I’VE SEEN WHAT CAN HAPPEN TO PEOPLE
IN LIFE
I’ve seen what can happen to people
in life,
the broken man, his lack of will not a
decision he made,
the crying child no one answered, the
woman
who realized her marriage was a
post-mortem effect.
Loneliness and misunderstanding so
vehement,
separation so cruel, though people were
only
a razor-blade apart, adolescents grown
psychotically geriatric
with disappointment, yesterday’s
victors who saved the world
dismantled erosively like rust in dry
dock, casualties
of having lived so intensely for awhile
for one another,
the best steel that went through the
forge of war
is beaten into ploughshares that till
the moon alone
like scars that were sown, but nothing
came up
because of the salt that was thrown in
the wounds of Carthage.
Good people, innocent, resplendent as
Monarchs
among the lilacs in the spring, the
kindness of souls
that would give an evil man a moment’s
pause,
just enough of a taste of what it means
to be human,
not to regret what he is, nor long for
what he’ll never be
for another ten thousand lifetimes yet,
but intrigued
by being at peace with his own nature
as if nothing mattered,
absolutely nothing, everything achieved
by just being here
to watch the swept-winged swallows
scramble
to intercept the dusk like top guns
among the gnats
in aerial combat with the Bolshoi
Ballet. Utterly destroyed
by a whimsicality that challenges you
to find a reason
it’s more merciful to lie about, than
believe in.
Modes of suffering. Tones, wishbone,
tuning forks
that can shatter a voice-box with a
ballerina on top
like glass, elaborations of the
atrocities with
university educations, that can come of
knowledge
without love, green apples and gripe,
with no idea
what the frost and sunlight can do to
sweeten their attitude,
sharp-edged humans that can slash
mirrors with their smiles,
for whom wonder and awe, even in the
face
of their own awareness, never appeal to
the acquisition
of manipulative facts because they
don’t confer power
on anyone. Graces of the imagination,
Venus,
delinquently radiant in the sunset
above the shopping mall,
fireflies in a valley of fog after a
thunderstorm
as the stars come out to consult them
like a think tank
for innovative constellations, and the
richness of the air
redolent with life, as the earth
releases a fragrance
you can almost see with your eyes, more
indelible
than the sickly sweetness of death.
Sentient delights,
raptures of awareness, the
inconceivable joys of intelligence
chasing its own tail without a purpose
to its play.
I’ve witnessed and experienced these
things every day
and even on many eyeless nights of my
life when I could see
but couldn’t say what I was looking
at because it was cloaked.
I’m not unmindful of how much kids
like sugar.
How everyone yearns to live a life of
happiness
they never tire of, love, as if it had
pride of place
in the periodic table, a sine qua non
of the elements
that sat down together around the
sacred fire
at the joining of many rivers they’ve
travelled down
from the mountain, assured of their
dreams of the sea.
Peace-pipes all around, three osprey
feathers in their hair.
But there’s an inviolability to
suffering that puts a scar
to shame, an eye on a snake that
doesn’t blink
even if you turn away from it like a
disconsolate flute
that gives up trying to make it dance,
gamma ray bursts
of experience that eradicate anything
in its path,
that bury you so deeply in your sense
of life,
you could open up a private school for
meteor showers
and avalanches assiduously scribbling
down notes
like the last words of a guru that
entered satori,
but never came out of the coma again
though
he talked incoherently in his sleep as
if he
were chattering with squirrels and
pileated woodpeckers.
I’ve seen starlings nest in death
bells they feed
like the open mouths of the morning
glory
even as they’re tamping down the soil
on the grave
of a man they just buried like a potato
in his own starmud.
I’ve seen the lowest snatched like a
baby rattler
right out of the cosmic egg bite the
highest flying eagle
with the keenest insight right in the
leg because
it forgot that innocence can be as
toxic as experience
especially when you’re trying to put
a dragon on the road
that’s oxymoronically immune to the
quantum entanglements
of the moon baring her fangs like a
gateway drug to bliss
you can’t teach other people to run
from like an anti-venom
to the rush of the thrill coursing
through a nervous system
like a root fire of white lightning
slowly killing you
with a tinfoil facsimile of a less
enlightened life that nevertheless
shines brighter than Lucifer showing
the Buddha the morning star,
doesn’t it, admit it now, o my
brother, my sister of the moment, confess.
I wrote once I seek the eventual
forgiveness of the dark.
Not that it needed to be. But it was a
place to start. And
by dark I don’t mean the ghoulish
antics of teenagers
digging up corpses like dogs in the
cemeteries of Smith Falls
and smearing black lipstick across
their mouths. Ooo, bad,
black bubbles without rainbows,
anti-heroes of the dead,
do you ever get the bends when you’re
coming up
from the Gothic depths of all your
ruined cathedrals?
Do things pop like a weasel when you
gore your thumb
on a real thorn you hadn’t
anticipated like a cotton mouth
under the rosebushes someone planted
around an otherwise
unremarkable gravestone? Got some
advice
that probably won’t do you any good
to absorb
but don’t cheapen the dark and it
won’t take you so lightly.
When you’re thinking positively you
can be sure
there’s some negativity inciting it
like a chthonic muse
pouring blood libations over the body
parts
of the king of the waxing year before
he evolved
a symbolic imagination. Tropical
islands owe a lot
to the slag of volcanoes. You can’t
dis the chrysalis
without diminishing the lustre of what
comes out of it.
What fool ignores the bud as any less
of an event
in the life of a flower than a total
eclipse
is integral to the art of being the
full moon.
Panning for asteroids or the amino
acids of life
it’s always wise to start with the
ore. Given time
diamonds can come of dandelions, a star
sapphire
light up like enlightenment in the
crystal skull of corundum.
Accord the same integrity to pain as
you do to joy.
Like the night sea in an unexpected
storm
learn to respect your own weather by
turning
the wheel over to the waves like a
pilot you trust
as much as chaos to navigate by the
stars a way
to pass between the whirlpools and
rocks of yourself
unscathed by the windfalls of anchors
and liferafts
you’ve dropped in the water like the
fruits
of what you want to be known by,
inverse crucifixes
attached to chains, the first crack of
light
under the eyelid of the new moon to
wake up in time
to greet the ice burg like a white
whale you’re growing
spiritually fond of like the enigmatic
co-sponsor
of a salvageable doom as a prequel to
the aftermath
of the dangerous, rosey-fingered dawn
keeping you afloat
one plank of your lifeboat at a time as
if
you were always slumped like a
half-drowned, mystic drunk
your life flashing before your eyes
like fireflies in Andromeda
on the thresholds of your interminable
homelessness.
PATRICK WHITE
