Wednesday, May 25, 2011

GREY SUNDAY PALLOR

Grey Sunday pallor.

Another church going morning in Perth.

The congregation risks getting a ticket

on their afterlife

for doubling parking.

It seems if you’re not being trod

like the grapes of wrath

at the feet of God

into the symbolic blood

of a wine-sipping saviour

you’re living off the backs

of sweating atoms

holding the world up on their shoulders

like an avalanche in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

Shakespeare where are you now?

I miss the homeliness

of your dream of the real world.

I want fire to be more intensely fire

and the ashs to be left unswept.

I want water to be more ponderous and wet

and the fields to have no extradition treaties

that didn’t send everybody back like wildflowers

all at the same time

to their point of orgin in a beginningless abyss.

I want to arise like a prophet in an aboriginal religion

that didn’t expect my coming

and say out loud

in five words

the whole of the perennial philsophy

we’re all native to this

that is arrayed before us now

like life on a habitable planet

whose only border is the wind

whose only flag is water.

Whose only moral suggestion

with respect to the conduct

of the mind the heart the hand the eye the ear

is keep them open.

No locks pleading like lost keys

at the doors of perception.

Peace rooted in the palm of your hand

beside the lifeline of a river

that isn’t impeded in its passage.

Compassion obsolete

because perfect empathy

has only one identity

and one passport

to go anywhere in the multiverse it wants

where the rights of humans

are written in light

and signed sealed delivered in blood

that makes them citizens of life

without anyone else’s approval.

Created in the image of God

who doesn’t live alone with their originality

without an image or a face or a shadow

contemplating the creation of worlds

to mask the unknowable with the known?

Every identity is a lie

that believes it’s telling the truth

but matter is energy and emptiness congealed

in a bosonic force field

that cries on both sides of the mirror at once.

God was a hidden secret who wished to be known.

But the minute you know one

there are two

ad infinitum.

So truer to the image of God

than an exponential simulacrum

that doesn’t bear any resemblance to the original

is not to have one.

So I’m the empty atom

of the little piggy

who had none.

The less I know about things

the more I experience them

as the earthly specifics

of my own cosmic mystery.

The moon is the fruit and blossom of my roots

who remember them

as previous incarnations of a lifeline

between heaven and earth.

I think of the planet as a sentient life form

that’s as dispassionately aware of us

as we are passionately ignorant of it.

And I marvel sometimes

at the disparity between the message

and the messenger

at the optical illusion of a thought

that clings to the notion

that it knows its own mind.

And wonder if we’re merely the functionaries

of a vaster intra-terrestrial intelligence

with the wisdom of the life of the seas in its eyes

and in its heart

compassion for all the generations of the dead

who animated its art

like models in the studio

of a painter who liked to work from life.

When I write.

When I paint.

I always think it’s dangerous

to become so identified with the work

I think it’s my own.

That’s why I get lost in it

bury my name in its solitude

and wander through a mindscape

where nothing looks like home.

Just like the river Heraclitus

couldn’t step into twice

unless he was up in over his head

everytime I write

I have to learn a new language.

Everytime I paint

the colours don’t have the same eyes

I looked into yesterday.

Thought travels faster than the velocity of light

but it isn’t a constant

and feeling at the speed of sound.

When you put the pedal to the metal of time

like dark energy

things expand so fast

that tomorrow’s extremes

are already today’s cliches.

I don’t want to be diminished by a Theory of Everything

that blinds Paul on the road to Los Alamos

like a snowman with lumps of coal for eyes

in a nuclear test site.

I wasn’t persecuting anyone in the first place

so I’ve never needed divine intervention

to bring about a change of heart

when change is the only thing it’s ever known

from the very start.

Life is the kite at the end of a long wavelength

in the hand of a star

that eventually taught it to fly on its own

by letting it go

to come back home alone when it’s called.

Fourteen hundred and seventy five c.c.s of starmud.

My brain.

Seven thousand trillion trillion atoms.

My body.

The depths of space

the volume of my eyes.

The Big Bang the age of my ears.

I’m a unifying field theory of becoming

not a unified field theory of what is

and I don’t see how I can have

a meaningful relationship with matter

if matter isn’t a matter of mind

not over anything

because in the whole of creation

as it is in the abyss

nothing is the underling of anything else.

Regardless of its time and measure

everything is a whole note

in the creative collaboration

of an unfinished song

that interrupts the silence

with sounds of life.

With the picture-music

of the nightbird in the hidden grove

that’s a dead-ringer for the mind

that reveals the song

but conceals the singer.

Everyone can hear it

but no one can see it.

You can listen to all the ghosts

of all the millions of voices

buried in the grave of a dead metaphor

and still not be able to know how

to breathe life into words

so their meaning is a living experience

of the unsayable mystery

that inspires them

to speak to themselves

like someone whistling through the dark

like an echo of mirrors.

