And Love Caught By The Gills Poem by Patrick White

And love caught by the gills
in the mesh of human need,
and the storm outside
a leaden drummer sick of war,
and flesh and rock the same,
and the eye no more than water,
and mud no less than the spirit,
and the heart
in the hollow of its own hands,
a lifeboat that failed,
an attempt that floundered,
a rescue that failed,
and everything beyond right and wrong,
no river mapping itself,
every direction,
the thorn of a rose,
the fang of a coiled compass,
the black toxicity of depleted stars,
and no one to surrender to,
no victor, no victim, no vanguished,
everything the metaphysics
of sand and salt,
dead leaves and brittle seaweed,
lost bolts to crucial connections,
a graveyard of windows,
and every step forward
a return to what was never left,
a knot that grows
by doubling back on itself
until it's stopped by the eye of the needle,
and the only thing left to burn,
this bouquet of unanswered love-letters,
the rain comes down steady
on the yellow leaves through the milky windows
and the sky is a mass of ashes.

And I concede
there are jewels on the vines of the fire,
and not all razorblades
mistake themselves
for eyelids and supple petals,
and there are fingertips
that haven't been dipped in acid,
and sometimes the robin mauled by the cat
gets away with the worm
to fill the satchels of its young,
and that everything that is
must in some way
be confounded by its own intelligence,
even the atoms somehow separate from everything,
and birfurcated reality, consciousness,
a matter of split ends,
peeling propositions like dead skin
off propositions about life
to understand nothing,
and the general spontaneity prevails
like a camp counsellor
with a bow and a target,
and there is only a you and an I
when the bridge has been washed away,
and there are rivers
that drink too much
and flow sideways over their banks
like sailors on the deck of a squall,
and one stone hits another like hearts
trying to free a spark
over a tinder of straw
to survive the cold of the cave
they will paint like a womb with inception,
and every astronomical catastrophe
is only a random blow to the gut
that makes the stars go flat
and panics and baffles the next breath,
and what could my pain and sorrow be
to a mountain on Mars,
or a frog in the mouth of a snake,
and no book ever sipped wine
from the pressed flowers
between the shales of its erudition,
and nothing I know
can help me die enough
to be free of this moment,
and there's no point sending a wound
from door to door
recruiting ghosts as blood donors
when the rose
has already leaked out of itself like a flag
or the poppy of a colour-blind matador
falling on the horns
of an iron bull
like the balloon of a punctured child,
and the silence
that hovers over everything
like vultures and angels
is louder than the scream
of a mouthless wind in a crematorium
cooking the marrow in the bones
of a dead mime
trying to teach death to talk;
I concede to all of it,
the dull, stupid futility
of a vision that tastes like glue
on the tongue of an empty envelope
that once was filled with stars
posted like light and rain
to an urgent sky
and let the amber of reason
flow over me like the bitter honey
of a stalled traffic light
and its exudings harden into a glass eye
I can use for a paperweight
in the rare editions library
of the unopened letters of resignation
I keep addressing to myself
like a poor man's copyright,
sick of mining the ore of dead flies for gold.