Sunday, February 1, 2009

FOR SOME

FOR SOME


For some the world is always about to end, and for others, it never really begins. Two eyes of the same watershed. Both blind to their own lucidity, the ruse of unfathomable fish swimming through their own light like dreamers who never wake up. I recall an old Chinese poet sailing his poems like paperboats, blossoms of the moon, downstream to elaborate the impermanence of the wind. Exquisite felicity! No ignorance. No liberation. The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds. Nor the flower concern itself with the future of its seeds. Events in the abyss don’t succeed one another anymore than thoughts do and all those phases of the moon too infinite to name. The important thing is not to hang on to what you think you’ve understood. Not to uncoil your mind like chromosomic flypaper among the stars that swarm you like a window at night, or make webs of their constellations to gain something from their light. You will never be more than you are now. Why put make-up on a mirror or glue eyelashes to the moon? The good dreams and the bad dreams are both painted on space. But as long as you keep trying to sign your own face with indelible markers, joy will always be a catastrophe.


PATRICK WHITE