I WOULD MISS YOU IF YOU WEREN’T SO
DEEP INSIDE
I would miss you if you weren’t so
deep inside.
I would send the fireflies out like a
search party
to beat the bushes and the stumps to
see where you hide
were you not the stars within that lead
me home.
I would cry out in anger and tears,
World, you are not fair,
were you not the mystic intimate of my
indignation.
I would look upon the illuminated world
thriving in its garden, and accuse the
sun of being blind
did I not see more in your eclipse, the
abundance
of your darkness, than I do by the
vacant light of day.
Let others bathe like birds in the
fountainmouths
of happier lyrics, I drown in your
watershed,
a starfish on the moon, and the
darkness shines
like a nightsea the colour of your
eyes. And there’s a sky
full of shipwrecked constellations
without lifeboats
that went down into fathomless time
with all hands on board
like a cargo of bones that reached its
destination
by giving them all up to you, like
yarrow sticks
to the Book of Changes, whether you
read them as such or not.
Nine in the fifth place. Enlightenment
in hell.
I am the nightwatchman with the moon
for a lantern
that strikes the bell of his heart
three times and says
all is well, all is well on the bottom
of the sea.
I would be planting supernovas like a
terrorist with i.e.d.s
in the Milky Way by now to add to the
chaos
were you not the black hole of a
galactic inspiration
that’s mastered me like a magic
latent in the heart
to burn the sum of all my destructions
in a blaze of insight
by which the light is known to the
light, the way
a tree is by a breeze, or ashes know
the fire’s out.
How could I reach out to you except
with your own hands?
How could I speak to you in any way
you’d understand
did not your voice coax the words from
my mouth
like a dream grammar of sacred
syllables betokening
the things of the earth like the echo
of a prayer we forgot?
Too intimate to be the principle of
anything
and yet your impersonality can only be
approached
with tenderness, like a feather
floating through space,
or the cloud that grounds the mountain
like the cornerstone
of a temple to the emptiness it floats
upon.
Were you not the valley my grieving
shadow wanders through
like the lachrymose theme of another
lonely psalm
trying to palm itself off as poem, how
could the eagles
shriek eureka in the heights at the
very next insight
into the nature of your vulnerability
moving down below?
We might both dance to the same music
as if it were true,
but you’re the silent witness when I
listen to the wind,
you’re the charmed locket of darkness
the light conceals,
you’re the secret jewel that’s
wholly transparent
to all the eyes in the universe that
have spent their lives
looking for you like a sky that’s
been hidden from sight
right over their heads and under their
feet
like an atmosphere and ocean that never
left the moon.
Even here on earth, the silver fish are
frenzied in your tide.
Lunar horses graze like waves on your
seagrass
and run wild when you spook them like
an ocean
with a bit in your hands, and the look
of an angry teacher.
If your absence were not deeper than my
solitude
how could I resist the consolations of
oblivion
and carry on as if I’d never missed
you? Who
would I long for to affirm my presence
in this emptiness
that engulfs me like an eye with
something in it
like a star that can’t be washed out?
I was not
born a warrior to surrender to anyone
less than you.
I do not open my heart and my mouth to
sing
lullabies to houseflies growing dozy on
the windowsills
as the cold comes on like the sheet
music of ice.
Who would I dedicate the works of my
nightshift to
like the journal of a dark demon
writing to himself
about the spiritual intricacies of
jumping from paradise
just to meet you naked in the garden
again
as if we were born to be exiled
together by the pain
that is visited like swarms of killer
bees upon those
who break taboos like white canes over
our knees
and throw their cornerstones around
like dice
to entice blind luck into taking a
chance on their disobedience?
Who would inherit the crazy wisdom of
my human divinity
if I did not know how many lives you’ll
outlive me
like the randomness of an alibi based
upon a truth
that reprieves everyone from death on
desolation row
by undermining the limits of our
culpability with compassion.
You, the sorceress of meaning, you, the
beast mistress
of my savage emotions, you, the fire
sylph at the hearth
of my homeless wandering into these
evictions of self
that bury the days with no names on
their graves.
You shake the lightning like a spear of
fury in a lion’s skull.
You wake the dragon from its dream of
lotus fire
You touch me on a night when nothing
else will
as if I were real, and the solidity of
my atoms sublimates
like a ghost of dry ice into a mirage
in space
so I could see in the grand paradigm of
things
even the most enduring pyramids in a
desert
are the work of the wind when the mind
is inspired
to move things around like the grave
goods of the heart
in the hands of a tomb robber that
frees us of them
to travel light without baggage through
the gates of Orion.
The past has no need of any other
afterlife than the present
nor the future the prelude of a promise
of better things to come.
Born into a life with a ferocious
childhood for an introduction,
I have grown young again in the ashes
of those fires,
like a skin transplant of flowers over
a burnt face
to hide the scars, and give the stars
some space.
PATRICK WHITE
