AND THESE LINES
And these lines like the
opening wake of a boat I’m not in.
Or is it the opening of an
old wound unsealing itself like a loveletter?
Or the world held up to
the lips of this fever like a spoon?
There are shadows in the
valley of a scar
that sometimes mistake
themselves for leaves
and turn their sewers into
wine
and reel in the unmoving
delirium of a black noon
when the hands of the
clock disappear
into the cool centre of
their turning
and time is sheathed like
mercy in the darkness.
Suffering shadows my blood
like a map
and so I look for joy in
everything
as if my death were
already achieved and behind me
and I could linger over
the morning and end of everything
like a wet winter fog that
doesn’t try to cling.
The tree outside the
window in my writing room
is the axle of existence
and every ring of its
heartwood
is the expanding wheel of
the world,
as it is with every
breath. But this is precisely where
I keep losing myself in
the ineffable urns and ashes
of the unsayable beyond,
not just of death,
but of all that life
hasn’t been
to one who loved it like
his only chance.
A firefly agitates the
darkness more
than all the lightning of
my awareness
when I consider the
spectral vagrancy of my thought
calling to me like a hill
to an unmoored lifeboat
to see if anyone survived
the last sinking of the moon.
And my sorrows are bells
of water that toll like the sea
for all the incredible
dead who are buried in me
like marrow in the bone.
Which is to say no more
than another
labouring under the weight
of being human.
And I know of a lyrical
clarity that’s free to sing what it wants,
that lifts the snake up
with wings
and enfolds it in the
infinite solitude of the sky
and lets it shine eyes
beyond the reach of the light.
Here words jump like fish
on the moon
and the dead branch is an
orchard in bloom
and yesterday picks up its
shoes and roads behind it
and there isn’t a shadow
born of the light that can follow me
and tomorrow isn’t the
ambassador of my next breath
arriving with urgent news
to wake up the dead
like a poppy or an
ambulance in a nightmare.
Here the lucidities ripen
like eyes with every eclipse
and the bright vacancy of
the glaring moonskull
is broken like the bread
of a dark abundance
that feasts in the seed of
everything.
I watch the snowflakes
fall randomly outside
and try to assess the
chances
of finding the moon in an
oyster,
remembering the
unattainable has no threshold
to blunder my way across
like spiritual junkmail.
The world is a drop of
water flowing out of its own eye.
A squirrel natters and
gnashes its annoyance
at my propinquity and for
a moment
affirms that I exist by
the intensity of its denial.
And it wasn’t just seas
that the moon lost, not just seas,
but the sky that softened
her stars as well.
The thought falls like a
key on rock,
a fly at a winter
windowpane,
forgetting what it once
could open,
and I let it take its
place at the table
like a ghost of salt that
looks a lot like me
because we both mourn for
the same lost sea,
born of the same bell. But
let the starmud settle,
the dust compose what it
will, thoughts fall
like the flightfeathers of
passing birds
that do not stop to sing
because my voices
echo in the cocoons of ten
thousand transformations,
and who I was in the
prelude that just walked past,
is now the likeness of my
dissimilarity,
hobbling like a bridge on
crutches downstream
or a disoriented pilgrim
on the smokeroad to fire
as all the Gothic glaciers
evaporate like churches.
Do you see how space
conforms me like the wind
to the shapes of my own
faceless emptiness
as I stand over the
silence like a heron or a pen
waiting for fish that slip
away like waves on the moon?
Madness or enlightenment?
Asylum or shrine?
I have deepened my
ignorance enough not to care.
My flesh, a wardrobe of
ghosts.
My mind, the gesture of a
star in the dirt.
My heart, blood on the
thorn of the moon.
And still, my spirit cries
out like an abyss
for the dead wasp on its
back on the windowsill,
as if there were a will to
my foolishness
tangled like wild morning
glory
in the trellises of the
constellations
where the great roses of
the night
are enthroned in their
bloodlines,
and do not acknowledge the
passage of the small urgencies
that are dotted like
periods at the end of their own sentences.
I accord the wasp, the
squirrel, the tree,
full rights to my identity
in this agony of being,
this fellowship of
suffering,
and with no more authority
than the spontaneous value
a jest of compassion
attributes to my clownish humanity
and the solitudes of
anguish it must endure
to keep on approximating
its life
like the long draw of the
straw in a hurricane.
I have lived and wept long
enough
not to trust any insight
that doesn’t feel the
pain
growing eyes like a gate
in the rain.
How have any of us not
suffered
and cried out in our
alienation
I am human, I am human,
as if our despair could
voice
the violence of our
relentless insignificance?
And when I say this,
understand,
there isn’t anything it
could possibly mean
if it doesn’t heal, if
it doesn’t say
to the widow alone for the
first night
or the scar of the moon in
the window,
or the child savaged by
atrocity
who was left torn and
alone in the dark,
there is no one to whom we
can plead,
no one who could hear
the scream of the hell
poured from your blood
like the iron voice of a
misshapen bell,
no one who can unseed the
life you’re rooted in,
no one, not even you, to
know your need
for intimate fires in the
ashpits of your stars
that suddenly flare up
like flowers
to consume that which
surpasses itself in wonder,
but when you’re wounded
by the horsemen in the night
who trample you like a
pulse, know this, I bleed
like the same resonance of
ruptured atoms
and my harp is split like
a wishbone
and my heart is the wilted
lily, the failed parachute
of a sidereal hemorrhage,
and I
am darker than the eyelids
of the gods
with anger that you should
suffer so
and not know, not know
the delirium of the seed
that is buried in your
wound
like the herb of the
eclipse that lived you like enlightenment.
PATRICK WHITE
