What I Want Is A Starfish Poem by Patrick White

What I want is a starfish
that can pry open the mouth of a word
not for the pearl but the tongue that said it.
What I want is an irrelevancy of slurred minerals,
a negligence of light, a torn candy-wrapper,
a whistle without chrome peas,
but what I want is a footprint that isn't my own
on a desolate beach out of the grasp
of the raking tide that sweeps
the lifeboats up with the garbage. What I want is free,
and that's why no one ever gets it,
when the world is placed in their open hands,
and not seeing their own reflection
or the rag of their wounded shadow
wearing their face like the sky they've always known,
deluded by the cheiromancy of their own entangled lifelines
cries out in their denuded emptiness
that nothing is for free. What I want
is not knowing what I want
on certain lost islands chipped off
massive continental certainties,
these dark bays where the closest thing to a sail
the wind has ever seen
is the stray oar of a feather
from the passing trireme of a bird
with nocturnal, naval engagements elsewhere.
And there's no art to knowing what you want,
you just know it, without reason or forethought,
there's a new bouquet in the vase of your heart,
and the shadows you poured into
the goblet of a burnt bone and drank from
to reveal the watcher at the gates
of the darkness within the darkness,
the taste of abused eclipses on your tongue,
opens the black eyelids of the wine
for you to see the beauty of the ghost in the fire
that's beckoning you to a new death.
So you must be able to live beyond death
to live with what you want,
you must be able to live in the interim
between the anvil and the hammer
shaping the sword
you will either pull from the stone in a myth
of unverifiable wizards and kings,
or fall upon like a defeated republic
to efface the shame of not being equal to what you want,
tearing your face off the stage
like the playbill of a one night stand.
And it's us who make the crystal pillars of the queens,
the rootless lighthouses that can move in any direction,
more important than the pawns
who can only jump from flower to flower like bees,
the vassals and squires of honey
rubbing their legs like cutlery,
so when we sit down to a game with fate
it really means fate, and checkmate, checkmate.
So when I scan the star crossings
for astronomical collisions overturned
along the soft shoulders of an accidental journey,
I'm alert to any movement
in the blinding doe-glare of my highbeams
and I slow down below the pitch
of shrieking brakes, not to kill what I want
accelerating like a comet to it, not
to exterminate the species of my wanting
in a analeptic fireball that drove right through it.
There's an art to knowing the happiest marriage
between the velocity and the direction of the arrow
whistling toward the target, and what speed
the target likes to receive the arrow at, and remembering
not all targets are in front of us.
If you want something badly enough
you must be able to coil your approaches
around the atmospheric doorway of your entrance
in a descending stairwell
toward the object of your desire, a hawk
wheeling down toward the bough of a specific tree,
landing like a snowflake on a furnace
or a kiss of ash on the bannister of a drunk fire-station.