However Gratified I Am
However gratified I am, always I'm left with a hunger
for something more than I've tasted before
as if my emptiness were not perfect yet and I were
ready to let everything ride on a single throw of my skull
up against the wall just to see what falls out of its own will,
or change my species once in a while. Over-reaching
perhaps, spiritual pleonaxia, something amiss with my heart
or maybe I just don't want to be left behind, resigned
to an expanding universe I can't keep up with.
Things are as they are. It's clear. My mind's a hawk
with the blinders off. I've thawed the diamond.
Enlightenment flows through my heart like electricity.
I'm shining. I don't need a star to find my way home in the dark.
I can look upon the earth demonically.
I can see it through the eyes of the angel.
But the fireflies have taught me all they have to share.
And the lightning looks like a slacker compared
to the discipline I exact from myself just to
shock me out of the old growth forest in my heartwood
like a chainsaw, despite the nails I've hammered into it
like a crucifix without a saviour, an ark without a sail.
Though I've beamed like the full moon out over the harvest
the bounty of life never quite fills me all the way up to the brim.
I'm always a dropp shy of my longing for completion,
as if there were always a crack in the cup I drank from.
And this agony has summoned me for years
from as far back as my beginningless beginnings
like a bell that swings both ways between sex and death
and though I answer it like the s.o.s. of a lapwing
by the time I get there, it's irrevocably gone
as if it were just a ruse that were leading me on.
Deeper into life? Though what I make of it, like the stars,
I make alone? No trysts on the rainbow bridge at midnight?
No god to rejoice in these works of love within me?
No abyss to delight in the sheer absurdity of it?
A gleeman, a jester, a sacred clown, a morose fool,
a mystic, a scholar, a sailor that went down with the ship
just to stay true to the spirit of the storm within me,
an open doorway for the dead to come and go as they please,
an astronomical prodigy, an optician of mirrors and prisms,
a cowboy Zen master who rode into town on a seahorse,
a poet living on the edge of the word that thrives like weeds
around the graves in the cemeteries of the dead metaphors
I'm always digging up like a dog who buried a bone.
A gardener on the moon, an usher of history, a lover
who learned to sing like a martyr in the flames
of a gnostic heresy that gave up all its claims to knowledge,
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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