A word is a word.

A thought is a thought.

A kite is a kite.

A hawk is a hawk.

If you don’t try to make one live

like the lie of the other

by keeping them both on a tether

you can learn to fly like the wind

without keeping an eye on the weather.

You stop pulling the flightfeathers out of your pen

like arrows out of your heart

and your heels sprout wings

like the stars in the Great Square of Pegasus

like snakes become dragons

like worms become butterflies

like the medium becomes the god

of the message it delivers

like a lock to a key

that sets the lock free

of having to keep everything in.

Religion.

Religio.

To bind.

What?

The human spirit

to the rosaries of the slavers

who compel it to servitude?

The raptures and excruciations

of two extremes of death

two visions of the same junkie

talking in his sleep

like a dream on crystal meth.

The one who thinks he’s the secret partner of life

writes his name in stone.

The one who practises necromancy

with his own shadow

and reveres his own lie

like a sacred object

everyone must bow down to

entrusts his mind to ink and horn.

He binds the spirit of the word

to the letter of the law.

Everyone is guilty

until they’ve earned their innocence.

The most absurd thing about common sense

when it testifies before a jury of mirrors

is that the more it disappears

the more it’s mistaken

for prima facie evidence

to verify the quick convictions of its peers.

But the eternal sky

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds

and I’ve got a whatever gets you through the night attitude

like a long wavelength of compassion

like a sure sign of intelligent life

from the other side of the universe

that eases the mutuality of our suffering

by realizing there’s nothing alien about life.

And it’s not so much a matter of life

reaching out to life

like someone who can teach us about ourselves

as it is

someone to talk to.

Someone to walk beside like a river.

Not a highway to heaven

or a shortcut to hell.

I have relative faith

in the interdependence of my originality.

In the whole history of the universe

there’s only been everyone of me.

Why should I ask the windows

what direction to look in

when I’ve got eyes of my own

with holographic vision

that can see further

than the eyebeams

of the gravitational lenses

fixed at both ends of a telescopic black hole

projecting itself on the universe

like Batman caught in the glare

of an antimatter flashlight?

Why should I live like a gibbering shade

in the afterlife of my own lucidity

when I’ve got it made now?

I can tell a silk purse from a cow’s ear.

The dark clarity of an enlightened heretic

from the occult magic

in the bones of a martyred relic.

There is as much of the night in me

as there are stars in my eyes.

What does the wind worship

if not the sky?

And what could be more false

than trying to true the idols of I?

Woman wasn’t made from the rib of the first wishbone

like the short end

of something that sticks in your throat

like a harp in a chimney

and I can’t imagine any supreme being

being way more vindictive in hell

to the people he loved and couldn’t save

from the wanderlust of their earthly dust

gusting up along their path to salvation

like a dirt demon blowing stars in their eyes

than Hitler was in Poland and Stalingrad.

Immortal punishments

for ephemeral war-crimes on crusade?

If the water doesn’t turn to wine

when it first touches your lips

at the wedding of Canaa

you’re sipping from an eclipse

of black cool-aid in Jonestown

that tastes like spit

you drink from other men’s mouths.

What fool conducts his own life

like a foreign policy with God

as if a wavelength of insight

were opening trade relations

with the great nightsea of awareness.

I like to read scripture

that’s never learned to write

that’s as eloquent as water

when it says its secret name

like two rat snakes swimming in moonlight

like echoes of one another

returning to the far shore

of the mysterious voice that summons them

like a spring thaw

to express themselves creatively

without brainwashing their gene-pool

into believing

that in the rainbow of life

they’re the evil wavelength.

Why do people expect God

to teach them a language they already speak?

And when she doesn’t say a word

ask someone else to do the talking for them

like a medium channeling the infallibly dead?

Who needs an air raid siren to translate

the lyrics of a songbird

into a purple passage of life

that understands every word of it

like first light?

Grey Sunday pallor

of another churchgoing morning in Perth.

I love to mix the infinite prolixity of pragmatic greys

that are engendered by the union

of complementary colours

island hopping like new lava

on the palette of my eyes

as if grey were the third extreme

without an opposite

because it didn’t cast a shadow

at midnight or noon

whether it stood in the light

of Venus

the sun

or the moon.

The third wing on a phoenix

in the mystical ashes of billions of stars

I like to fly down the middle with intensity

when the fire refeathers the wind in my flames

and words overturn the urns of their old meanings

in sacred precipices

and holy mindstreams

to go with the flow of the picture-music

like the lyrics of a dream

they wrote the words to.

My emptiness is a watershed of inspiration

I can draw on anytime I like

without fear of depleting

my spiritual aquafers.

I’m an hospitable well

who doesn’t judge strangers

by what we all have in common with water

or whether they can tell a mirage from the real thing.

PATRICK WHITE