And There Are People Poem by Patrick White

And there are people with glass blood and chalk hearts
who ask you to believe that razorwire is a grape vine,
and the moon nothing but a cold stone, half-people
in stolen straitjackets with secret agendas of blackflies
disguised as the smile of a leaf, passionless people
with the emotional life of an insecticide
who cannot understand they’re as transparent as larvae in a canning jar
though you’d think the way they verbally profess the light
they were apostolic butterflies. Look at a Dutch elm
smothered in the smog of gypsy moths to see what I mean.
From a mineral point of view, life lives off of life,
a type of organic perpetual motion machine,
a biological conservation of energy principle enacted
by the brutal genius of the uncompromising creatrix,
whatever form or name you attribute to that
which is without attributes, like starlight invisible until
it encounters an object, as we know the wind
by what resists it, as we know a lie
by the opposition of the truth. And just as I do a garden
where I always leave a little for the jays, deer, raccoons,
I don’t mind being a mobile bloodbank once and awhile
for the midget ladles and syringes, probosci and tiny ice-picks
that want to drink a rose or two of healthy haemoglobin,
puncture an eye of weeping iron to saturate their bloodlust,
and, by all means, thrive in the game of I eat you now you eat me.
In one way or another, each after our own taste and fashion
we’re all food for one another. Even the stars eat
and there are black holes without bodies
that devour the radiance like open mouths
and love affairs that are nothing
but bone and bloodmeal by the end, and even that,
in the chronic flux of consumption, a fertilizer,
the furtherance of another kind of sentient appetite
as roots turn into mandibles, the lotus into a praying mantis,
the dead rat into a million maggots fattening into flies.
You get the picture. It isn’t really a foodchain with fixed links,
a rosary of interlocking orbits that replicate the ripples of the rain,
it’s more like a clepshydra, a transformative waterclock,
a womb that gives birth to a gravestone
in the hidden harmony of the natural flow of things, time, too,
not visible until it’s expressed by an object, a skull,
the fallen tent of the lily crisp with shadows,
and all the grass in the world a kind of slow green fire
that cooks the grazer from the inside out. Who can look
at what a spider really does for long, or a garden snake
the sparrow’s egg disgorged like a used condom? Civilized,
we insist on caring cannibals
boiling over with the milk of human kindness
to buff the impersonality of being unmarrowed straight,
we always talk of love and friendship just before we eat,
homophagoi, we sugar the brain and pamper the sacrifice
with elegant cutlery, soft forks and pleading spoons,
rituals of grace and gratitude
that obviate the obvious with culinary indirections,
menus in an abattoir. We harness our blood
to the horse of a gun
and die of a decent obesity of body and mind,
a wallet, the ultimate mouth and orifice, altar and shrine
of our obfuscated appetites. We even eat our gods
trined on the fork in the devil’s hand
to expiate the bloodguilt of the butchery we refined from a garden
of violated apples. But there’s just as much meat
in the belly of the believer as the atheist,
and the lion may be grateful but the gazelle is just as dead,
and you may call that napkin tucked under your chin friendship,
and the fangs in your hand a fork,
and think you can carve forever with immunity,
bartering new famines for old cornucopias,
believing you’re a lamp that lives on its own light,
but there will come a day, soon, I promise you
when you’ll look in my eyes to see who you are
and all you’ll be is the black dwarf of your own appetite,
the morsel of a star between the teeth of a ravenous night,
the last bite.