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Empty-handed I Come

Empty-handed I come; empty-handed I go.
The road has no name.
The destination doesn't exist yet.
By my side, no one. Little bird, you want to drink
from the dragon's chalice, but faces from now
I will not know you; the mirror
will not breathe. Unlovable, strange, some
warrior mystic under an expanding sky
where the stars move further and further apart
I hammer swords of light out
on the igneous anvil of my heart
folding the metal
like the first edition of a holy book until the edge
draws blood from space
with a slash of lethal intelligence.
The clowns of God are rehearsing for a play like this
and you have your lives, your disgraces to live;
your clock of lies that says
it's always a lonely time to forgive. Now and here, never
anyone or anything, all objects turned to thought;
ahead, the eerie seduction of living for nothing
and all behind, the auroral dispensation of delusion.
Did you do well? Did you do poorly?
Are you clad in the rags or robes of life?
Is your mind wired to lightning
or are you just another flake of heat in the desert;
a gesture of extremes, hallucinating?
I've never liked people much; they
bruise the eye of the wine
and keep the flowers of night in a straitjacket.
They don't know how to take themselves seriously,
mistaking maggots for magi. Their diamonds
don't flow; across the streams of their being
they build dams out of crutches, houses of God
out of the bones of the ethnically cleansed.
Their children sit at the feet of eggs
giving lectures on the perils of flight. Offered wings
they cling to their fear of heights
and dread death like a crack in the sky.
I'll take the hawk over the barnyard every time;
the wolf over the house-broken dog, I will not
masticate shadows in a well-trained field.
I may be only a dropp of blood
hanging from the horn of the moon, a nail
of salamander gold regenerated in the fire
to plank a leper's coffin, all my work, the invention of the wheel
for birds, a leader that follows, always a needle off north.
I would rather see what the widow sees
in the petty eyes of her beloved
when he's laid out in the living-room
like a gambling debt even death couldn't pay.
I would rather be impaled in hell
on the tip of an eyelash of true insight
than wobble my way through this gallery
for the blind
begging donations from the light. Let those
who have gerrymandered their minds
into emergency wards for the heart receive
silos of what they've sown, seven years
of lean and fat
and a mini-series of death certificates
notarized by a grave-digger
taking invitations at the door. I would rather
rage like a pagan wind in the orchard of my own face
than to have even the slightest of my solitudes
whisper one word of falsehood
at this trial of seeing. Let the dead give witness,
let the blind swear, the ignorant insist,
the cripples lie and the cowards balance; still
you will be sentenced
by a knock on the door in the silence; still
you'll expire like a parking meter
or a pensioned saint
on the way to paradise, mermaids in the wave,
maggots in the rose.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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