I Won'T Turn The Shadow Of The Sundial Back Poem by Patrick White

I won't turn the shadow of the sundial back
to replicate the asters that bloomed yesterday
and were lovely as the wrists of a child
playing with perfume in front her mother's mirror,
I remember, without wanting to turn them
again and again and again into a template.
I don't mind grinding the past
into a parabolic mirror to see where I've been
in the last fourteen and a half billion years
but as I get older, that isn't going to give me
an insight into the future of darkness
I'm rushing into like an accelerated fool
where the angels are not self-destructive enough to pass.
The most beautiful songs are sung in the dark
by the loneliest of creatures endangered by the night.

I've been a jumper for as long as I can recall
and sometimes it's sheer suicide, and others,
even though I don't pack a parachute for the fall,
it's paradise. No risk in your next step
you're just crossing a river on a bridge of skulls.
No real Apaches in the Black Hills you're just
collecting postcards of the massacre,
buttons and bullets in a garden that went bust.
How can you keep your wits sharp
and hone your instincts in an arboretum?
Drug-store explorer with a library of roadmaps,
you've feathered your heels with lapwings and poultry
and flutter around like butterflies in a barnyard.
You ever tried firewalking across the stars?
Or put a match to a poem you loved like a storm?

If you're not proceeding at your own risk
the journey's not worth it. It's someone else's path.
It's only another threadbare carpet under a window.
May the rose always have thorns. May your lovers
always be able to kill you without a moment's notice
and your fireflies revert to dragons when your comets
are flying blind too far from the sun to shine.
You be the one that's missing from the family album
for a change.You be the one who's moody and strange.
The blasted orchard that isn't known by its fruits.
Stop revising that diary of event horizons
you've never violated once, and instead of
dumping your dirty sheets down a laundry chute
into the basement, go skinny-dipping in a black hole
to wash the stink and stain of useage off.

You keep listening for choral arrangements
of mellifluous honey in swarms of killer bees
without realizing the maelstrom that is already upon you.
Your mountains aren't wolves. They're St Bernards.
Have you ever been the epicentre of anything
you've ever said, or have you always been third echo
in this choir of indignant aftershocks? Would you even
recognize the sound of your own voice
if you ever heard it in a keen-eyed wilderness
among the nightbirds with the courage of their longings?
And I see you've gone and offended the muse again
by lowering the bar of your pain threshold
and fireproofing your heart against a lightning strike.
You think hugging shore with the rest
of the abandoned refugees is going to keep you
any safer than a liferaft flowing along
with your own mindstream through blackwater and white?

You can embroider your nightmares on pillow cases
and think you're going to sleep better tonight
than the homeless that are banked up like leaves
against your door. You can bleach the shadows
into albinos and think you've done something
kind to yourself, but all you've really done
is make the light turn dangerous. The sun bare its fangs
at the colour blind cowardice of antiseptic flowers.
Not a cheap thrill of blood on your palette anywhere.
Talent smiles like a house karl, but genius snarls
at the thorn of insight in its paw like a lion on a cross
roars like lightning in a skull at the rosey stigmata
of a fresh kill that tastes like the stars in its blood.
Solitude isn't a state of mind, it's a calculated risk.
You either jump into the lotus of fire heart first
and dare your own extinction among great heretics
or collapse like a universe into a starless abyss.