YOU'RE ALREADY STANDING IN THE LIGHT

YOU’RE ALREADY STANDING IN THE LIGHT

 

You’re already standing in the light

but you keep turning around

to inspect your own shadow

for signs of yourself.

And like most people

you think love means

you’ve got to stay

but love’s a sweeter intimacy

deeper within

when it grows to mean

you’re free to go

because when love is real

instead of solid

there’s nowhere in all these worlds within worlds

the universe is ever separate from itself.

Which means the mind can’t be either.

Or the heart.

Or a lover from a lover.

Hey

that almost sounds like wisdom

but I wisely assure you it’s not

anymore than the colour blue is.

Love doesn’t institutionalize

its passion for madness

in the bones and stones of a church

like the new moon in the old moon’s arms.

It’s doesn’t sucuumb to the big clues

about who you is

and then train its thought

like a seeing-eye dog

to keep it on the right path.

Love doesn’t take the chaos out of its art

like the genius of a housefly

out of wet paint

you’re hoping to sell to the purists

as an expression of how beautiful the world is

when you leave everything out.

And it’s as easy as it is forgiveable enough

to fall in love like Icarus

who flew too close to the sun

into the blackhole of a plunging I.Q.

but love doesn’t dumb down to the heart in anything.

It adds itself like nothing to one

and one is amplified tenfold

like an expanding universe

way ahead of itself

like a star ahead of its light.

You learn to feel with your head

and think with your heart.

You begin to realize

what idiocy it is

to be smart

in a world full of insight.

You see what’s wise about madness.

You see what’s foolish about wisdom.

You see that your blood’s full of dark secrets

it keeps from the heart

on a need-to-know basis

that keeps an eye on your art

when no one’s around at night

like a streetlight in the snow.

The mystery of how to make love stay

is the mystery

of how to make the mystery stay.

I think Tom Robbins wrote that.

But you look into the mystery

and the clues get in the way.

Love sees this in that

but you’re always looking

from the inside out

for that in this

and you miss everything that way.

There’s no room in the window for the moon.

There’s no time of day in your eyes.

You wait for love in ambush

hoping to be surprised.

Longing is to love

what emptiness is to a cup.

Something to be filled up.

But you’ve turned into an expert

on what you haven’t realized.

You might know a lot

about being a sunrise in waiting

and when it’s best

to raise the blinds like eyelids

and let the light in.

But love doesn’t try to fix the fireflies

like the stars of a distant zodiac

in a homely mason jar

to keep faith with the future like jam

over a long winter on an isolated farm.

Love is the lunatic

that unscrews the lid

of the full moon

to let the light

in the arms of its journey

find its way home alone through the night

knowing when the stars are out

even the dirt shines

with constellations of its own

that are as high-minded as any starmap

that ever traced it ancestry

all the way back to you.

But love bleeds red.

Not blue.

And just as light

isn’t the pariah of dark matter

that was cast out for shining beyond itself

love isn’t a misfit

unworthy of a perfect universe

just the way it is.

 

PATRICK WHITE