DOES THE EYE OF THE RAIN

DOES THE EYE OF THE RAIN

Does the eye of the rain know it’s a tear?

Does that ray of light know

that even at night

it’s a revolutionary among flowers?

Between the giver and the given

between a human and his god

between a human and her void

the gift of a gift of a gift.

And the gifts aren’t hidden

even when you cover your eyes.

I saw a baglady the other day

who hadn’t given it all away yet

who was positively beatific

in an atmosphere

that only she could breathe

but the shining under her rags

told me she lived on light.

She was a waterlily in a swamp.

And I wondered if she knew it.

What I don’t know I intuit

so even if she did

how could that add

one drop of bliss

to an abyss that was already full?

Experience makes a gift of a school.

The blossom grants the apple its absence.

The wind is Johnny Appleseed.

Or the mad old farmer at the end of his life

that was seen hanging on to the tail

of a black bull

in the backwoods of Westport

sowing the groves with grain.

So the birches had bread

he gave away his brain.

So the dead know

we haven’t departed

we leave them our pain

in the company of flowers.

Things don’t have origins.

They have givers.

Even in math

giving is an axiomatic fact.

Does the sumac know it’s a phoenix in the fall?

The lifework of a universe

in every eyelash

in every bud on the locust tree

in every branch of coral on the moon.

If the all were not whole in the least of us

all things would cease to exist.

Life wouldn’t be possible

if it ever short-changed itself,

watered a gram,

diluted the whiskey

thinned our blood like a mosquito.

Life would be an also-ran

that didn’t quite make it to the moon.

Does the stone

that forged it out of fire and iron

know it’s giving Excalibur

back to the water?

Or the magician his wand?

The diviner his witching rod?

The poet his computer?

Giving isn’t a moral vow

you make to the universe.

It’s the way we survive.

Say one word truly in any language

and you’ve endowed the gift of speech

on inanimate things that were mute

about all the things they had to tell you

in your own voice.

This is not mysticism.

This is not science.

This is not the Uncertainty Principle

of some random atomic spiritual life.

I’m not drinking my reflection

from the wellspring of a mirror.

It’s as clear as a chandelier.

You can’t keep

what you won’t give away.

And it isn’t the giver.

It isn’t the given.

It’s the giving that’s crucial.

The Buddha gave Ananda a rose.

I don’t know what kind of flower it was for sure

but let’s suppose.

It isn’t the rose that’s famous

it’s the giving that has come down to us

through the years

thorns and all

heart to heart

hand to hand

human to human

rose petals on the mindstream.

The enlightened dreams

of an unattainable man.

If you’re cosmic ice,

absolute Kelvin,

dispassionate as entropy,

profound as blue glass

to an ancient Roman

you’re still not sublime

until you learn to give it all away.

Empty the urns of the fireflies

like the ghosts of earthbound insights

and scatter their ashes on the wind

and they’ll tell you how

to light the night up

and play like water

that doesn’t know how to live any other way.

Giving took water for a body

as soon as it saw how beautiful

the wild iris and blue narcissus were.

Wisdom is water.

Compassion is water.

And there’s no end of the modes of it.

Water is the light’s favourite mirror.

And the most fun.

And what are we

if not clouds

if not wombs

cut off from the sea like kites,

if not sacks of water,

fruit that leaks like a crucified pear

hoping if we’ve got to be poured out of ourselves

like pitchers

it’s over a garden.

Chandeliers of rain when we cry,

even the windows have learned

to weep along with us,

glaciers and glass,

slow inexorable tears

that like to linger on the past

as if their futures weren’t the past

just gone on ahead of them

to greet them when they come.

Like a garden in the fall

that gives what it’s got left to the birds,

However you think

you’ve emptied the cup of the moon,

such is the generosity of water

there’s always one last

unfathomable watershed of a drop left

to give back to the water-giver.

And when you do

pour it away from you

like Dogen Zenji

or someone who has drunk their fill

in a single gulp

from the bowl of their skull

as a sign of respect for the river.

PATRICK WHITE