Monday, November 17, 2008

OVERLAPPING BULLSEYES OF THE RAIN

OVERLAPPING BULLSEYES OF THE RAIN


Overlapping bullseyes of the rain

that never misses the mark,

each bullet, each arrow of water

its own target

as if subject and object were none

or seeing the inseparable locus of being

like puddles in the parking lot

and then the gust of a shapeshifter in passing

and every drop turns into a tuning fork

that resonates out of itself like a solar system

or a bird whose wingspan is the duration of every note.

And then someone passes me

like a loveletter they found on the street

under the door of a chameleonic threshold

or a flower down a drain

and I’m alone again

trying to hang on like the last leaf on the tree

to a delusion that has already let go of me

like an address on an aging piece of paper

that’s forgotten its way home.

The mindstream is glutted

with the wrecks of November

and there’s no way across except on the skulls

of these stepping-stone moons

that cling to my emotions

like greasy moss on a moodring

but I’m urgently savage enough

to scalp my own comets

as they venture out of their dark haloes

and exultantly fling their topknots across the sky

like reruns of a warning to an extinct species.

New feathers and fur for old scales, perhaps,

but I’ve always tried

to forget the future before it happens

in order to live now with the assurance of a dangerous dinosaur

and as all the enlightened know

like a jewel opening its eyes

in the back of their brain,

there isn’t any effort to evolution

or floral agenda to the rain

because everything is utterly keyless

when the water guitar strings its own ripples

over the great abyss

and thumbs sad music

for all the missing links along the way,

all the starring parts I never got to play

that undo me like a food chain.

But in a world so elegantly free

even the rain is a mere gesture

of the eye-growing sea I bubbled up from

to explore the terrain like a wheel

until it turned from solid to real

living with purpose

is just a shortcut

to living in vain.

Go ask the rain

falling like tears

from these visions of being

back into its own eyes.

Even the hardest crystal ball

you’ve ever huddled around like north

convinced you could find a passage through like light

will eventually ride its own melting

like an icecube back into the seeing

and you will be the journey

that puts on your body like a shoe

and walks you out to clarify the view

of your own transformative mysteries

until you’re as free and as expansive as the skies

that attach themselves like wings

to the emergent exclamations of the dragonflies

and washing yourself off

like the stain of an indelible eclipse

in billions upon billions of eyes

you will taste the light like honey

in the flower-mouths of all your metamorphoses

and gathering yourself up

like the gods of roots and rivers

who enshrined their passage in everything

as if we were all survivors

of the mysterious gifts of the life-givers,

you will give yourself away to everything alike

without distinction for the demons and the divas,

and the warm compost

of all those undernourished divinities

that distemper your lucidities,

and like a god

among the shining myriads

without anything on your mind

you will bead like light

on the branches of the autumn trees

and falling to the root

like jewels and fruit

you will see what the rain sees.


PATRICK WHITE