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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476925" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Morning After Everything</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">for Luke Cochrane</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Saturday morning rain in Perth <br>and things seem as intimately far off and strange <br>as the new maps of water running down the windowpane. <br>No birds on the black boughs of the November trees <br>and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot<br>and on the other side of me <br>the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church<br>that looks better in the nicotine lingerie <br>and dusky seaspray <br>of a single yellow floodlight at night<br>that can't get it up to be a lighthouse.<br>It would be a lie to say that I'm not in love <br>and happily alone, but I most wistfully am, <br>as I excuse myself for being me <br>and put myself off like the small death of another way <br>I could have taken to get back home, but didn't. <br>November's an orphanage after the last kid has left <br>and I'm sure there's an ancient chthonic wisdom <br>under the duff and detritus <br>of all these slick, leechy leaves<br>that the earth has applied to herself like a poultice <br>to draw the violets and worms out in spring, <br>but right now my mouth is not a wound <br>with anything deep to say<br>about things too deep to be said<br>and there are memories of women and friends in my head <br>sleeping like keys in the bottom of a drawer <br>that I have saved for when the day comes<br>to open the flowers and doors <br>that I've forgotten, <br>all the soft sorrows that rime the radiance<br>of the halo around a black hole <br>haunted by these ghosts of light. <br>I am absorbed like tears in a tenderness of grey <br>and there's more healing than thorn <br>in the cool aloe of the air <br>moist with a seance of emotions <br>that gust lightly around me<br>as if yesterday were merely a fragrance <br>hovering over an eye of wine <br>like the dust and smoke of today<br>that bottles its purity like water. <br>Sometimes love passes like a glacier over you <br>and there are runes and scars and striations on your skin <br>and lakes and craters and eyes the sky fills in <br>and the sun comes out like an exorcist <br>and you feel like you've been baptized in ice <br>or tucked into the crevice of a wailing wall <br>like a baby mammoth, or an unanswered prayer<br>and you try not to care <br>that you're a freak of your own evolution<br>trying to clone yourself out of the museum into a zoo<br>and that all these people are staring at you <br>like a missing link between the parentheses of your tusks<br>that have unhinged you from the gate of time <br>you once swung on like your next breath, <br>and if you were asked about the extremes of mercy <br>you would say, without hesitation, death.<br>Sometimes it's that hard to accept <br>that nothing that happens here, including death<br>is ever over, and that the absence of something or someone<br>doesn't mean they've ceased to exist<br>like footprints that lead down to a river. <br>Because we all live the same beginningless beginning<br>that is the once and forever of this universe<br>even if it should call itself home occasionally like an eye, <br>we go on living and dying each other alone<br>like an extinct species always asking the time <br>when the moonlight burns like lime in a grave<br>and then, once more, absurdly never the same <br>riots of flying fish leap from every dropp of rain <br>that remembers the passion of the wave <br>offering itself in the life of every moment<br>like a jewel thawing, or an icecap over the eye <br>or the opening of a brittle window<br>to be scoped out by the nightwind <br>that longs like a thief for the sea<br>to gather him up like one of its belongings.<br>But you can't pour the universe out of the universe <br>where the whole is sustained by every part <br>anymore than you can empty the human heart <br>that is renewed by its own exhaustion like a tide. <br>Time is always prelude <br>and death has never known when<br>to take down its sail like a tree in the fall.<br>And because things are never the same twice <br>and the road back is not the road taken <br>the world and everyone in it <br>just as they are, have always been here.<br>Things don't come and go<br>like migrating geese ascending southward out of a field, <br>or things fallen returning to their leaves<br>because there's nowhere to come from <br>nowhere to go to <br>that isn't now and here<br>as intimately far as it is impersonally near.<br>Ask almost anyone who they are <br>and they'll look down a well in a mirage<br>to haul up their reflection on a wheel <br>and insist it's real<br>when they ladle their face to their lips<br>like the moon on dark water. <br>Or they'll tell you a story around an unending fire <br>where the shadows are always truer than the flames <br>and the most illuminating themes burn like stars without names.<br>Mind is space and there is <br>nowhere inside or outside of anything <br>that is closer or futher than anything else<br>because everything is mind as far as you can be.<br>So I can stand here in my lengthening shadow <br>like a long departure<br>turning into the wind like a sail or a sundial<br>as if I were the last of my species of eclipse<br>and life were merely the long, hard discipline <br>of unmastering the art<br>of saying hello to the living <br>and good-bye to the dead, <br>or turning the telescope around <br>and saying good-bye to the living, <br>hello to the dead as I please, <br>but I'd rather shed myself <br>like all these falling maps to anywhere<br>that once arrived like the fleets of the leaves like me<br>on the shores of this rootless tree<br>that doesn't let go of things for its own survival <br>but lives in itself like a stranger come<br>to the opening gate of an endless arrival.<br>I let the birds come and go, the apples fall, <br>the stars build their webs in my crown, <br>and grow like a holy road I take as my own, <br>like geese passing overhead at night, <br>or the small birds that come to me like voices <br>a moment here then gone <br>who taught me that it's always dawn <br>because there's no end of the beginningless beginning<br>and it may be a green bough <br>or a dead branch <br>you hop up and down on like the hidden notes <br>of something you're singing<br>on the rungs of these crazy snakes and ladders<br>that long like flesh and bone in the night<br>for things they can't see anymore in the light, <br>or fish dying of thirst in a fathomless pond <br>or a fire putting itself out in its own eye<br>or someone dying and someone else asking why <br>and the whole of creation left alone at home <br>feeling it doesn't belong under its own sky<br>like this Saturday morning rain in Perth<br>the day after your death<br>that falls like a loveletter too late upon the earth<br>or the harvest moon of a delinquent heart <br>above an untimely skeleton<br>that can't decide whether it's a tuning fork <br>or a witching wand <br>looking for answers like water<br>under every stone on the moon, <br>the way we cry for people we think are gone, <br>but green bough, dead branch, Luke, same song.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476925" data-title="The Morning After Everything de Patrick White" data-description="for Luke Cochrane

Saturday morning rain in Perth 
and things seem as intimately far off and strange 
as the new maps of water running down the windowpane. 
No birds on the black boughs of the November trees 
and black mirrors in the empty funeral..."></div>
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