What Chains We Rattle
WHAT CHAINS WE RATTLE
What chains we rattle in our own emptiness.
The void gnashes its teeth to dust. Is there love
Anywhere that I'm worthy of?
I want to scream in this straitjacket of anti-matter
but you are not here; your person is absent;
so I scream into this paper ear;
I abandon my own blood, turn red white
in my fear of losing you, witnessing your anger,
the small glaciers that inch through my heart
like ice-ages. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm old,
maybe I'm burnt out, maybe all these words
I throw at you mean absolutely nothing to you
or to anyone else, or even me, but there you have it.
I'm sloughing my old skin like a star-riddled universe
and I don't know what I'm turning into.
When I want to know who I am I look at your face.
Lately I've felt like some kind of eclipse, some darkness
growing like fungus on the light. A leper in sunshine.
Am I broken glass; the black mirror, shattered? I mistake you
often; looking for you in every shard and splinter of my being
but the shadows are too young to give birth to stars
and you can't seem to give me the reassurance I need
to return the moon to the goblet it fell from.
It's not so much that I doubt you but that
the affirmations that should be anvils under the burning swords
crumble under the hammer-blows of the heart.
There is no fire in the answers; only the hiss
of metal cooling in black water. Now maybe I'm gone forever
and maybe you're some bridge collapsing under its own weight
and we're both acting too indignant to be honest,
but I feel a hole in me the size of darkness
and a silence that dreams like God. Are you still there; am I?
Have I woken up without you?
Burn for me, baby; fire all these love-crossed stars up
and let me see you shining and naked on the nightwatch.
I'm tired of issuing all these secret passwords
to an army of spies scrambling clarity in a coding machine.
Perhaps I'm not clear myself or haven't done or said it right,
or there are lies standing-by like unfueled flights to nowhere,
but I feel like my heart's been through a paper-shredder
and there are foreign troops entering the office with orders
to exterminate anyone not already in pieces
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poem by Patrick White
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