Impoverished Like A Loser With A High IQ
Impoverished like a loser with a high IQ.
It’s a darker discipline than art
to learn to love what you must live.
The aristocratic penury of a poet
who keeps giving it all away
as if generosity were a form of protest
against the sock puppets of common sense
whose mouths move like empty wallets
when they speak of the lives they’re living.
We lived from rented dump to rented dump
and beautified the yards
with gardens we dug
and flowers we stole
from a better neighbourhood six blocks away
until it came time for the landlord to sell them
and we moved on to the next lunar landing
when I was a boy
and maybe that’s why
I’ve always seen things
as temporary ever since.
I give to people as if they knew
what I know
that everything we have
will be taken back soon enough
and you can’t keep what you won’t give away.
Life for example.
Or light. Flowers. Stars. Children. Poems.
More seeds in the autumn
than there are in the spring.
And because I’m so aware of time
I see so much eternity
in their tears and their smiles
everyone always seems to me
myself included
half ghost
and half mystic shadow
of the lucidity they could be for awhile.
I’m always urging brown stars like Jupiter
to shine a little harder
to open the other eye
of its three hundred year old methane hurricane
and greet the sun at midnight
like a peer of shining
that could set carbon and oxygen
on the spiritual path to us
like blind pilgrims on the way
to a shrine of eyes with liberating visions
that are released like doves
to look for land
by people who understand
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poem by Patrick White
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