I DON’T SQUANDER MY TIME SEEKING OUT
DESIGN FLAWS IN CHAOS
I don’t squander my time seeking out
design flaws in chaos.
I celebrate the intelligent randomness
of a creative universe
predicated on the spontaneity of the
copulative verb
that never interfered in my being here
in the first place.
I don’t make a precedent out of the
missing links
in my ancestral antecedents. Nothing
remotely dynastic
about a periphrastic genome talking
like evolution
in its sleep, tinkering with the
alphabet blocks
of the dream grammars of Ugarit in the
penumbrally
dark ages of forgetting I ever knew how
to write.
I don’t make totem-poles, obelisks or
imperial columns
with wrap around plaster and bandages
of flypaper
commemorating the victors of mummified
wars
to impress wax and clay, flesh and
blood,
with the cuneiform scars of
spray-bombed graffiti
on the empty cattle cars sent to
relocate
subjugate mother tongues in the full
stop
at the end of the tracks that run on
time
like Mussolini hanging by his heels
from a lamp post,
pendulous as his place in history, or a
periodic sentence
that gets around like a mindstream, not
a highway,
through the shadows and the moonlight
in the woods at night
circling back on itself to throw its
pursuers off its trail
like the sixth patriarch of Zen,
pointing out,
there’s no need to enlighten your
mindlessness
because when you take nothing from
nothing,
robe or begging bowl from nothing, the
sum remains
nothing missing from zero, no gap
between the arrow
and the target, broken or in free
flight, lame
in the Bolshoi Ballet, or faster than
the speed of gravity.
You have to go a long way to discover
your childhood
never left home, you’re looping
backwards
into the indolent youth, alone on the
rock of his thought
trying to imagine how he ever got to be
you.
I’m making retrograde progress
through all the stations of life
I passed through on my way back here
like a prodigal stranger
on a homeless road to nowhere I’ve
ever been before
like a snake that takes the omega of
its tail
in the alpha of its mouth, so the first
sacred syllable
it utters is the last it will mutter on
its deathbed,
unborn, unperishing, so no one can tell
where things
begin and where they end, as you climb
up
this ladder of thresholds out of the
blackhole
it’s scary for the light to be buried
in implausibly alive.
Everybody’s trying to survive the
gift of life
they’ve been given to make their way
in the world
like an object lesson to those who
refuse to listen.
I practise an offroad discipline of
disobedience
in the wake of this compass leg of my
journey
trying to walk like crutches on a
runway of water
I’m trying to take off from like a
ring-necked loon
that doesn’t care if you understand
why you’re arrested
by the fading echoes of its lonely
ululations or not.
The picture-music is empowered by the
suffering in a voice
that estranges thought like a misfit at
its own funeral.
If you’re not reading the chapbooks
of the butterflies
as sensitive as the pistils and stamens
of the wild poppies
with scarlet letters on their
foreheads, like a mad man
that doesn’t give a damn about poetic
reputations
getting in the way of a more intimate
love affair
with the elusive truth that’s never
signed a loveletter
that couldn’t be denied in public,
you’re still illiterate.
You’re etching runes on your eyes
like the striations
of glacial glassware you were as afraid
in the ice-ages
to smash up against the cave wall like
a prophetic skull
you were drinking from to celebrate the
grand opening
of your spiritual fingerpaintings
trying to identify
the vague nature of the in you’ve got
with God
like the candelabra of a handprint
anyone
can see right through like an
artificial third eye at first glance
as you are now looking for a meaning
that doesn’t
dance on your grave like a troupe of
wildflowers
you never asked to sweep you off your
feet.
You never learned to sit down on the
ground
under the shedding leaves of your
perfectly bound books
and have a good laugh at the idiocy of
your insights
into the nature of a life that doesn’t
exist except
as a surrealistic circus tour of sacred
clowns
practising their priestcraft like
mendicant monks on the road.
Back to the robe. Back to the begging
bowl.
And even if you’ve got it all
together, I defy you to lift it
like your head off the pillow of the
deathbed
you’re dreaming on like a frog on a
stone lotus
trying to make a big splash in this
belly-flopping pond
of a world that exalts itself like a
pearl diver
in high places it takes a lifetime to
climb up to
before you plunge into an oyster bed on
the moon
that’s always been tight-lipped about
the secrets
you can pry out of her like birthmarks
slashed
across her delicate, thin-skinned
wrists by
the shuck and jive of the knife you’re
using on her smile
like the optical illusion of your
bifurcated consciousness.
Try another lens. A gravitational eye
at the far end
of your telescope that bends the light
in aberrant conformity
with the radical departure of your own
seeing
off the beaten path of less wayfaring
moonbeams
so you don’t ending up telling me the
way it seems
is only the proxy appearance of an
understudy standing in
like a deathmask for the way it is when
everywhere you look
is opening night for the imagination
playing tricks on the mind
on the streetcorner of Gore and the
Universe
when every step of the journey that
doesn’t leave home
like starlight, is another yellow
stripe down the spine
of a crosswalk of freshly painted
thresholds like dance steps
waiting for the lights to change from
red to green
as if autumn got a leg up on the turn,
counterturn
of the strophic epodes of the spring
waltzing with the wind
like willows in the gowns of a Viennese
ballroom
under the imperial chandeliers of
falling stars
you can put in your pocket like chump
change
and save for a rainy day as if life
didn’t depend
upon its own extravagance to survive
the famine of metaphors in the lean
lightyears
of your face-painted eyes with their
glass blown tears.
Shakespeare: would he had cut a
thousand lines
playing midwife with his own umbilical
cords.
Mozart: too many notes, too many birds
in the tree
celebrating the dawn spontaneously all
at once.
Butterflies: no end of the books and
canvases
displayed in the rogue galleries of the
oyamel forests
of the Yucatan, sustained by the manna
of milkweed
in the long exodus across the chemical
deserts
of North America like a promise made
and broken
then swept under the quota of prayer
rugs like a price tag.
PATRICK WHITE
