Driving Up To Mayberly
Driving up to Maberly for cheap cigarettes
at the Two Eagles Trading Post
across the highway from Silver Lake,
frost of the night,
mist of the morning lifting
in the blaze of the sun
in the bleach-blue sky
that wheels the reds and oranges,
and the wild, canary, grosbeak yellows
into their complementary hue,
I can't really see the autumn
until my blood stops thinning itself down
to peer through the lenses
of the watercolours in my eyes
and flowing, deeper, darker
turns into fire and paint
and dancing on the funeral pyre
of my last unknown masterpiece
instead of trying to walk on stars,
celebrates the crazy wildness of my solitude
by elaborating a world
I can almost forgive
as I brush myself
off the shoulders of the hills in passing
like a thread of smoke,
a parrot of ash,
a glaze of Prussian blue,
and cry like an arsonist
in an old-growth wilderness
that the trees don't wait for me to burn.
There is a void, an abyss, an emptiness
that wears a human face
in the presence of things everywhere
that are reflected back
in the black mirror of space
as the mystically specific features
of every mineral, plant, and animal
I've ever been.
I'm not just a figure in a landscape
I am the whole of the scene
and even in the shadows
that don't feel like me,
that are sometimes horrid and strange,
intensities of separation in faces
that have fallen far from the tree,
I am the child in the darkness
rooted in a fever of fear
that is slowly learning to trust me.
And it's been like this for years
though memory is just another way
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poem by Patrick White
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