THERE ARE MEMORIES SEARED INTO MY SOUL
There are memories seared into my soul
like tattoos on the inside of my
eyelids,
starmaps that lost sight of their own
light
a long time ago, still shining in the
dark
with the vaguest of hopes they still
might
illuminate themselves somehow along the
way.
The most intense, when memory is an
event,
not a passive recollection, those that
scorch my seeing
like the Shroud of Turin, or the
Northern Lights,
with images of love that takes the
mundanity
of what wasn’t even noticed at the
time
and makes it burn, God, it burns like a
sunspot
on the heart enflamed by the mystically
sublime
specificity of it forever passing into
oblivion
as if into a fearful dream that
vapourizes my eyes
when I try to follow it into the dark.
My brother and sisters and I getting
ready
for school in the morning, the Beatles
on the radio
singing I Want To Hold Your Hand, and
my mother
wrapping peanut butter and jam
sandwiches
in wax paper, a long board sticking out
of
the woodstove, everyone temperamentally
busy
about something petty and crucial, and
in the air
such a riot of love and hope before
hope came
to be understood as just the
better-mannered upside of despair,
and the energy in the world on those
navy blue mornings
as new and intriguing as we were to it.
Gone.
For good. Once. The fragrance of a
dream.
Did we even exist? I’m lightyears
away and alone now
but it sticks like the koan of a crow
in my throat.
I can write about it, but still, it’s
a paper cut to my heart.
A postcard with no return address from
the edge of nowhere.
Where did we go? Why didn’t we wake
up together
as we always used to like dream figures
grounded like root fires in each
other’s being?
Was I even there, trying to get the
part in my hair right
as my sister squealed to my mother I
was hogging the mirror?
Barely a hair’s breadth of a
wavelength among the stars,
a homely vignette in the vastness of
space
of a happier time, what could it mean
to anything
in the radiant immensities of this
unanswerable abyss
that I should endow this trivial thread
of my unravelling
with the significance of a strong rope
I’m bound to
like an umbilical cord to the rest of
the universe?
Dark mother, explain. Why do the waters
of life
taste of such heartbreaking farewell as
we’re
washed away by them like alluvial
starmud out to sea?
If you saw me now, would you recognize
me
by my shining, like those flowers I
used to steal for you
from the neighbours on the more floral
side of life,
you taught me the names of as you
tamped them into the earth?
Flowers were a good start in life for a
thief of fire
who worked his way up like a cat
burglar
into stealing stars through an open
window
in the houses of the zodiac when their
lights went out.
The white lettering on the blue Evening
in Paris
bottles of perfume I used to buy for
you
will always remind me of the nebular
Pleiades,
or the star clusters of wild asters
tangled in September grass,
but, mother, my heart aches to know
where it all goes at last.
Does it all go down into the basement
with you
and get stored in one of six steamer
trunks
like the alabaster gravegoods of a
regal woman
for a better afterlife than this one to
come?
Mother, am I stuck like a star to the
flypaper
of the human condition, or is my genome
a starmap of fireflies trying to see
where I’m going
by the light you gave me to go by? Why
do I want to cry like a telescope when
I see
what a beautiful constellation we made
back then,
you, the habitable planet, and we, your
shepherd moons,
and the myths of origin we all shared
with you
around the same woodstove on cold
nights
when you burned the couch and the
kitchen chairs
to keep us warm in your presence like
books and bread,
and then time, like a bluejay, gouges
the eyes
of the sunflowers out, seed by seed,
the teeth
of prophetic skulls, as if we were born
to see the light a moment, flower and
be happy
and then go blind before the forbidden
vision
shows us how the darkness shines beyond
us
like a star in an eyeless state of
radiant grace.
PATRICK WHITE
