MORE PURPOSE IN THE ABSURDITY OF
SHADOWING YOUR DREAMS
More purpose in the absurdity of
shadowing your dreams
like a star you vowed to be true to, a
small candle of love
buffeted like a starling in a hurricane
off path as is
the way of the heart, without going
out---off course, lost,
but burning nonetheless like a daylily
in a drainage ditch
beside the road that’s taking you on
a firewalk among the stars
the long way home, less reason to
despair of ever
finding a meaning in life that
transcends the banality
of common sense with the longing of a
nightbird
for immeasurable joy in the hunger of
the fire that consumes it
without destroying the mystery in the
irrationality of its song.
You want to burn. Not burn out like the
infirm heart
of a waterclock that goes on forever
with or without you
as if you were always drumming for rain
to hide your tears.
Water-sylph, mistress of mirrors, muse,
you who whisper
ecstatic clouds of silver insects into
the dusk not
in the likeness of life, but life
itself, as the starmaps
of the nocturnal waterlilies put their
blooming to good use
like a lost expedition of cartographers
trying to find themselves,
it’s too late in the day to betray
what I’ve loved most
about my life, not so much to add my
say
to the white noise of literature, but
to listen deeply
to the voices that emanate out of the
heart of the things of the earth
as if there were always something
beguiling to celebrate,
an intelligence fascinated by its own
awareness of being alive
like a river, a rock, a star, a tree,
to wonder like a watershed why.
Even in the midst of my most private
sorrows,
the light’s been a shapeshifting
glassblower that made
crystal skulls of my tears I could look
into like the eyes of an oracle
and see the sun and the moon still
shining
after the flower wrecking thunderstorm
passed over the hills
and the sun drenched the dishevelled
willows in gold
and the fireflies came out from under
their leaves
as the stars from under their eyelids
no longer dulled
like a patina of time on the newly
washed air
but clear-eyed and shining like a
chandelier at a waltz
not a sword hanging over my head should
I speak false.
Ask anything from a god to a grosbeak
for instruction
and they’ll relate to you
didactically as a matter of course
as if you were listening like a
sympathetic jury at your own trial
to the immorality of the facts that
have been brought forth
but pay less attention to what you’ve
got to say in your own defence
and nature will respond to your
petition for disclosure of the evidence
lyrically. Ask God who you are. Who she
is. And she’ll
start singing to herself as if you
reminded her of a song
she used to know when she was a girl
growing up like Helen
beside the banks of the Eurotas, like
Isis who hides her face
out in the open like a veil of space no
one’s ever going to lift
like a hundred billion stars shining
eye to eye with you
as if you were the last place you’d
expect anyone to look for her.
And, yes, it’s all been lived and
felt and said before, but not by you,
not by the mystic specificity of the
supranoumenal persona
that lives like a singularity in the
black hole
of your insatiable, light-eating,
star-swallowing soul
that occasionally loses its appetite
for insight
like a blue whale for krill, or the
moon for marine life.
Estranged as an undertaker at your own
wedding,
or Joan of Arc in the blissed out ashes
of a martyr’s urn,
dragon or firefly, prince of the pent
house or Jedi in a hovel,
ploughed under like the archival
middens of the popular demotic
or stutter like an accent through
purple passages of linear B
there’s a mermaid sitting on the
skull of Devil’s Rock in everyone
and she’s been singing like Love
Potion Number Nine among the muses
for you, in particular, to shipwreck
yourself on the eerie sadness
that haunts her song like the foghorn
of your own voice
lost like a ghost at sea, passionately
annihilated
by an attachment to the picture-music
of your own imagination
that is no less of a Buddha activity
than letting go
of enlightenment as the beginning of
something delusional.
Factor the errors back into your
perception the way
the earth receives the dead without
disappointment or remorse,
knowing they will sweeten the roots of
tomorrow’s flowering.
Follow your own river like a siren to
the source
as if for once you were listening to
good advice
and wary as you are of the repetitious
side-effects
of going mad without fulfilling a
fictitious purpose in life
rejoice in the clairvoyance of going
with the flow
of your own mindstream, knowing that
none
of the death masks in that collection
of mistakes
you keep inter-reflectively projecting
on the waters of life
ever gets to wear the same bare-faced
lie twice.
PATRICK WHITE
