Saturday, May 2, 2009

WALKING ON STARS

WALKING ON STARS


Walking on stars,

walking on skulls,

walking on myself, water,

giddy suspension bridges

swaying over windy river gorges

playing chicken with my heart

to see if it’s just another mini-blackhole

or a real abyss,

one foot where I’m coming from,

the other, where I’m going

it’s all the same road

my feet make with their walking.

I don’t know what impels me to keep going,

but it walks me where I will

over the quicksand and tarpits,

the improvised explosive devices,

the lunar blossoms of the tree on the moon

that keeps sprouting out of the stumps

of my clear-cut emotions.

Inside and out, I may be space

but even space sometimes get sick of its own distances

and longs for homier stars,

lamps in the window

to draw it out of the vastness

of the huge night of its crucible,

its chrysalis, its galactic cocoon,

like a moth or a dragonfly

or a man with nothing but time in his eye

to cast himself like a spell or story

into the flames of a deeper intimacy

with the voiceless fire

that listens to everything

as if the saying and the not said

were two flames of the same pyre.

You need the wisdom

of a Solomonic serpent or a river,

the intuition of a witching wand,

to know how to split your tongue oxymoronically

between the living and the dead

to speak of the unsayable

as the moon raises its sword

above your head

to cut the cord

and unbind the word

from the lesser magic of your grammar

floating like an empty boat on an infinite sea

as if that were all there were to say.

For years I’ve winnowed the stars

to sort the thistles out of the grain

like dead metaphors among the simulacra

but ultimately, likeness, like a mirror

can find no likeness in anything

though everything elaborates

its mystic affinity with everything else

because we’re all born of the same darkness,

of what was not said

on the first day of creation

when the word was already

the past tense of the beginning

and God said, Be. And nothing happened.

There’s nothing in a state of being

that can be misconstrued as an event

though we like to think of ourselves

as the children of a happy, ongoing accident

the multiverse isn’t expanding

into the hyperspace of its own extremes

or entropically cooling to the idea of a private cremation.

A compassionate pragmatist with a mystic bent

light-years of elation from home

that keeps saying hello and good-bye

on the same threshold

like the needle of a compass

pointing both ways,

with a heart that is rarely more

than a full moon away from forever,

I’m riding the tide of my own resurgency

like a wave of illumination

thriving with eyes

across the deep seabeds of my skull

toward an emptiness that is always full

of the same reverberating echo

returning like geese in the spring,

a sail to a bay,

a loveletter that went missing for years

like the prodigal word of a bloodstream

to the voice on a hill above the valley

that keeps calling out my name

without expecting an answer.


PATRICK WHITE