Saturday, June 20, 2009

I STAND UPON NOTHING

I STAND UPON NOTHING

 

I stand upon nothing.

I stand for nothing.

And yet I stand.

I don’t know

if I’m holding anything up

like a torch or a flower

or taking it all in like quicksand

but the cup of the moon

breaks like feathers and stone on the water

whenever I walk like time alone through a desert

to the well at the end of the world

to take a drink.

Yesterday about two in the afternoon

among the tactical squirrels and birds

at the bottom of an ocean of trees

and the breeze cool fire on my skin,

I watched a thought resolve itself

like water in water,

breath on the wind

and for a moment

my mind seemed

like the loneliest of elements

without a place at the table

even below the salt,

infinitely disappearing into itself

like space, or a wave, or a solar flare

that puts its fire out in fire.

No thought. No mind. No one there

like a hidden secret

to seek illumination

in the shadow-waters of the trees

that have washed me out to sea

like another eye in the ocean,

rain in an empty boat,

seeing without a seer,

the mirror that drowns in the mirror

looking for clarity

like water in water

worlds within worlds

or a jewel that burns like a heretic

for its inexhaustible rarity

in the fires of its unwitnessed purity.

I watch the array of greens

the sunlight mixes

on a low-hanging palette of leaves,

the ruined kisses of the purple tulips

bluing their blood in the unweeded garden

beside the yellow lilies

and there’s paint all over my fingers

like pollen on a bee

but the colours my eyes can see

are not the clear colours of my senses,

six waves of the same reality,

so whatever the mind paints

on the black mirror or the white,

is the same eye of inconceivable night

ripening the light in its seeing

like a drop of dew

at the end of a blade of stargrass

heavier than a bell, an arrow, an apple, a word

with the unreserved sweetness of being.

 

PATRICK WHITE