So Crazy At Times I'm Exiled From My Solitude
So crazy at times I'm exiled from my solitude.
I disguise my madness as the excruciating discipline
of beading the stars into a lifemask I can wear
like a constellation of fireflies that never arises
the same sign twice. Among all these myriads of me,
not one with an identity I can isolate monadically
and say, see, I'm indefensibly this mystically specific human.
I have an ontological address, and these are my doors,
my stairs, my floors and windows, my local habitation
and a name as the bard suggests. Whatever my magnitude
I've got a place on the starmap. I'm grounded like a garden
in being. The hummingbird thrums sacred syllables
into the ears of the hollyhocks, aum mani padme aum,
the jewel in the lotus, and the crow caws like a black mass,
but even when I walk through the cemetery
up on Drummond Road, looking for a gravestone
with the future of my name on it to prove that I existed once
to suffer the same dissolution as everyone else,
none of the voices I hear like starlings in the elms
are my own. And altogether the dead echo: not here, not here.
Everyone seems to have a God-particle they cling to for mass,
but I've been bubbling up for light years in one universe
after another, and I'm more vaporous than solid,
and even when I morphologically assume what I take to be,
briefly, the true shape of my shifty universe just
to get along or belong to all my friends with backbones like rafters,
it's only a provisional scaffolding I climb up on like monkey-bars
to paint the latest theory of my myth of origins.
Am I a sum of destructions, God's Own Zero,
or a creative deficit of cosmic proportions in debtor's prison?
Have I run out of afterlives, broken the continuum,
or is this one just unborn without a beginning
though there's no end of dying behind or ahead of me?
Subjective idealism, the slippery slope to solipsism,
the shadowy puppet theater of my own imaginative projections,
the mind only intuition of Vishnabandu,
the vehicular autobiography of the road not taken,
no bed in the shelter of the Shepherds of Good Hope
to lay my head down on like the rock of the world
to dream of what I could have been if I'd found a self
I could take seriously. Not life in a palace, but even
a tent I could carry around with me like my homelessness,
or a deer bed of cool nocturnal grass, a crude crop circle
under a broad-leafed basswood tree to say where I slept last night
on my way to somewhere else like the stations of a crossroads
where I can dance my way honestly like a Sufi
into annihilations of anti-matter in a charged particle field
reversing my spin. But there's no particle at the end
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
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