I've Gone Somewhere
I've gone somewhere
wherever this is,
and I don't know how
the roads I knotted to mark the way back
came undone
like a bagful of snakes,
like lightning in a cloud,
ribbons of fire
leaping like wolves
from ripples of wood,
all the targets
stumps of charcoal
in the ashes of the arrows.
I can breathe the whole universe in
with a single breath
and let it out again just as easily.
There are bells in my blood so heavy
they feel like iron oxen
grinding their teeth in the void.
And I am hurt inexplicably
and lonelier than dust in the rain,
and my heart is an apple of wounded magma
pared like the phases of the moon,
and I am trying
to evaporate graciously in my solitude
like a ghost exhaled by a lake
so that no one notices I am gone,
but I keep sinking like a continent
bored with advanced civilizations,
the big bang as flat as the cosmic sigh
when life is nothing more
than the afterbirth
of a hydrocephalic with a hangover
as it seems when I stand
like a winter branch at the deserted window
and peer through the cold clarity of glass
as if the world were no more
than the sediment of time,
the lees of the wine,
the mud of a puddle in turmoil,
the wind shredding
the tree on the moon
with a chainsaw of waves,
the thought brides of an interminable severance
that falls like snow
on the grounded wings of the pine.
I'm trying on coffins like shoes
that won't blister like sunspots
on the heels of the sun;
I am coronated like an eclipse
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poem by Patrick White
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