Monday, January 30, 2012

WHAT DO WE KNOW?


WHAT DO WE KNOW?

for Simon and Samantha

What do we know, what does all our knowledge amount to
in these infinite spaces of ours, within and without,
if not less than nothing, perhaps a single hair
in the endless vastness of these abysmal depths
that keep on blooming within us black rose after black rose,
moon-face after sun-face?
And in these realms of transformation
where everything is once, once only for everything,
no second thought, no second person, no witness
or revision, no retrieval once held like water or sand in our hands,
and gone, implacably, purely, time flowing into time;
in this dream without bridges, what
does all our feeling, all the ore we haul up out of our secret heart-mines
and refine in the fires of our desires and longings
over the long labour of a lifetime amount to
if not the flaring of a match in aeonic fathoms of darkness?
Isn’t this life, for all that we say in silence and words, unsayable?
And when we reach for one another, strange auroras
of light and love coursing through our blood
like the mystical horses that graze in the pastures of the moon,
don’t our hands always turn into water
and the radiance that filled the empty bag of our hearts
like August sugars in an apple orchard
leak out of our exaltations,
a refugee line of dead stars pouring out of a defeated country,
sand from a cracked hourglass?
What can we hold here of one another,
even if we become the high priest of the holiness
that shines in the shrines of another’s eyes; even if
we lay our lives down like a patched robe of blood
on the stairs of the temple, small religions to one another
and walk naked and unmasked down the world mountain
back to the crude hovel of a valley heart
that has spent itself completely; what have we achieved
that is anything more than melting snow and mountain streams
washing themselves clean of themselves?
We can whisper like the sea in another’s ear
vows of forever that are written in water by the wind;
or under the closed eyelids of our private skies,
drunk on the dream-wine, replace all our own most intimate stars
with the bright constellations of another’s being
to live in one house of fate together, abdicating our own
like a northern crown. We can do all this and more, so adept
have we become in our grasping and rejecting,
so ingeniously desperate have we grown over the millennia
at weaving moonlight on the black waters of the lake
into the most elaborate tapestries of delusion,
or hiving sunlight out of wildflowers into white gold
to marry a world that keeps slipping out of our immaculate rings
into a blind, mute night so remote it eludes
even its own shadows and echoes. Constantly
offering ourselves like gifts to love, life, destiny, leaves on the wind,
risking annihilation and immaculate ashes,
why do we keep on waking up, returned to ourselves,
address unknown, slumped across own lonely thresholds?
If the world today, if this little wink of eternity
seems so often like a small black match-head
curled into the charred monk of a question-mark
that has swallowed the dancing flame of its own answer;
if people and events seem vicious, greedy, and ignorant,
junkyard dogs posted around heaps of corpses and cars,
the sprawl and scrawl of wreckage and disappointment,
the litter of flies on a winter windowsill
that exhausted themselves against the ice and glass,
looking for an opening; what is it all,
the violence, the drugs, the indifference, the subtle poisons,
the corporate leeches, if not the desecration
of the unattainable, acid-rain hissing on the rose-fire,
the obscenity of human lovelessness?
And yet, even in the midst of such obvious defeat,
crippled by angels and demons alike, we go on longing
to touch and be touched, dry seas on the moon
waiting, how long, how long now, for the return of even so much
as a single drop of all the rivers we’ve lost, we go on
yearning to embrace o not just
the fragile vase of her body crammed with flowers,
or the pillar of his, adorned by passionate torches,
but the mystery of the night and the slumped hills
disappearing into the bird-voice of the distance, we go on
aching to have all of it poured insanely into us
like closet drunkards chugging the stars. No feet, still,
we’ll crawl down the coal-road on all fours for a taste of flowing diamond; blind,
yet we’ll paint worlds on the back of our eyelids
and shed them like the petals of peonies
just for a glimpse of the ineffable beloved
always disappearing around the corners of our seeing.
Excruciating razors of pain might slash us open again and again,
clear skies and all their unread, lyrical scriptures
be run through a paper-shredder in hasty evacuations of the heart,
and yet even in the grave, the green leaf of a phoenix wing
stirs, unknowingly, the ashes, so relentlessly are we infused
with this strange and marvelous hunger to love.
It’s easy enough after all these years and weddings for us
to turn the waters of being into wine, but how
to turn the wine into us so that we are always drunk on joy,
the heart an inexhaustible fountain-mouth full of singing birds
because we know, because we have always known, even
before we were born, even before the mind made the body
and we arrayed ourselves as the world,
as rivers, stars, stones and trees, that our very being, every action
and agency of our lives, every breath, every cell,
and the small, silent voice that assents within,
that offers its worldless yes to another, is love, is reality, is
the mountain that makes the valley
it falls from itself to fill. Immersed in love,
we go looking for love with our hands our heads our hearts on fire,
bewailing the futility of the looking, the finding, the losing,
pilgrim waves wandering across an infinite sea of love,
we keep breaking on alien shores in our search for love
only to be drawn back into love. Fish in water
and yet we go on crying out of thirst. How amazing!
Under the stones of ourselves, diamonds; warm rivers of gold,
and even in the clashing of our hardened hearts,
a spark, a firefly, a hundred million stars of love released
like the fragrance of a single flower, or hidden bird-song on a green bough,
love calling out to love so unfailingly
that the whole of the world to the furthest star
is created anew in every second by the instantaneous answering.
That’s what we are, have been, since before
the beginningless beginning of all things, love
revealing itself to itself in the perfection of its own inseparable being,
that’s our original face, our original home, the light-seed
of this orchard world. Do you understand?
This world is so completely, absolutely, nothing but love
that even the darkest sky bends down to kiss the dawn on the forehead,
and not an atom moves in space
but moves burning through the fires of love at the behest of love.
Why look for what you already are; why, impossibly, try
to scoop the moon’s reflection from the water,
hoping to drink immeasurably from love’s elusive madness
when you are already the goblet and the wine, the grape and the vine?
Just this once, turn the light around, and look inside yourselves
as if you were an unmarked box, a secret gift
left on the doorstep in the night by an intimate stranger
and discover for yourself the origin without end
of all your looking. Without thinking, without reasoning
or the torment of why, open yourself up like an orphan’s empty hand
and discover the dark, priceless, living jewel of love
whose mysterious shining has always been the you that is looked for
and the you that has done the looking, love
looking into its own eyes like a star
looking into a flower, or an echo returning to the voice on the branch
that gave birth to it, or here, today,
at this mingling of veils and waters
where love whispers Sam and Simon answers out of the silence, yes,
and soon we’ll all be out dancing together, married to each other unsayably,
ten thousand moons in ten thousand windows,
ten thousand brides of light
in ten thousand grooms of dew
joyfully beyond denial and affirmation
in ten thousand wall-less rooms of light
rippling out through this endless summer night
like the pulse of a single heart, a single jump of the fish,
a small drum of blood beating out in the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of these vast vivid spaces:
not two. not two. not two. not two.

PATRICK WHITE

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