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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=477008" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>What Did You See Just Before You Committed Suicide?</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">in memory of Heidi Clow</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What did you see just before you committed suicide? <br>Did the snake mesmerize the bird that used to sing inside <br>your rib cage, turn it to stone, dis the lyrics of its song <br>with a cosmic hiss that underwhelmed all other sound? <br>Did you die from the inside out or the outside in? <br>Was there a light that summoned you to the end of the tunnel <br>like candles on the hillsides of Blue Skies, or did you<br>step out on stage in the glare of a bare lightbulb <br>in an interrogation room where you finally answered <br>what you were keeping secret from yourself? I won't ask you <br>to forgive the candour of this if it's cruel. I've been <br>the kind of demonic fool the earth opens up <br>and swallows from time to time, so I know <br>death has its jewels as well as life and when the dark energy <br>expands your eyes like space, you can see them shine<br>like wolf's eyes in the black mirror of a midnight lake.<br> <br>And I've always found the brightest diamonds of clarity <br>that could cut through everything like the clear light of the void<br>in the darkest, deepest diamond mines of my igneous soul.<br>And I remember the cotton candy clouds of the pink angels<br>before I jumped from paradise, but that was so many shrouds ago <br>I've learned to keep my fire at a distance from inflammable hair-dos<br>that have been backcombed and hairsprayed too much. <br>I don't graft a crutch to the tree of knowledge <br>and expect it to bloom. And even when the moon blossoms <br>on the dead branch, what fruit ever comes of it? </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I don't think you ever liked me much, but if push <br>had ever come to shove I would have thrown my weight <br>like the mass of a black hole on your side of the argument. <br>My heart was too much of a stump to efoliate <br>in the fires of spring and I was autumns away <br>from the gates of the garden you brought to the door <br>with flaming angels and untempered swords <br>that weren't hard enough to fall upon yet, <br>but you were in love with my room mate for awhile <br>and I gave up my studio to the two of you<br>so you could both work the guile and wile and style<br>of your respective arts like alchemical spells upon each other<br>while I retired to the living room like a benign sunset <br>with a smile on its face over the darkening hills<br>to re-read Spengler's Decline of the West <br>intrigued like a ghost at a seminar-seance <br>by the morphology of knowledge forms based on metaphors.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I remember you coming over once, <br>bombed on Fireball Whiskey, grabbing the neck <br>of the half-finished bottle like an unexploded artillery shell<br>and falling backwards over a table into a large rubber plant <br>as you collapsed like a laughing inferno that bounced back <br>in adolescent tears as we picked you up like a circus tent <br>or an emergency parachute that didn't open in time, <br>covered in potting soil, as you apologized over-crucially <br>about the slashes and striations that scored a painting of mine<br>I finally repaired years later with scars of pthalo blue after you died. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I thought of you as a high wire act on your spinal cord that night<br>as I mixed the luminosity and values of the hues<br>on a palette that seemed like a small, sacrificial altar to you <br>of my grief and affection in the crazy wisdom of a human insight<br>into the nature of the tragic follies of love and life and how <br>we endear loss to ourselves like wounds, like graves, like flowers <br>we inflict upon the heart in such a way they'll never close<br>because the sorrow is what binds you to us <br>like a rose to the thorns in our bloodstream.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then all your friends came over in a squall of concern <br>as Spengler and I went and stood by the large bay windows<br>and looked out into a vast night we knew we'd never understand<br>as you poured your beauty and passion, darkness and doubts <br>out on the couch in a flashflood of tears and alcohol, realization and laughter. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Only ever saw you in passing after that and sometimes <br>you'd say hello back and sometimes you wouldn't<br>as you seemed embedded in some kind of tempestuous trance <br>oblivious to the world as you danced around your own fire<br>deep inside, though I never thought it was any of my business<br>to guess what it was you were praying for or whether <br>you were firewalking a warpath into the military as I later <br>heard you did and thought how strange that such a dancer<br>should want to learn to march and even Spengler didn't have an answer. