Wednesday, December 17, 2008

ISN'T IT A WONDER

ISN’T IT A WONDER


Isn’t it a wonder that surpasseth understanding

that we’re here as we are

this very moment

to wonder at all

and curious the way the whole affair

seems to take its tail in its mouth

and try to eat itself all the way up to

and including the head

like the last morsel on the moonplate

or the mind trying to discern itself

like a star apart from mind?

The eclipse eats the moon.

The snake swallows the egg.

A dragon sprouts wings.

And I’m not talking about these things

as if there’s a way things happen

because I know if you go looking too intensely

for the way things happen

you’ll miss the happenings.

You’ll live a shadow life.

You’ll put your thinking before the living

and cling to the morning grass

like hungry ghosts

afraid to invert the hourglass

and pour out of themselves like water

by living before they think

by trusting the mountain

doesn’t lie to the sea

and it doesn’t take much effort to be

this constant flowing over into yourself

as if even the clocks

that scared the pyramids

weren’t time enough

not to be swept away.

It takes a happy fool

to see beauty in the snow

when there’s mud in the looking glass

and blood on the ice,

and all the stars

are stern with distance

and he’s a shadow alone with his breath

and there are cracks in the diamonds

he couldn’t detect

under the cataracts of thin ice

he keeps breaking through like a mirror

to get the real low-down on his own reflection

when he washes it off like paint.

And you would need to be

as unbrave as an enlightened man

to try and understand

why we keep amusing our own delusions

with bad imitations of the real

that don’t express the way we truly feel

when there is no star, no light, no stage

and no one in the darkness listening.

Sometimes a doodle in the margins of life,

sometimes scribbled like a bloodstream

on the edge of a knife

that leaves a fingerprint on the moon

I can’t identify.

And sometimes my third eye

is the loneliest colour of night

and even the stars lose themselves

in the darkness that overwhelms me

after the lightning-strike

of an intrusive insight.

I am numbed by the terrible clarity

that rips through the heartwood

like a scalpel of light

through a diamond

and the wound is an abyss

I can’t stitch together again

with the myths of old constellations

that are swept up like sparks in the ashes

of my phoenix brain

isolated in the cosmic furnace

of a pain so cold it burns

like a spear of ice through a heart

not god enough to thaw it.


PATRICK WHITE