Humbled On Earth, Exalted By A Star Poem by Patrick White

Humbled on earth, exalted by a star,
I say nothing and wait for the echo.
It's bad with me tonight, more than I can bear.
I'm in isolation, but I don't know where.
And there's a half moon apricot blossom
over the roof of a bookstore that swears
that it's a scar. Maybe so. But there you go.
Why blame your eyes for what they see?

Venus earlier tonight, that was the key
to a thousand doors of insight
without a threshold among them
to say how far the light had travelled
just to get to me. O, yes, no doubt, beauty,
and time-shares in eternity you can't forget
all that easily. Something sharp and cold
and romantically aloof, diffuse, smeared
like a name on a window someone signed
in their own breath, as the night cooled down
like a glorious life into a homely death.

Crazy-wisdom, but without a path.
I followed the river to a sacred syllable
of a single dropp of water on the tongue of a leaf.
Though my immutable present be the aftermath
of flowers after a funeral, a skull with a laurel wreath,
just because I steal fire, doesn't make me inflammable.

Slow and sad, among my myriad mirages
and heart-dwarfing immensities. What is this?
What is that? I keep asking myself
so I don't have to listen to my own answers
as if someone were here to explain them to me.
Trying to saddle a bubble on the moon
and rise to the surface like a seahorse
to see if I can ride off like Venus
into a sunset somewhere with atmosphere.
Is this a labyrinth? Is this a cul de sac?
I embody a silence deeper than death.

Forgive me, mother. Forgive me Apple laptop.
I didn't ask for this afterlife. It's the sum
of what I had left after I ransomed myself
from those who would have deprived me
of this tragicomedy with pastoral overtones
I'm living now like a whole new golden age
still in the ore, but reputed to be there,
though I don't hope for too much anymore.

And it's o.k o.k. o.k. o.k.
I've got a place to sleep, a painting on the go,
a poem toying with me, two cans of tuna, one
of sardines, half a loaf of bread, and a clean window
to look through when I want to disappear
into the aura of sidereal distances
that backstops the rooftops of Perth
with an atmosphere that just isn't another
bubble of glass, and offer myself to the moon
as a qualified substitute for what it's lost.

Probably good to serve some function in life
you know about, even if you've got to
make one up for yourself while you're waiting
for the inevitable to come back for your shadow,
just to say thanks to everything, good or bad,
for why you're watching Venus in the sunset,
as if you once had a personal relationship with it
like the third eye of a telescope that thought
it must notice you, if you stare long enough
into the nothing, face to face, with a deep love
of the universe that has abided me
so much longer than I would have.