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Or I'd watch you from the Perth Restaurant, strutting your stuff <br>up Gore Street like a model on a runway, range-finding <br>the effects of your cosmetics and high heels and auburn hair <br>on an encampment of your boyfriends absent without leave. <br>But I never saw you, rare for the young women of this town, <br>being led around by a donkey like an eagle on a leash<br>and by that I knew the intensity of your vulnerable independence<br>and the savage innocence of a passionate heart in the wilderness. <br>Then, I forget who told me, but in a single sentence, you were dead.<br>An ice storm had shattered the rose like a crashing chandelier <br>and blunted all its thorns like those stilettoes you used to wear<br>The dance, the strut, the march was over. Late frost <br>on an early metaphor for the springtime coming into its prime.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>But I need to know, when you fell into the black hole <br>did it turn into the fountainmouth of a white one on the other side <br>of a whole new universe that hadn't grown as old and blind as this one? <br>Teach me the signs so I can rearrange the stars in time <br>like new astrolabes and starmaps to keep the Milky Way <br>from turning into the Great Barrier Reef that rips the hull <br>out of the lifeboat of the moon as it passes over <br>the brain coral and starmud of other shipwrecked minds<br>that put to sea looking for salvation in the oceans of the rose <br>only to return like salvage from the storm washed up <br>on these isolated shores of haunted islands in the mindstream. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Unborn, unperishing, I believe we're all here indelibly<br>because you can't pour the universe out of the universe<br>or where's it going to go, and since the whole is in every part, <br>that includes you and I and everyone in one way or another <br>eternally. Is it so, Heidi? Do we move like waterclocks<br>from world to world, our eyes evaporate into the light <br>because whatever form we take, fireflies or lightning, <br>we are, perennially, the shining of our own unique insight<br>by which the light is known by the light we cast upon it? </div><div style="margin:10px 0">That we're the light by which the stars are known<br>and those immensities in which we hold them deep inside, <br>as now we do you who have added yourself to the whole <br>so expansively we must grow like space to keep up with you<br>and the way we humanize the unknown, as the stars do <br>like lanterns entering a dark room, is to embrace it as intimately <br>as you have like the available dimension of a future <br>we've all been moving into like supernovas and galaxies <br>from the beginningless beginning of all things, tomorrow <br>like yesterday, here, now, as you are, and have always been <br>as if the history of seeing were the biography of the light <br>that blossoms in each of us like wildflowers in the starfields, <br>or in every wild rose, as you were, the incarnation of a passionate insight, <br>even in its passage in the autumn when the rosaries<br>of the Canada geese call as they're crossing the moon <br>high overhead, transmigrating the souls of the dead <br>to the thresholds of new constellations hidden under our eyelids<br>like Venus in the Pleiades near Aldebaran just before dawn? <br>No death or birth in the moment, like time in a dream, <br>how can here and now where we all abide with the stars <br>and the planets and their shepherd moons ever be gone? </div><div style="margin:10px 0">It's night now, Heidi, back in Perth here on earth and it's raining.<br>I'm watching the ripples in the puddles playing water like music <br>all up and down Foster Street from my upstairs apartment window.<br>And how the streetlights are dancing in their garish gypsy scarves <br>barefoot to the rhythm. As I imagine you're doing right now <br>among similar wavelengths just out of reach of my eyes<br>Though I can see you so clearly when I see you with my heart<br>as I do the stars and the willows and the waterbirds <br>down by the Tay River when I stand on one bank of life <br>and look up at the other like the far shore of the Milky Way<br>wheeling like the girandole of the spiral arm of a starfish.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And though I thought of putting poppies and wheat upon your grave, <br>remembering you were a sailor back in my hometown, <br>and hope is a lifeboat that keeps us all from drowning in our tears, <br>it reminds me of you somehow, and I make a wish upon it<br>like the star of Isis the ancient sailors used to tattoo <br>on the left palm of their hands to make it through the storm<br>and had, somehow, come through the squalls of time like you<br>there in the heights, a water-sylph of the radiance<br>shining on like that star just to the right of midnight, <br>breaking through these clouds of unknowing, like Heidi Clow<br>looking down upon us all on the nightwatch, <br>whispering like the carillon of the rain, three bells and all's well.</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=477008" data-title="What Did You See Just Before You Committed Suicide? de Patrick White" data-description="in memory of Heidi Clow

What did you see just before you committed suicide? 
Did the snake mesmerize the bird that used to sing inside 
your rib cage, turn it to stone, dis the lyrics of its song 
with a cosmic hiss that underwhelmed all other so..."></div>
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