Mystic Regency Poem by Patrick White

Blue hole in a swarm of afflicted emotion,
I cannibalize my own event horizons,
to turn off the glare of the lifelight
that boils my brain in delusional bleaches
that present themselves as the truth.
I have known nothing
but the fragility of a tolerable hell since I was born
so I am not fooled into believing
anyone stands on more than quicksand.
And yes, there are women and stars and flowers,
orchids in the shadow of an outhouse,
eclipses that draw the veils
off faces and hearts like shadows and eras,
gold in the bones of extraordinary people
who move like swans across the mind
easy in the grace and dignity of their excellence,
and sometimes, for brief islands of serenity
I am one of those, but only briefly
and only long enough for me to disallow myself
the luxury of thinking I’ve arrived anywhere.
If fireflies were once
the souls of unbaptized children, stillborns and embryos
flirting with the night for salvation, now
they’re the unbound abacus of joy
that has lost count of the days and nights
I’ve stood by myself before a winter window
and looked out into the darkness
and wondered if I am
what I seem to myself
or some other man
I’ve been looking for all these years
better than I am, more courageous,
able to absorb the bitter light
and sweeten it like wine. I can endure
the miseries and sorrows, I can act
when there is call to act, and I can see
into the dark corners
where the spiders age their poisons without malice,
and I can be a tree in the morning
just before moonset, and hear in every bird
the lonely bell of blood that rings like time
advancing the night with departure;
and feel the incredible onceness of being alive,
the igneous beauty of the black virgin
buried in the wound of my own mortality,
and the terrible longing that arises and wants her forever
knowing she’s unattainable and yet prefers this folly
over every other delirium of desire,
certain only of my own demise in the attempt
and the fanatical universe that decrees it
as if it were heresy to try,
but never, never in those depths
have I ever understood so much
as a hair on her head, not even
an eyelash of insight to show for all my agony, not
a word from her lips
for all that I have sung and seen of her,
that wasn’t a falling rose-petal, a kiss upon the skull
that gapes at her feet
like the cold stone
of a full October moon rising over
the lean fields, the empty silos
of my devoted desolation like a crown.