Thursday, January 22, 2009

YOU CAN TEACH THE MIND

YOU CAN TEACH THE MIND


You can teach the mind

but you can’t teach the heart anything

about the way it’s come through everything

like a theme of the ocean through a bloodstream.

The crabs clatter like sleepwalking clocks

across moonlit beaches

holding up the crescents of their claws

like lunar castanets

to dance the time away

with their own shadows.

Walking the road

you become the road

and no one gets anywhere

until only the road arrives.

Petty people toy with small destinations

they call themselves.

Be a great river

and follow your own veins and arteries

down the mountain

through the plains and valleys below

to the vastness of the sea that conceived you.

And when the sea reflects the stars

don’t look for your place in the waters

as if you were reading a starmap

when every drop of you

is distilled from a vine of the light.

When you turn the light around

and pour the mooncup of your existence

back into the river it scooped you from

to ease a stranger’s thirst for stars,

and everything seems empty and forsaken,

and the dream is quaking in the turbo-charged air,

suddenly you disappear

and the sea is everywhere

effaced by its own longing to share.

If you hate the world,

it will go to war with you.

If you love it inordinately

it will ignore you.

Better to be the fire

and not be burnt by your own flame;

better to be the sword

that kills you into life

and not be cut by either edge.

And if you’re a bell

so stuffed with choirs

you can’t sing,

or a liar pimping constellations like bling

in the blaze of your own thing,

you should know

there is no hell for you,

no truth that’s going to sting

that hasn’t already been bored to death

by your significance.

There is no inclusion

no exclusion in clarity.

If you examine closely

the coinciding of thought events

that you misrepresent as your mind,

the whole of the sea is in every wave

and the water isn’t startled

when the fish jumps.

Walking by that sea

everything the world

ever stole from you

is returned by grateful thieves.


PATRICK WHITE














WOKE UP THIS MORNING

WOKE UP THIS MORNING


Woke up this morning

and a whole side of myself

slid like half an island into the sea

to create a tidal wave of emotion

that’s come crashing down over me

as if I were the coastal city

of the continent in its path.

And it’s not unusual for me

to live in the aftermath of myself

like some thermophilic bacterium

after the comets destroy

all my higher life-forms

and slowly complicate myself

back into a new species.

I know how to feather a lizard

into a songbird

and divide the world in two

so there’s a me and there’s a you

a this and a that,

two eyes of the blind,

to be concious of a mind

that sets me apart from everything.

And there are days

I can melt diamonds in my mouth

like spring

but lately

it’s getting harder

to keep faith with what I sing,

harder to taste the gold

in the darkness of the ore

I keep refining like my life

until all I will leave on the table

is a loveletter and a knife

for the next tenant.

Every day’s a new start

if you don’t approach it

with yesterday’s heart.


PATRICK WHITE