Friday, May 7, 2010

LILACS AND CRAB-APPLES IN BLOSSOM

LILACS AND CRAB-APPLES IN BLOSSOM

 

Lilacs and crab-apples in blossom

and here and there a wild cherry

abandoned in an old farmyard

like an unfashionable chandelier

that kept on dancing with itself

long after the stars went out.

If for nothing else I was born

to tell the trees how beautiful they are.

What an elegance and grace of earth.

Embodiments of time in the concrete.

Brides at the weddings of matter.

The solid become real. Mind

when it gives up looking for itself.

Fountains and clouds.

Life whispering into its own ear

about the birds and the bees

in a native language of its own

that blooms like the demotic tongues

of a Babylonian renaissance

that doesn’t need a translation.

Life says so much without meaning to.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


YOU'RE FREE TO BE FREE

YOU’RE FREE TO BE FREE

 

You’re free to be free.

You’re free to be bound.

Attachment too is a Buddha activity.

Unborn

there’s no need to begin.

No beginning.

No end.

Draw your own conclusions

but don’t be a small snake

and get swallowed by a larger.

Move on according to your own wavelength

and let go of everything

like a myth of skin

like a tatoo you just had removed

now that the romance is over

and time’s fallen out of love with eternity.

Separation where there should be love.

Modernity’s the ultimate divorce.

We’ve disinherited the planet.

And all our children

are spiritually illegitimate.

Boo hoo

plays a little blue violin

on the streetcorner

outside the bank

and runs to buy a rock

he can crank like music

with the small change

of compassionate passers-by.

I’m alive now as I ever was

and I’m not a time-traveler from the sixties

having been here all along

but I was young in that generation

and if we were better than anybody at anything

I think it was

we didn’t lie to our imagination.

But I wouldn’t bet on it

knowing the mind’s greatest virtue

is not that it remembers so much

but that it knows so easily how to forget.

Smoke is not the historian of the fire.

Shadows are not the ink of the light.

Thoughts don’t know if there’s a mind

anymore than you know

if there’s a god

and your feelings have never heard of a heart

that makes a damn bit of difference.

Each of these things has a life of its own

but death doesn’t know anything about life

and what is there for life to live through

that can only live through itself

like water being a fish

that you could possibly experience as death?

Does the fish swim out of the water?

Does the bird fly out of the sky?

The great sea of awareness sheds its sky like skin

and swims on through itself.

You can’t pour the universe out of the universe.

Water finds the witching wand

like seeing finds the star

that’s been following it.

You are what you are what you are

and that’s not a consolation

not a victory or defeat

not Buddhas at your feet

or the chains of your leftover freedom.

It’s not Merlin killing stones with chemical Excaliburs

or the curse of a heavy life even Atlas couldn’t lift.

It’s the mystic specificity

of your own irreversible life

flowing down the mountains of matter 

saying you into existence

every moment of it

like water talking to itself in the womb.

And time speaks with a human voice

about the sadness of its passing

and the eye that seeks the seer

looks in all the best directions

for the jewel of its enlightenment

like a mirror held up to space

looking back at its own unshapely face.

And that’s who we are

when we don’t stop to think about it.

We’re not lumps of intelligence

in the dark matter of it all

or crude approximations

of futures that never happen.

Our lives our lies our truths

our sorrows and joys

our love and disappointment

our foolishness and wisdom

our compassion and savagery

the things we keep faith with

and the things we betray

everything we are

and everything we are not

aren’t the masters of the medium of us

as if we were the stuff

the universe worked with

to shape small statues of itself

like a terracotta army it could take to the tomb

as a precautionary keepsake or momento mori.

We’re not the story of heroic elements

transcending themselves

around a periodic table.

That’s just another scientific fable

about the subjugation of Tiamat by Marduk

and how humans were made out of the filth

of her dismembered son Kingu

to serve the gods like faithful dogs.

White dwarfs shrinking heads into blackholes

as if oxygen could be enslaved by hydrogen

and her bitter tears turn into water.

And hydrogen beget helium

and helium begat carbon

and carbon beget us

like a polygamist at an orgy with oxygen.

Cowards coerce power with superstition

like mind maggots replacing the seeds

in the core of the apple of knowledge.

True gods don’t need to be served.

And real love doesn’t demand you do anything.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


YOUR PICTURE SEEMS VERY COMPOSED

YOUR PICTURE SEEMS VERY COMPOSED

Your picture seems very composed. As if you were trying to believe in yourself. But a rose is a rose is a rose and yours is dark and beautiful as if your heart knocked and the night let it in. I hope one day the dance of love chance and occasion lets me sleep with you like a dragon in advance of the rain. I’ve never slept with an eclipse before but I’ve heard they swallow you whole. If you’ll forgive me for taking this small moment out of my cathedral and choir to be kind to my lust. Someone left it like an orphan on the stairs. I think it’s yours but it keeps calling me by my name like a moth to a candleflame like lightning to a firefly that wants to get higher by deepening the darkness with a glorious death. You brood. You allure. There are bruises on your arm. You’re an amateur celibate. Your broken vows are fortune-cookies that forsake themselves like ostrakons. It must be dangerous being a beautiful woman. A siren on the moon summoning her waves back like shadows she once exiled like the tides of providence she didn’t take. You’re a precipice but you look like an island where the drowned sailors wash up on the shores of your flesh with smiles on their faces. And can you see, even as far off as you are, my little white sail on your event horizon like a feather from the wings of Icarus making his way toward the sun that shines like you at midnight?

PATRICK WHITE