NO RAY OF THE STAR

NO RAY OF THE STAR

No ray of the star in the lead,

none following, no one vector of light,

the compass needle for all the rest.

Eye to eye, side by side,

like the spikes of an onion gone to seed,

companionship and parity,

even after billions of light years,

every one’s still shining among their peers.

Even your best efforts

to make it all into one when it already is,

are in musical harmony

like dissonance in jazz

with every wavelength of heart and mind

in a great creative collaboration

with every thread on the loom of a flying carpet

as big as the universe, growing

into the vast expanse of the chaos

it’s spinning itself out of like the three fates,

the daughters of night with their thread and shears

severing the lifelines of passion birth and death.

Let them. Because there’s a little green thread of love

coiling around your spinal column like serpent fire

that can’t be cut by scissors or tears,

a dragon of dna with rainbow chromosomes

riding the stairwells and thermals of its own flames

like a wild grape vine, or trout lilies

down by the night creek

holding up their blossoms

like masterpieces to the stars

apprenticed to their shining

like one genius to another

revealing what can be done with light

when everyone’s working in the same medium.

Every star, a kiss on the eyelids

of a wildflower in a far field

that’s gone back to seed for a while,

every rose and mushroom alike.

Every ray of light, a mystic spear

through the heart of a disbelieving telescope

that’s just had a major revelation

not only about the true nature

of the radiance within

but the ore of the darkness

that includes it like a diamond close to its heart.

Every lucid needle in the haystack,

in the pin cushion of every star,

laying out the pattern of a constellation

like a star map with a ray of light in its teeth,

and every angel that dances thereon,

and every angel that keeps its place under a stone

as a junkie London poet once wrote,

and every demon of a black dwarf

that gave its all and everything up

until there was nothing left but a black hole

or a massive cosmic match head that’s burnt out

like the ashen bud of a heretic that bloomed in fire

like the seeds under the eyelids

of the pine-cone of a Zen pagoda,

and returned the universe to the darkness it came from

like a child it discovered wandering

too far from home without a threshold of its own,

is patching the wounds of the sacred clowns

with the whole cloth of the rags they’re standing in

with roses and rainbows at midnight

and big ripe tears in a windfall of pears

that keep falling to their destiny

without realizing they’re plunging toward paradise

every time they lose their grip on things.

In my unified field theory,

whether you call it fana, nirvana, tauhid,

the godhead, the plenum void, the blaze,

the rapture, dropping off body and mind

once the Japanese plum blossoms

have turned into fruit and realized

no sweetness in the apple bloom

no ripeness in the apple, God,

Brahma on his lotus, Muhammad on Buraq,

Jesus on the cross, Moses on the mountain,

or you’ve just had a serious falling out with your lover,

in a world so boundlessly unified

we have to resort to stars for boundary stones

like illusory barriers between too much and too little,

where the sweet water meets the salt;

in my intimately impersonal skew

of the crazy wisdom of what’s happening here,

the most accurate thing

you can whisper like a poem

into your neighbour’s or lover’s ear,

is not two, not two, not two, like the vital pulse

of a musical cult of oxymorons

at a gathering of opposites in the wilderness,

everything clings to one another inseparably

like the primordial atom to its table of contents,

like a fish to water, a bird to air,

a star to the darkness, the heart and the mind

to every thought and emotion

of the space-time continuum it works in,

or insight into the mystery that inspires it

to go looking for more grails

than there are ailing kingdoms

to hold them up to their lips

like rain on ripe blackberries

or the full moons of magic mushrooms

because every drop of rain’s a grail in itself.

For every star, an imaginary number

of lifemasks like metaphors

as many as there are flowers

and children of the earth to wear them

as if dressing up for life were the embodiment

of how awareness made its first appearance

like a hidden secret that wished to be known

through an infinite number

of ongoing myriad things all at once forever.

Ergo: we’re all in the same lifeboat together

looking for one and the same threshold

in our homelessness like rogue planets

dancing around one another as if each

were in reach of the sun of the other,

sister, brother, and lover, mother and father,

bonded by the light and life

we’ve all been looking for long before

we were born to shine upon one another like this

as if there were no difference

between the crests and valleys

of one wave and another,

our fullness and our emptiness

on the great night sea of the abyss

that is always as pregnant with us

as it is with the membranous wombs of the multiverse

whenever we kiss in deep hyperspace

and a whole new world gets off on us.

In this realm everyone receives one another

like a gift they weren’t expecting

and are never sure they deserve,

down to the last atom of the drunk in the doorway,

the exile in the embassy yard

looking for sanctuary in his own country

by asking you to let him in

like the angel of immigrants in disguise,

like a teen age girl on the sidewalk,

crying like a star-crossed chandelier of rain

shattered like a crystal slipper at her feet

into the plinths and shards of a constellation

you can only see on the dark side of the mirror

like the secret reflection of who she is

inside the locket she hangs around her heart

like the moondog of an innocent suicide

no one would have ever guessed she had in her

like a conversation that never took place, face to face,

heart to heart, when timing was as important as content.

If you hold up a mirror to your own lifemask,

a puddle where the starmud’s settled down

like the cornerstone of the moon in a tent

that’s comes to flower in the backyard

of a house of the zodiac, you can see in your own face

the faces of everyone who’s ever been, or is, and will be,

you will see in the single eye of a seed

how many Japanese plum blossoms had to be

scattered down the street like a Milky Way of the ancestors

you’re descended from, to implant their vision

of light and love and life in you. And how

transience learned from the wind

how to let go and give it all away

like the passage of birds and the winged samara

of maples across the full moon, all the fruits

and flowers, stars and seeds of a generous autumn

shaken like the apple orchards of the Hesperides into your lap.

And to begrudge one atom

of this inexhaustible plenty to anyone

is to starve to death in your own garden

is to deny your own children bread

you didn’t break with them like a harvest of light

so their darkness wouldn’t hunger

for stars the rest of their lives.

Is to live in the shining

and grow possessive of shadows.

Is to break off a love affair with the waters of life.

Is to never feel your eyes ripen from

something green and bitter

into a mirage of wine in the desert

that drinks time spiced with stars

from an hourglass of a blissful delirium

where even the vipers have learned to dance in the sand

among the bones of skeletal keyboards.

Anyway, you get the point, and once

you’ve got the point, you’ve got the wavelength by the tail

and you’re centered everywhere in a boundless universe

and the circle is as complete as a drop of rain,

or the growth rings of a tree

making ripples in the heartwood of spring

to give the birds and the stars and the trees

something to sing about they weren’t expecting.

That no sum of zeroes ever added up to nothing

as if something were missing from the very start

like blackholes that don’t write their names

on the galaxies they make out of their emptiness.

Out of nothing, one, and in that one

that includes everybody you can see

how the zeroes got carried away by the billions

into an infinite elaboration of their radiant vision

of a universe of overlapping circles making waves

and all it takes is one insight

into the creativity of compassion

that steals the breath of the stars away in amazement

that one ray of light from the least expected quarter

when you least expect it is more than enough

to touch your heart with a feather of love

fallen from a passing nightbird above

that has been calling to you all night in the darkness

to see how enlightened everything is as it is

when you open up the black holes

in the wild irises of your eyes to it.

PATRICK WHITE