Indelible, The Saline Taste Of The Tears Poem by Patrick White

Indelible, the saline taste of the tears
like words you can't get out of your mouth
at the bedside of a dying swan,
slowly turning into the summer stars
forever skimming over the Milky Way,
wings outspread, as if childhood
had been a lonely dancer and now age
had made her bones and tendons ache
like tent-pegs trying to keep a night sky
over her head, her head above the waves
of an ocean of skin on her body
to keep her from drowning in her own flesh
as she shed what she used to be
to make a vast space in her heart
to embrace what she was becoming.

A gazelle of light on a bridge
that could leap with taste and art
like the moon from one shore
to the next, as if her last breath
were a gust of stars that kissed
all her weeping mirrors on their foreheads
like the lunar dew that used to renew the morning.

I watched her breathing disappear
like the warmth of life in the Orion nebula
on a window colder than a smudge of blood
that won't come out of the sheets
of a universe hung out to dry in hyperspace.

I grieve the smokey ghost of a dead candle
that tied itself to its own body, the stake
of a heretical dancer consumed with keeping
a single-petalled rose of fire alive
even as she drowned in a lachrymal pool
of her own flesh like a star that could walk on water.

Inviolate, the mystery of death. No one knows
where the waterbirds go with our unburdened souls
once they're over the hills of where they were buried.
I've spent my life looking into mirrors
I ground like templates of death with corborundum,
gazing into eyes and stars, the faces of strangers
I was never convinced I could call my own,
and death, always death, somewhere
in the silvered patina of the background
like the cosmic hiss of the Big Bang, the white noise
of an auroral afterbirth washed up on the shores
of my island instincts, a sea star
learning to breathe in the galactic waters of life
breaking like the skin of a grape
into undated dreams flavoured like a wound
of ripened wine with the untimely joys and sorrows of night.

O brave housefly, buzzing at the windows of death
you're never going to penetrate like the black dwarf
of an insight that burned out with exhaustion
long before you were cancelled
like an underfunded experiment to prove
the will to absurdity is pangenic to all life.
Our eyes go extinct in the midst of the vision.
Immaculate death, like a vow of silence
in a cult of old ladies, first word of creation
to cast a shadow of life like an aspersion on the abyss
that couldn't care less whether they existed or not.

I listen oceanically to the stars in lonely clearings
out in the woods where just to stand alone
like a pillar of solitude in a forgotten temple
is to summon the more intimately compassionate feeling
we're all in the same lifeboat together adrift
on the same nightsea of heart-wrenching awareness
calling out in the fog to voices we're sure we overheard.

Delusion, dream, or some transubstantiating hallucinogen
distilled like a love potion from the tears of life,
I swim in the feeling there's something perennial
about the human experience of just being here
that isn't the passing rumour of a false superstition,
but an insight younger than the dawn of time, more ancient
than the fossils of dusk embedded like constellations
in sedimentary starmud at the beginning of life
well before the universe became conceivable.

Old women don't just kick the bucket
like a waterclock of wombs bearing the waters of life
back like mythic mindstreams from their own wellsprings
weeping their way down into the valleys of death.
They go on flowing like rivers of light brimming
over the distant horizons of themselves like moonrise.
Or the spiral arms of the Milky Way dancing
with starfish and the sunflowers of the golden ratio
waltzing under the subtle chandeliers of their discrete tears
breaking into fireflies, their eyes damp with prodigal atmospheres.