No Matter How Far
No matter how far into the past the star travels,
plunging its white fingers into the expanding womb of the past
to pull its own damp head out of convulsive space,
it will never find a beginning, the widening cleft between two thoughts
opening like a mouth full of silence, a sluice gate of thick water,
a dark prelude, the first letter alpha breaking like an eye
out of the eclipsed envelope into a splendour of light
to hang its jewel, its dropp of flammable water
from the incredible webs of the night,
to shine alone in the dark with millions,
the elemental heart of an abandoned lover. The void
became a tuning fork and struck itself, became
a nugget of gold and dropped itself into the world pond
sinking like a throne through a center of infinite haloes,
disappearing into the origin of its own undulant pulse,
a fish leaping out of the stillness of the mirror
into the encircling waves of its own event
or an arrow into the target of its own ripples,
or God lost in his own universe without a return address.
Where now is the desolate monkey
forced down out of the trees
to stand up in the high conquering grass to look for leopards
who first shrieked into consciousness
or sat down quietly on his heels
to ponder the odd blue stone of a thought he couldn’t grasp?
Where is he who has gone on expending himself
like the first violin of a tribal symphony
through the blind abyss of the blood all the way to me?
Is there a skull that lies cracked and quarried somewhere,
a fallen idol in a temple of shattered bones,
a small, moldy moon clotted with earth
who was the first to become aware of himself
as a paling star who would be washed out
in the brightening flood of the following dawn? Did he glimpse it all in a flash,
as the seed contains the whole of the tree, the blossoms
the singing branches, the closed eyelids of the apples,
did he see in the lightning gap between matter and mind,
in the first atom of self-brained sentience
all the murderous troupes of civilization
that would walk out of that first step, that progenitive initial
that goes on unspooling the maple samara
of the helical generations down even
into the bloodstreams and wellsprings of the lines of this poem?
Did he see the continuum of his own beginning
moving outwardly in time like a viper
through the oceanic fire-wombs of a nubile cosmos,
the world serpent that would marry the world
with a rib of light? Did he see me as I am this morning,
elaborated in all directions like rain from his watershed,
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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