BEEN DOWN THIS ROAD SO LONG
Been down this road so long
don’t even know what I’m looking
for anymore,
if anything other than the way it is.
Set out to find something, be someone
and found I was the journey itself.
Passage, my destination. Always
just in time to say farewell to my
arrival.
The still point of a black hole
in the gravitational eye of my
awareness,
change and change again the most
stable foundation stone of my
continuum,
it’s like the wind talking to the
night stream
in whispers of moonlight that take
possession of my mind and voice for a
moment
as if something prodigious moved
on a far hillside and you couldn’t
help be all ears.
Life of the Mind. Function or Source.
Light or lantern, or inseparable
bodymind
reflected on its own waters, or
the optical illusion of a dream
grammar,
a cosmic tweaking of God-particles
in the third eye of a hurricane of
stars
like a mirage in a sandstorm the
washerwomen
in your eyes rinse out in tears after
beating your brains against the
moonrocks
wonder keeps bringing back from your
heart,
convinced there are hidden jewels of
insight
in the ore. Even the way you’re weary
of thinking
is perpetually new as a patina of
light,
constellations of fireflies holding
their lamps above
the ancient loveletters of the
waterlilies
renewing their virginity as they’re
writing
to the stars. Who knows what it means?
Don’t trouble yourself. Make one up
of your own
like a bored artist trying to paint
picture-music
on the shield wall of plywood boards
around a construction site with siege
equipment.
You set out on a grailquest to discover
the meaning of life, and it’s a bad
hangover
when you drink from your own skull,
and the next night, you’re drunk,
dancing
around a fire with the life of meaning
and briefly
you know for certain that mind is
inexhaustibly more
than a ghost dance of the flesh longing
like a marriage bed to be crucially
urgent
with desire again as a distraction from
the pain
of remembering people and things as
unattainable
as their memories unavailably lost
forever
in the abysmal solitude of an
indefensible human
listening with her heart to the
irrevocable echoes of time.
Songs for the nightbirds. Sad music of
the mind
putting shadows like treble-clefs and
semi-quavers
to the riffs of a widowed guitar proud
of its scars
as if that were proof what it sings of
sorrow
can be believed like words that silence
the heart.
PATRICK WHITE
