Friday, December 9, 2011

TRYING TO SETTLE DOWN INTO THE SIMPLICITY OF MY WILDNESS

TRYING TO SETTLE DOWN INTO THE SIMPLICITY OF MY WILDNESS

Trying to settle down into the simplicity of my wildness

inside a clearing in a grove of Long Bay birch,

one pine reflected perfectly on the sunset calm

of the intervening water. Just sit here,

not meditating, not painting, not trying to pose

the environment to suit the mood of the poet

or indulging in the anti-pathetic fallacy

that I’m somehow exempt from all of this.

I see. But I’m not looking.

I hear. But I’m not listening.

The beavers give me the benefit of the doubt

and decide I’m not there after all

and go on working around me

like another troublesome, harmless obstacle.

Nothing lonelier than the call of a crow in autumn

as it hones its beak like a sword that’s gone rusty

on the branch it’s perched on

and tries again and again

to figure out what’s wrong

by waiting for an answer that never comes.

It’s a black blob on the ink-blotter of the moon

rising almost full to the west

of a Pearl Harbour spiked with the masts

of a sunken fleet of trees in port,

a quarter-note, a misplaced comma,

an apostrophe that doesn’t belong to anyone.

I surround it with the similitudes

it engenders in me associatively

and enter crow mind

like a diamond travelling back in time

to when it was anthracite.

And don’t think of the diamond

as solid adamantine translucency

because it flows, it ripens, it falls, it weeps

like a supple absolute in play with everything

the way water is

when you pour it out of the grail,

out of the elaborate lattice-work

of a thematic atomic principle

that binds the whole to every particulate

like flypaper coiled the opposite way,

an hourglass turned upside down

like an empty hemisphere at last call

just as the Sahara returns

to nimble Capsians, antelope and grasslands

due to a change in the climate of time.

I enter the immensity of the crow

like a wingspan wavelengths wider than mine

and I’m horrified by the depths of its solitude

and how, like coal, like diamond, like me

before the diamonds thawed

its most dangerous wish was

to be consumed in the fire of what it longed for,

to break into flames and disappear.

And for the very first time

my third eye cried a tear

like an insight into the sadness

that makes light of the world

like a sacred clown that’s scared to death.

And then its partner came like a delinquent eclipse

that distracted both of us

from the intensity of the clarity

that was setting fire to the clouds all around us

in the damp, autumn sunset,

and they flew off like ashes in an updraft

and I was left sitting here alone

with one of my eyes put out

like a cold fire pit

the stars return to every night

like the highlights of the stories

I made up about them

to bridge the distance between us,

hoping I’ll add a new twist to the plot

like another branch on the fire

they first took their shining from

when we were all full of stories

that were lyrical, lonely and young.

Radiant with despair to know

what we were all doing here

trying to read each other’s minds

as if everyone of us kept a secret

so deeply within ourselves

we didn’t know about it

and weren’t in on it

because that’s how open and apparent it was.

PATRICK WHITE

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