I WOULD MISS YOU IF YOU WEREN’T SO DEEP INSIDE I would miss you if you weren’t so deep inside. I would send the fireflies out like a search party to beat the bushes and the stumps to see where you hide were you not the stars within that lead me home. I would cry out in anger and tears, World, you are not fair, were you not the mystic intimate of my indignation. I would look upon the illuminated world thriving in its garden, and accuse the sun of being blind did I not see more in your eclipse, the abundance of your darkness, than I do by the vacant light of day. Let others bathe like birds in the fountainmouths of happier lyrics, I drown in your watershed, a starfish on the moon, and the darkness shines like a nightsea the colour of your eyes. And there’s a sky full of shipwrecked constellations without lifeboats that went down into fathomless time with all hands on board like a cargo of bones that reached its destination by giving them all up to you, like yarrow sticks to the Book of Changes, whether you read them as such or not. Nine in the fifth place. Enlightenment in hell. I am the nightwatchman with the moon for a lantern that strikes the bell of his heart three times and says all is well, all is well on the bottom of the sea. I would be planting supernovas like a terrorist with i.e.d.s in the Milky Way by now to add to the chaos were you not the black hole of a galactic inspiration that’s mastered me like a magic latent in the heart to burn the sum of all my destructions in a blaze of insight by which the light is known to the light, the way a tree is by a breeze, or ashes know the fire’s out. How could I reach out to you except with your own hands? How could I speak to you in any way you’d understand did not your voice coax the words from my mouth like a dream grammar of sacred syllables betokening the things of the earth like the echo of a prayer we forgot? Too intimate to be the principle of anything and yet your impersonality can only be approached with tenderness, like a feather floating through space, or the cloud that grounds the mountain like the cornerstone of a temple to the emptiness it floats upon. Were you not the valley my grieving shadow wanders through like the lachrymose theme of another lonely psalm trying to palm itself off as poem, how could the eagles shriek eureka in the heights at the very next insight into the nature of your vulnerability moving down below? We might both dance to the same music as if it were true, but you’re the silent witness when I listen to the wind, you’re the charmed locket of darkness the light conceals, you’re the secret jewel that’s wholly transparent to all the eyes in the universe that have spent their lives looking for you like a sky that’s been hidden from sight right over their heads and under their feet like an atmosphere and ocean that never left the moon. Even here on earth, the silver fish are frenzied in your tide. Lunar horses graze like waves on your seagrass and run wild when you spook them like an ocean with a bit in your hands, and the look of an angry teacher. If your absence were not deeper than my solitude how could I resist the consolations of oblivion and carry on as if I’d never missed you? Who would I long for to affirm my presence in this emptiness that engulfs me like an eye with something in it like a star that can’t be washed out? I was not born a warrior to surrender to anyone less than you. I do not open my heart and my mouth to sing lullabies to houseflies growing dozy on the windowsills as the cold comes on like the sheet music of ice. Who would I dedicate the works of my nightshift to like the journal of a dark demon writing to himself about the spiritual intricacies of jumping from paradise just to meet you naked in the garden again as if we were born to be exiled together by the pain that is visited like swarms of killer bees upon those who break taboos like white canes over our knees and throw their cornerstones around like dice to entice blind luck into taking a chance on their disobedience? Who would inherit the crazy wisdom of my human divinity if I did not know how many lives you’ll outlive me like the randomness of an alibi based upon a truth that reprieves everyone from death on desolation row by undermining the limits of our culpability with compassion. You, the sorceress of meaning, you, the beast mistress of my savage emotions, you, the fire sylph at the hearth of my homeless wandering into these evictions of self that bury the days with no names on their graves. You shake the lightning like a spear of fury in a lion’s skull. You wake the dragon from its dream of lotus fire You touch me on a night when nothing else will as if I were real, and the solidity of my atoms sublimates like a ghost of dry ice into a mirage in space so I could see in the grand paradigm of things even the most enduring pyramids in a desert are the work of the wind when the mind is inspired to move things around like the grave goods of the heart in the hands of a tomb robber that frees us of them to travel light without baggage through the gates of Orion. The past has no need of any other afterlife than the present nor the future the prelude of a promise of better things to come. Born into a life with a ferocious childhood for an introduction, I have grown young again in the ashes of those fires, like a skin transplant of flowers over a burnt face to hide the scars, and give the stars some space. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 22:46:58 +0000