You Keep Looking
You keep looking for meaning in a world
you say hasn't given you one
worth living for
and you're down and disappointed
and all that red passion
that used to burn like books and leaves
has turned as mystically brown
as the background of a Rembrandt painting
or gone up in smoke
at the Bonfire of the Vanities.
Now you're a copycat Savanarola
in a faculty lounge
trying to turn God back like the Renaissance
for behaving like the Medici.
You used to be a little on the teachy side
but now you're boring and preachy
having settled the whole issue
of what you're doing on earth like a fist.
You once went looking for the point of life like a grail.
Now you plunge it through everyone's heart like a spear.
Like the terrible angel at the garden-gate
to prove you're sincere as fire
you're ready to kill anyone
who likes what they see in the mirror
that never wears the same face twice
when it looks at you.
The truth is
since you're fond of the word
you never found a meaning big enough
to accommodate that Delphic python of an ego
that's kept sloughing you like skin over the years.
You were always too big
for any chrysalis or cocoon you ever crawled into
and the greatest miracle of transformation
as far as you were concerned
is the shape you took in the womb
like the pearl of the moon
from a grain of dirt
at the bottom of a seascape.
What unified field theory could ever contain you
like some cosmic Houdini in chains and locks
twisting upside down over a snakepit of thoughts
trying to think your way out of the box
as if you were the ultimate escape-artist
and could pour the universe out of the universe?
Even space wasn't enough of an embrace
to hold you
and now time's given up on you as well.
Eleven dimensions were never enough
to take your measure.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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