SOMETIMES THE SEA RETURNS ME TO MY
DREAMS
Sometimes the sea returns me to my
dreams
like a drowned man washed up by a wave
like a cinder from under its eyelid on
an island
I return to like a message in a bottle
from the future
that says don’t risk yourself to save
me, it’s hardly worth it
compared to who you wanted to be way
back then
when you laboured to amount to more
than I’ve ever been.
I’ve been bobbing like this Orphic
moon
of a prophetic skull across this dark
night sea
for lightyears now singing to myself in
the abyss,
the self-abnegating minstrel of my
melodious emptiness,
listening for any sign of life in these
sidereal realms
that dumbfound the starmaps when I ask
to what point, what for, into a coma of
silence
that echoes from mirror to mirror like
a spent satellite
that wandered out of orbit like a slack
guitar string
that didn’t want to stay in tune with
the music
of the usual shepherd moons. But I ask,
anyway,
thinking the answers might be quantumly
entangled
with the questions somehow it’s
impossible to fathom
except as just another poetic
lucubration in the void
of what life has made of me for the
last sixty-four years.
Maybe it’s all one long beginning
that flows on forever.
I hope, of course, though hope isn’t
the most reliable horse
winged or not, to bet on, whatever I’ve
done
might be to the betterment of God knows
what,
but something, whether I’m the last
to know or never
and it’s better that way, or, at the
very least,
if humanity’s lost the taste for
itself and more
robotic sensibilities want to forget
who we are
and cauterize their hearts to the
civilized savagery
of atrocity, waste, and devastation
we’ve wreaked
upon millions and millions of lives
throughout history,
poetry was the most graceful and absurd
sorcery
of the word I could be apprenticed to
like the muse
of a dream grammar that taught me to
sing metamorphically.
What a curse humans have afflicted upon
themselves
and the robots will be worse, much
worse than now.
O may it not be so, but too many
languish in the alibi
of inevitability and even astronomical
catastrophe
seems to have lost the power to change
our minds
like proto-mammals back in the age of
the dinosaurs.
And it isn’t if we didn’t see it
coming from a long way off.
If you let your oceanic awareness of
the multiverse
linger in the shadows of your big,
blue, cosmic eyes
there’s still something, isn’t
there, perennially true and beautiful
about watching a mother wash her
daughter’s hands
in a fountain in a park like the wings
of a small bird
when you recall all that had to occur
from God particles
to black holes for that momentary act
to happen,
all the collaboratively creative
annihilations that had
to take place in an unending succession
of cosmic events
big, small, incomprehensively, or
randomly significant
like fireflies and stars, trace meaning
of metaphors
leaving half-lives and contrails of
where they’ve been
in the field of view of a few who see
them for everyone
like the moon and the sky in a drop of
dew, or jewels
in the net of Indra whereby you mark
one and they’re
all marked indelibly like a starmap on
the waters of life.
Maybe there’s a code-breaker
somewhere one day
who’s going to make crystals
precipitate out of thin air
synchronistically like a kind of
intelligence
that overlooked our starmud as way too
sloppy
to be the hard-edged medium their
translucency
prefers to work in, but to me it’s
this lumpy clump of clay
on a potter’s wheel that can just as
soon turn into
a game of creative Russian roulette,
this amorphous
nebularity of the vague way each of us
is giving birth to stars
within ourselves all the time even if
we don’t realize
we’re androgynously pregnant with the
inconceivable
like clepshydras breaking water like
ripples of rain
in the eyes of a mirror that undulates
like the wavelength
of a serpent of mercury, life echoing
itself
in the elaborate proliferation of
mandalic diffraction patterns,
the evanescence of this endless dream
of change within,
without beginning or end, birth, death,
cessation or continuance,
beyond ignorance and wisdom,
achievement, failure,
the filth we derive our myths of origin
from,
or the false dawns of a mythically
inflated paradise
that turns its back on the dark energy
of the new moon
that inspired it counter-intuitively to
conceive of itself
in the first place, this is the
dangerous garden I live in
where just to touch a face the mind can
feel in astonishment
through the labyrinth of my fingertips
and staggered eyes
is a wonder of chaos that it should
have been shaped so
out of nothing, I can read it like the
face of the moon in Braille
like an ocean where the stars dwell
deep within,
light upon light, without any notion of
ever having gone
metaphorically blind. However you try
to square the circle
of your place among the auroras of air
you wear
like the aura of a lifemask that
concealed your inner vision
of yourself as adamant as a glacial
dolmen
about the size of a thumb stuck in
three and a half pounds
of brainmud like a plum pie, o what a
good boy am I,
there’s always as much up ahead as
you left behind
and take it from me, I’ve tried, just
to be true to myself,
however you do, you’re never going to
disappoint the mind.
PATRICK WHITE
