NOT JUST THE NATIONS

NOT JUST THE NATIONS

 

Not just the nations

but the whole planet

is reaping and eating

a perverse harvest

of hot coffins for cool people

like the indigent fire

of the crematorium next door.

I don’t think the sky’s going to fall in

or accept every invitation

to the backyard barbecues

of all the apocalyptic chicken-littles who do,

but I do think the air’s

going to cramp around our fat throats

like merciless hands 

when we’re dragged

to the chopping block

to be severed like the split ends

of a short circuit

that mistook itself for intelligence.

And as for our humanity.

Imagine. Two thousand years

of Christianity

and Christ is still being greeted

like extraterrestrial life

scrolling down from the sky

like a search engine with all the answers.

And there are spiritual snake-oil salesmen

pimping out the constellations

like hookers and websites

all along the Milky Way

only too happy to sway with the flute

of your weeping pleading and prayers

by taking you by the hand and the wallet upstairs

where sin begins your undoing

by teaching you how to fall

toward paradise

like something serpentine

in the gathering voice of the divine.

Fanged oracles with lightning tongues

like witching wands

looking for signs

in a tatoo parlour.

The amends doesn’t justify the ends

and eternity swallows its own tail

up to the head

and in a single, final gulp

disappears.

But it’s as easy as water to see

that it’s always this moment

and this moment

is all you ever were, can, and will be

out to the furthest stars and beyond

and down to the frenzied nano-heart

of the tiniest gnat of an atom

trying to patch space

like a mad seamstress

in the sunset air

when the past isn’t missing

and the future isn’t yet to come.

And this moment

is not younger or older than that moment

because you can’t say where it ends or begins

and space is not volume enough to fill it

and time can’t root its theme in it

and old men don’t sit out

in the shade of the summer trees

as if they were washing

the dust and stars of the world off their feet

at the end of the long road

in unknown tides of deep thought

about what might endure

and what might not.

Isn’t it clear

after all these thousands of generations,

and the pyramids and the churches and the prophetic skulls

and the brides of the living who annul them,

that the only place you can live forever is now

in this very moment just as you are and aren’t

and that there’s only one flower in paradise

that blooms alone like the moon at night

and roots in your eyes forever?

Sometimes it burns the heart

to turn the jewel of being in the light

and taste the anguish of your own death in its fires

and feel the mute, bell-weight

of the moon under your tongue

like the unassessible agony

of the dead that endure

without a rite of passage

like roots deeper than truth,

the brevity of the living

in the old fountains of youth

that no one goes looking for anymore.

And it may be that death is merely a shadow

that’s wandered too far from home

as night comes on, and life

a little radiance in a huge darkness,

the last star of the morning 

washed out of our eyes

by the light of the dawn.

But the masks you put on

like views of the world

to accessorize your feelings

never wear the same eyes twice.

And if you were to ask the nightstream

that flows by your feet

what it was looking for

it might answer

in an ancient dialect of water,

water, just as the mind

is a longing for mind

that pours out of itself

to search the worlds within worlds

that it creates as a sign of itself in its flowing

like lilies and willows along the bank of a river.

Everywhere in its shallows and falls and depths,

its passage is the threshold

of the homelessness

deep in the heart of all forms

that array their worlds for awhile

like stray concessions

to an inexhaustible longing

they know will never be fulfilled.

If you want to know

what my mind looks like

from the inside,

or yours, or hers or his

look at the world just as it is.

Scrape the faces you keep

painting on the mirror

hoping one day one might

accidentally mistake itself for you

and seduce you away

from the evolving agony

of not knowing who you are.

Let the paint flake away from your eyes

like autumn leaves 

down to the heartwood

of the tree that has stood

like a many armed traffic cop

trying to redirect the wind

like a vagrant violin

and listen to your seeing like music.

Picture-music bluing the distant hills

like the secret emotions of angels

hovering over an unknown grave

they’ve kept coming back to for years

like the ghosts of unsummoned oceans

gathering in tears,

true to their hopelessness.

 

PATRICK WHITE