The Last Draft Poem by Patrick White

There never was a way I could say it;
impossible from the first. The night
opened my mouth and poured its stars
down the well of my throat so I could say it in light,
but all that came out when I tried to sing
was silence and darkness
and a solitude that pawned the wedding-ring
that slipped from the finger of the wind
like a punctuation mark.
I envied the leaves that could say it in rain,
and the stones freaked by fool’s gold
so much like my own brain
but able to say it with ease
like the birds in the morning trees
shuddering with eloquence.
Women could say it, and children, and dogs,
and even the spider could play it
on its lethal guitar,
and the moon by stealthy increments
draining its cup to the lees,
but I could not say it, even after
years of study and extravagant teachers,
everything ended in the cruel laughter
of clones and clowns aghast at my ignorance,
even the pictographs of the mute bones in the cemetery articulate
compared to the dumb show
that betrayed my grief and shame and fate.
I implored the sky to let the words flow
that would set me free, release me
from this lifelong agony
I’ve endured like a downed powerline,
but only my own voice returned
without a branch and leaf, without a sign.
I grew weary of form, of emptiness,
of roses that curse and thorns that bless;
I collapsed all opposites
into enlightened oxymorons,
no polarities or contradictions anywhere,
and shrank to the size of the universe
in forward and reverse, random borons
the only gravity that called me
back to earth, this interminable birth
that hasn’t yet evolved a mouth
that can say it. Now
I don’t know who I am
or what I am
and I’m aging. And I’ve forgotten
what it is I wanted to say
that seemed so important, so pressing,
so absolutely engaging;
maybe something about the mystery
of the human heart
wounded by its own beginning
turning into the history of art,
but I’m guessing. Here
among these immensities,
there’s a window, and a star above the moon
and a fable of blood
riddled with intensities.