To A Young Poet Poem by Patrick White

As you are now, and I have been
a long branch at the top of the tree
in a black spring, reaching out
for the fury of a distant star
to adorn your spine
with a leaf of light
that might be the sail
on a boat full of worlds
that will thunder like windfall fruit
or an army of hearts
pulsing across the drumhead plain
of your moon-salt thoughts,
their liberation, a sea of blood,
a squall of vipers, a murder,
and a brazen idol away
from the beguiling taste of another paradise. What
does this mean? This means
I come before you
like a brutal lighthouse without a warning,
unfolding wings of light like a stormbird
slipped like a letter
under the door of huge winds
that have driven most sailors to shore,
prudently seasoned
by what the ocean can do. But you are
a creature of the depths,
a volcanic thermophile
grown gigantic in your darkness
and your solitude, the Cyclopean shadow
you would cast on the castle walls
in the tiniest burning house of time
if only there were light and life enough
to convince the grotesque it’s beautiful;
the folly of your unknown world
is the secret wisdom of a second moon. Not
insane enough yet
to be a credible witness
to the antics of your own asylums
where the mad angels
swear you’re real and fling you like a drug
they won’t take across
the lunar floor
of your infamous acquiescence, I come to you
like a prophetic lighthouse, arms of light
outstretched on the edge of a towering cliff,
pleading like a Druid with God
for answers I could sacrifice
like rams and humans
to questions on the altars of a mountain brain
that heaves me like a continent
up out of the depths and opens my mouth
to announce a black wind in the abandoned caves of silent oracles.
I can hear the whisper
of the serpent ghosting through the grass
in a cemetery of dead echoes, and I can read the names
of the midnight shipwrecks
you have suffered on the inclement shores
of your own island consciousness. Are you marooned
or is it that you’re just choosey
about rescues and life-boats?
Unfolding these petals of light like straitjackets, like tides,
I come before you,
a navy sunk in a well on the moon,
no footprints on the map to where your treasure is buried
like the jewels and wishbone harps of the dead.
I’ve always disappointed my own wisdom,
and the dark-hearted clowns
of the suicidal circus
that waits like a sense of humour
for an encore,
have long ago died without applause
like unexploded shells
far from their badly-aimed humanity.
Like the universe, whose life
hasn’t been a clown
shot out of a cannon
without a safety-net? So
I come before you without a face, a mask,
a self, or the worn-out authority of a wound
scarred like a book out of the sum
of all my failures, offering
these simulacra of keys to what
has no need of a lock, but conceals your fate
in a mouthless rumour of intimate stars.
And I do not come to fill the dead seabeds of the moon
with tears and raise vast armadas against the fact;
no one need tell the wind the world is sad,
nor multiply the horrors of hell like bitter weeds
in the ashes of the wheat when fire itself,
so long the nun of its own burning,
pledged to ferocious purities,
is corrupted by what it consumes.
And among these murmurs of murder and war,
these corpses and civilizations sandbagged into seawalls
against this toiling deluge of blood, who
but the most unfeeling, could indulge
the obscenity of the lie
that life is beautiful or good
in the radiant marrow of the bone
cracking like a flute in the jaws of an iron dog?
Nor do I come scrying fissures in the sky
marking annual Armageddons
in a calendar of vengeful tomorrows. If the world
isn’t already worthy of love
it could never be worthy of hatred.
No curse, no blessing, no reform or utopian felicity,
ignorance and enlightenment both
one heartbeat shy of the truth,
and freedom, compassion, genius,
three brides on a bridge of snails,
how could I come before you clearly
if there were anything in my hands? Fire
doesn’t need a teacher to burn
nor the wind an instructor to fly
and if you haven’t already been struck
like a birdless tree
by lightning on the moon
what farce of the sublime could show you
what you don’t need to know
to be what you are
when spring comes like a voice, a whisper of bliss,
a green arsonist, a jest of life
to the startled garden
in the rootless urn of your unsayable longing?