Lees Poem by Patrick White

What a mess I’ve made of it in the name of an earthly excellence,
my life, in the pursuit of poetry, the afterbirth
of the stars that step out of the veils of the creative mystery
into the new legends of their shining. I’m the leftover hydrogen
the placental remainder, the outcast element,
the excess lifeline of an incumbent umbilical cord
that’s eventually eaten by their radiance or blown away,
the ashes of the moth that committed its kite to the flame.
It’s a foolish host that starves at his own feast
and I’ve been generous serving up the earth and sky
and all the things that water can be in these reveries of flowing
when the intimate strangers knock at my door in the night
seeking shelter from the storm; my heart’s on the table
and the slender goblet of the moon is always full
of the blood that I’ve aged into wine. And there’s a guest bed
with clean dreams and fresh paintings on the wall, and I keep
a nightingale on in the hall for the dead and wounded,
and sometimes I’m more of a hospital than a hostel,
but no one’s ever been turned away from what they seek, ever
been denied effusive accommodation on the other side
of my indiscriminate threshold.
What horror, sorrow, joy, rage, longing, lament, love, laughter,
petition, prayer, curse or insight ever arrived,
a pilgrim out of the void, dressed in rags or robes,
beggar and braggart alike, a whisper of waterlilies
or the igneous proclamations of prophetic stone,
to find I wasn’t there to greet their expectations?
What refugee from the boneyards of the butchered nations
ever found a gate, a guard, a border, a passport in their path
or that I was less than a tent and an ocean of wheat
without a shore, when they slumped their distress at my door?
Over the last forty years I’ve embraced them all
without judgment or deceit, ushered them all in
thief, lover, assassin, and sage, to be what they must be
as they take form in the abundant dark
and vacant light of me. Like the sea
in the lowest place of all, greeting its lost rivers, come in, I’ve said,
sit, eat, here’s a stage, a page, a heart and mind and fingertips,
take my seat and borrow my eyes if you’re blind,
my mouth and my ears if your mute and deaf, my soul
if you’re horned and cleft, my body if you’re passionate;
take and make of yourself what you will
until there’s nothing left of me but scrapings off a plate,
bread crumbs in the cupboard, the emaciate ore
of a depleted mine, tailings in the creek
or a crematorium of ashes under the iron fire-dogs of a cold grate.
And I have accepted it all with the grace of a leaf in the fall
and the dignity of a star as it pales in the morning light
to voice their entrance out of the open into being through me,
this eloquence of avatars born of the living word
that upholds the singing bird on the green bough
of an ancient apple-tree. And though time alone will winnow the stars
from the tares and eerie eclipses that blight the field,
even in the falling of the gifts I sought to yield
this is a noble calling that grafts the best to the real. I’ve accepted it
and accept it gratefully now with the humility
of the chrysalis and cocoon cast off
like tiny houses of transformation redressed by the sun and moon
as the dragons and the monarchs, and the lunatic pharaohs
dreaming in their pupae of wide-eyed moths
with feathered feelers. Or sometimes I’m an empty lifeboat
as big as the world, abandoned by the survivors and revivors
after rescue, full of night, without regret, cut loose, and drifting.