Monday, July 18, 2011

ON INTO THE NEXT DIMENSION

On into the next dimension

like a measure of thought

sitting full lotus

on a flying carpet of feeling

that’s on the same wavelength as the stars.

I’ve been an intimate of windows long enough.

I trust them.

But they don’t shine.

They’re confined to the news

of what’s going on beyond them

that’s brought to them live

by skies they flip through

like old Time magazines in a doctor’s office.

Their eyes are long on views

but shy on visions.

Cataracts in the eye.

Flowers in the sky.

If you look through them long enough

you’ll kill all the wildflowers

in your field of vision

and your third eye

will start grinding lenses for a living

like Spinoza

for a spiritual telescope with myopia.

Clarity will start writing messages in your breath

you’re meant to take to heart

as you watch the universe shrinking

like expiry dates on the hot gusts of stars

evaporating like ghosts

from the cold glassy stares

of windowpanes

that have been crying in secret for years

because they’re not taken as seriously as mirrors.

It takes a rock of a will

and the passion of an angry delinquent

to break free of them

but once they’re broken

like the link of a koan

that liberated you from your own thought-chains

you can still see the whole in every piece

of the primordial atom

that precipitated the Big Bang

but it doesn’t get in the way of what’s beyond it.

You stop lifting fingerprints

as evidence that you exist

and start lifting veils

begin shedding skins

stop asking sacred clowns

if they can still recognize you

under all the facepaint

you use to express your emotions.

You let your masks blossom and blow away

like Ezra Pound’s images

of faces on a wet black bough of the subway.

You empty your streets

like a dangerous part of New York

and step out of the doorway

where you’ve been waiting for yourself

to return home.

You exchange the key to the lock

for a fork you can fly from a kite

like a lightning rod in an electrical storm

that sends the snake pit of serpent fire

that moved like a glacier in a dream of thawing

racing up your spine

like a dragon of life

urgent as spring rain

that sheds its scales

like waves and ripples of water

but wakes up feathered in flames.

And this time it’s the sun that drowns

for flying too close to Icarus

like the event horizon of a black hole

that smears its dimensions

like peanut butter

around the rim of a subliminal halo.

Free of the past

whatever you see

confirms your secret intuition

that the world hasn’t happened yet.

That everything you see

in the ubiquitous solitude

of your unwitnessed sentience

is merely prelude

to a greater event

that transcends

the inconceivability

of what’s self-evident about the present.

PATRICK WHITE