I UNBURDEN MY HEART AND MIND TO THE
RIVER AND THE NIGHT
I unburden my heart and mind to the
river and the night.
Stars in the spring run off of the
urgent waters
breaking like a rush of passion over
the skulls of the rocks
that have felt all this before like a
recurring prophecy,
young watersnakes hunting juvenile
frogs along the shore,
colonies of unknown waterbugs sprawling
across
the thin skinned surface of a black
mirror as the water
glints off their backs in the moonlight
like tiny jewels
lost without a setting to embed
themselves in
except for the occasional corona of
light a wave
crowns them in only for a moment in
passing their way.
I keep the stars close. Immensity near
at hand
like a kind of back up wisdom when
mine’s too narrowed
by some local concern and I forget how
oceanic
awareness is once it’s disentangled
from the nets
and the starmaps, the flypaper and the
spider webs,
the separatist ego drapes it in like
the bling of a pimp.
Sometimes I walk the rounds of the
whole zodiac
like a nightwatchman holding his hokey
lantern up
like a heart to look into their eyes
through a dark window
into my own soul and see as deeply as I
can
whether their bemused regality is
sitting on
the lower terraces of this Colosseum I
often feel
closing in around me like a slow
garotte,
witness to this blood sport of human
being
against human being, the savagery of
our elaborate sentience.
And I can feel the febrile contagion of
my own vehemence
arising within me like a volcanic vent
at the bottom of the lunar sea of my
subconscious
trying to thrive in the depths of
myself like a species
that’s never been touched by the
light
and I need the vastness, I need the
herbs
of the silence and awe of the
illimitable vastness
to cool the ferocity of the nuclear
wounds
that burn like white phosphorus
marrowed
in the pipe bombs of my bones. I look
beyond the stars
into the huge impersonality of an
eyeless abyss
and its indifference is morphine and
heavy water
to the meltdown in my heart that’s
boiling me alive
in my mother’s milk like the kids by
Capella in Auriga
or another blackhole in the Via
Galactica.
I stop hemorrhaging like a lifeboat in
a bad dream.
I fill in the black hole in my heart
like an avalanche
on the spade of a gravedigger patting
down the earth
with the ironwork of a few words to
help
the medicinal enormity of the
mountainous void
I’m buried in settle into the grave
of its own dark valley
like these hills into the long barrows
and bone-boxes
of the broken birch groves toppled like
the masts
of a ghost fleet caught sleeping in
Cadiz while still in port
like a ruinous victory snatched from
the defeat
of everything it’s highly unlikely
I’ll ever believe in again,
though, of course, I’ll endorse the
probable concourse
of good second guesses it’s necessary
to live your way through
into a solitude you have no doubt has
abandoned you
to your own inner resources as my
mother would say.
I looked for beauty in suffering and
I’ve seen it
clear enough through my tears and the
tears of others
like fireflies breaking through the
night fog
after the storm has passed, haphazard
miracles of light
no one could have anticipated on the
darkest night
of their soul spitting lightning on the
ground
like the downed power-line of a severed
spinal cord
writhing like a wounded snake
unravelling itself
like a Celtic knot in agony not knowing
what to strike at.
I’ve seen the hand of a dying man
reach up
and rest an open palm against the
shoulder of a friend
leaning over him, desperately trying to
staunch
the stars and the roses and their
emergency ladder of thorns
from bleeding out of him like music
from a funeral bell
as if this last human gesture of
farewell said it all
more eloquently than the ageless
silence that followed
his hand sliding down the slope of his
friend’s arm
like the last caress of the
companionable dead
toward the unassuageable dread of the
living
gaping well beyond sorrow into an
emptiness
that’s never been disturbed by a
whisper of eternity or time.
It means what it means. It is what it
is. Fair enough,
as far as it goes, but when does
suffering become a blessing,
how is life exonerated from the pain it
inflicts
upon itself in the name of keeping the
show on the road,
eating its young and old, its best and
worst in the same breath,
death, death, death, death, death, the
erosive pain
of everyday’s little bit less, little
bit less, until we’re
so used to the pervasiveness of what’s
lacking
it seldom occurs to us we’re even
hurt, or anything
is missing though we mourn the more
obvious atrocities
it’s living with a sorrow so
unfathomable, the lachrymae rerum
the tears deep down things like
housewells
of the wounded watersheds where our
spirits
are blunted like swords we lay down
like light
upon our own mindstreams in tribute and
surrender
to why it has to be this way at all, we
can’t explain,
and why, if I can imagine a world
without pain,
awareness without an error of
perception, without damage,
where we progress from bliss to bliss
without
the intervening abyss that shadows us
like sorrow,
where hunger and eating don’t exist
because
they’re neither self-sustainable nor
functional,
because there’s nothing malicious
about chaos,
could not life have evolved so there
was no alternative,
no indispensable right and wrong path
to the proliferant joy
that revels like a starling in the
fountains and the willows
of just being alive with no notion of
mortality
but the ongoing mystery that
perennially
roots and blooms in us like an unknown
wildflower
we keep coming up with names for
according
to the way it changes, interdependently
emanating
out of the same awareness by which we
see it
like that star through the burgundy
branches of the willows
so much closer to me than my eyes are,
it’s rising like a firefly on a wind
like seeing,
like being, that has no within or
without, no gap
between the wonder of its creation and
mine,
as we arc into existence simultaneously
in the context of this prophetic medium
of mind
that remembers yesterday like a future
it never leaves behind.
PATRICK WHITE
