted in the tide like a piece
of broken glass
that washed up on the beach without
losing its translucency.
An alumnus of the underground schools
for the occult science of new moons,
every moment of my life since
I’ve been the master apprentice of my
own dark beginnings.
The serpent fire at the base of my
spine woke up
like a fire alarm in the hallway of a
burning house
shrieking for life at the window, and
my vertebrae,
playing by ear, the silver-tongued
flute,
and the picture-music within me, the
snake-charmer,
swaying like a river reed going with
the flow
to keep me on the same wavelength as
lightning
looking for a place to strike,
intrigued and alive.
It’s the arrogance of consciousness
to think
it’s anymore than an eddy in the
mindstream
that’s got intimate connections with
the greater sea of awareness
it’s heading toward like a maple leaf
with a flightplan
that’s got nothing to do with how
things fall out.
The world turns and things are
relegated
to stolen milk cartons like old albums
weaned
from the nippled turn tables of a
breast implant.
The past is a jigsaw puzzle where all
the pieces
keep changing shape like the fossils of
a man
who isn’t comfortable in his death
bed.
Over the course of time this vale of
tears
slowly evaporates spiritually into the
heat
like heart-shaped morning glory leaves
steaming into the dawn
like ghosts that had to get back to
their graves,
arising off the lake like a mass
exorcism,
or the third eye of the sun that shines
at midnight
from the bottom up on the roots of the
earth
as if it were trying to teach blind,
star-nosed moles
to see the stars burning in the day
from the bottom of a dry housewell
that echoes like a firefly in the
spider mount
of a hollow telescope listening to the
cosmic hiss
of a message it’s waiting to receive
that’s already been delivered
like a star that’s strong and true,
but apocalyptically behind the times
as if one person’s past were another
person’s present
and past and future and present
were all living co-terminously in the
moment
like the triune identity of time
looking three ways,
and probably more if you were take its
lifemask off,
simultaneously, so when the wind blows
through my musical skull in this
celestial desert of stars
because I listen attentively to the
lyrics
like a nightbird waiting for an answer
to its amorous enquiry, I know I’m
not
singing out of my ears just to overhear
myself talk.
My world’s been complete since the
Big Bang
and everything after, the prophetic
echo
of a future memory of cosmic events
that happened without me billions of
light years ago.
PATRICK WHITE
