My Eyes Poem by Patrick White

My eyes have turned into clouds on the moon
too proud to cry
and my tongue is a leaf on the wind
and this may be my last voice, everything said
in a single word not god enough to begin me again,
but I’m grateful for the ride back into town,
and there’s only one river left
that hasn’t poured the peasant
out of my patrician poverty,
these refugee lines of evacuated stars
that just made it out with their lives
and a couple of planets they wouldn’t let go of.
And I’m down to the last firefly in my grave,
a sea-witch a desert away from the coast
who’s keeping an eye on my pulse
and my amateur heart is doing cosmetic surgery
with volunteer razorblades on my mind
to undo the Red Cross facelift
they flew in to give my emergency passport
the last time I asked the mirror
to close the door on her way out
as she threw me the keys to her eyes
and said anytime you need
another oasis in an hourglass,
but she never really did understand
the true nature of my calling
but I gave her a gift certificate to rent-an-idol
for the shrine of her telephone anyway
and thanked her for the designer powerline.
Right number. Wrong answer.
And now the lotus-mouth of the nonreturnable silence
that blooms in the shadow of my name
comes to tell me the love-letters
I had to get off my chest like an avalanche
the last time I did a guest-spot on terminal row
have caught on like a shabby religion
in the mikes of the junkie prophets
realigning their echoes in the valley below
to all the compasses I’ve had to swallow
over the years to mean
when I say I’m lost, I’m lost
and not be seated like a celebrity direction.
And I hope, still dangerous enough to hope,
lingering in the doorway of a homeless waterstar,
a rootless tree, that it is my fault,
solely and wholly my fault
that I’ve never mailed the moon’s reflection
caught in the act
to the dark side of the mystery,
dropping a dime on the truth as payback
for all the furious answers I’ve listened to
trying to tell me I could do a lot better for myself
like air-raid sirens in the sack,
that I’m not enough of a user
to know what’s good for me,
that I should be the kind of loser
that claims his life’s a never-ending prize
then lames the victory with lies.
And maybe I should have listened;
and maybe it would have done me some good,
but who would have been there
when God dropped in to bury her dead,
and say she was sorry
for the kind of afterlife she’s led,
and all the things she would have meant if she could;
who would have been there
to put the crown back on her head
and who would have been there to listen
to the way her voice bled like cherry wood,
and who would have understood?