I'M FLYING UNDER THE LIGHT

I’M FLYING UNDER THE LIGHT

I’m flying under the light to avoid detection.

There. That’s the first line. A cornerstone.

Maybe water, granite or quicksand

but the cosmic glain

is cracked open like a skull

to extract the message from the fortune-cookie.

The second line comes easier

though it hasn’t come yet.

I’m waiting like a crematorium at the end of my cigarette.

Yes. Hot coffins for cool people.

Like it. Where’s the rest?

A mirror looks into my face

and sees the enlightened folly of creation

is not the work of a clown.

Forgive the little arrogant flag of flame

I’ve been trying to raise

out of a nation of ashes

like an arsonist with noble aspirations.

I’ve looked up at too many stars over the years

not to see beyond my next breath

like a cloud of unknowing,

a road of ghosts,

into the sweeping clarity

of the silence and the darkness

that have unmarrowed me like a bone

to grow new organs of light, new senses,

new eyes and hearts and minds

that are free of the ferocities of night

that consume them death by death

in unextinguishable fire.

It’s a mode of compassion

I can’t get off my chest,

my way of venting with tears in my eyes

when I consider what becomes of us

who stood here once in the high starfields

alone in an opening between the groves

and gave our eyes back to the sky like water

that tasted of too much suffering

to be sweetened like an apple by grief

or provide us with a vision of relief

that floats better

than all these lifeboats of belief

we’ve overturned.

Time’s refugees,

even in the donated tents of these bones,

flapping like skin in a desert wind,

only our homelessness is our own.

Like stars and dirt and leaves

we’re swept off the stairs

across thresholds, out the door

and into the dustpans of our own eyes

whenever we think about putting down roots

and waking up beside our own boots

like bodies that walked all the way with us

to a known address and a bed

we didn’t share with the dead.

Even when the moon is full and beautiful

I can hear the clacking castanets

of the crabs and the pebbles

rounded like skulls in the tides

of the untold myriads

that have come and gone like the sea.

To be so much and then nothing,

to be washed clean of everything you cherish

to watch the dyes run like blood and paint

or arsonists from autumn leaves

when your mind has lucked out

like a watercolour in the rain

and your brain unspools like mud.

Sometimes I think my awareness

is no more than the smear

of an incidental rainbow

on a distended bubble

whose inflation always

snaps back on itself in tears.

I prick myself on the thorn of a star

and let my eyes pop into vaster skies

and almost convince myself

that our bodies are crushed like grapes

to deepen the abyss of the wines

that bleed us into oblivion.

Or life is a dream without a dreamer,

fireflies in a well without an echo,

a magician so overcome by his own spell

there are doves flying out of his nostrils

and fish building nests in his brain like a tree

and yet he still can’t conceive

of what he pulled out of his hat.

And fulfilment may well be the enlightened flower

of the ignorant roots of desire

like the truth in the mouth of a liar

but I’m not assuming I’m a vegetable

and who knows,

when you put it all together

from the earth and the light and the rain

into one brain

I might be nothing more

than just another kind of weather

trying to take shelter

in this makeshift eye of the storm.

But do you see what I mean?

There’s no more continuity in being blind

than there is in looking into the face of God

and seeing the worlds within worlds

that seep like feelings into her thoughts

as if one world without a witness weren’t enough.

Words stumble here like physics

before its singularity

and are left like bodies and shoes

on the myriad thresholds of hyperspace

where the worlds pour into each other

like a waterclock of salmon

returning to the source of it all

like the pulse of the sea to the call

of the voiceless bell that gives birth

to all the unimaginable generations of time

that have wounded the faceless mirrors of eternity

by breaking the silence and serenity

of the well that would not answer

by dropping in like eyes

that disappear in waves

washing out their own reflections.

Sometimes it seems as if

there are only two kinds of people in the world:

those that are going and those that have gone.

Where did they go?

Where are they coming from?

Are we the only strangers on the road

and our inhospitable purpose, this passing?

When she leaned on the windowsill

and cradled her head in her hands

to watch the summer clouds

her arms were cormorants of light

and she wore the window awry like a crown.

And the old Japanese man

with hair whiter than moonlight

who used to apologize to the weeds

he uprooted all morning long

in the whisper of a language

only he could understand

for making a distinction.

Where have they gone

where eyes can go and see and come back

across the threshold of their extinction,

mile zero of a road that leads

everywhere all at once

like any point in the infinite space

of the expanding universe?

Why must we leave

the mystic particulars of our lives

like shoes and bodies and names

at the opening door of our bootless generalities?

These fingertips were kissed by a mother

who strung them tenderly

like ten little birds

ten little arrows

to the lips of her bow.

Now that they’ve flown

can anyone follow

the light into the unknown

or lift their reflections from the waters,

their shadows from the gound

like breadcrumbs and fingertips

to say where they’ve gone

or even more impossibly

find out where we are now

so they can find their way back to us?

Or is all that we ever were and will be

irrevocably lost

like the root in the flower

that passes it by

on its way into the open

where its eyelids fall away?

When I fall away from myself

like a drop of water

from the tongue of a leaf,

an unspoken word, a tear,

like rain on an autumn headstone

will the stone ripple

like the rings of a tree

to let you know

that the great sea of life

still jumps like a fish within me

to break through the immaculate

silence of the pond,

its undulant membrane of light,

like spring in the morning,

like a pulse of light beyond

the dark side of the mirror

that has never seen the moon,

that absorbs everything

like a cloak, or an oilslick,

an eclipse, a black hole

where things never appear,

to let you know I’m here. I’m here

where I have always been

where the joy of life transcends

its own thresholds of meaning

by parting its own waters

like the wake of a night passage

or the curtains of an open window

or a woman who opens her legs like a compass,

suffering her own felicity

to give birth to the shoreless sea,

drop by drop,

you and me

each moment we live

where death hasn’t laid down its threshold

and birth can’t get through its own gate

because the concepts have left no living ancestry

in this empty world of now

where we live, where we

have always lived,

our elbows on the horizon

like two moons on a windowsill,

wondering, longing, dreaming,

a breath, a veil, a mist

as we evaporate

like visions off the lakes of our eyes

into the great abyss of our unknowing

like a nightstream that lives

blindly belonging

to what’s going on, inexhaustibly.

PATRICK WHITE