MEANDERING AFTER THE LONG THAW

MEANDERING AFTER THE LONG THAW

Meandering after the long thaw

through whatever landscape my mind

creates in its flowing, karmically disposed

or not, I unscroll like emotional water

playing with the quick otters of my thought

and no meridians or parallels on the loom

that snares the stars in birdnets,

and no horizons, no ports

of arrival and departure,

no hellish red of emergency exits

out of the darkened theatre,

I revel spontaneously in the freedom

of not having a clue about where I am going,

and go off in all directions at once

like the moon on the waves

like light through the homeless abode

of the only place I’ve ever stopped like space

to admire the road without beginning or end

that leads everywhere and nowhere at once.

Thought-years away from my last death

and the nebulous rain of the sidereal breath

I took once and held forever,

waiting to grace my stars with flowers

when words don’t interrupt the silence like pyramids

and the desert is free to speak for itself

to itself about the flower

that flows like an eye through its depths.

One eye, being; the other, non-being,

and a third that is beyond both,

I don’t know what it is I’m looking into,

but I keep rising and falling

like a wave of my own seeing

casting shadows on the water

like the voices of the things I write,

the new moon like a dark coin

under the tongue of everything in the light,

and the valley voices and the mountain voices

and what they say to each other in the night

when they draw near to a fire

no one else is awake to overhear.

I may be a bull in the labyrinth of my own fingerprints

unspooling my blood along the way

so that someone else can find their way out,

an evangelist on the moon with my head in my hands

telling the stars not to fret

if they’ve forgotten the last prophecy

because eventually even the lies will come true.

My wild ass compassion wants to break the jaws of circumstance

that eat so many like thorns of the moon in the desert

when the cactus blooms and the viper strikes like a flower,

but I don’t send my emotions out to judge events

like hysterical lipstick smeared across the mirror

or let my thoughts stir the mud in the puddle

to make things clear to the clouds.

One meaning for the whole of immeasurable life

is facepaint on a clown that’s seldom funny

or a spiritual ideologue whose only expression of grace

is a frown like a knot in the wind

that dances all around him, abusively free.

But the life of meaning doesn’t need

a seeker or a teacher flipping pages like a weathervane

for the stones and elixirs and grails of life,

as if you had to struggle to attain what you already are.

The star in your eye. The tree in your spine.

The bird in your voice. The moon in your heart.

The wind in your lungs. The light in your mind.

The sea in your blood. The earth in your flesh.

It’s not hard to know who you are

when you’re breathing alone in the darkness

that sheds you like the oceans of the moon

and the manes of the lunar lions come undone

like white peonies on the flowing of the nightstream.

However you look at it, your nose

is the hypotenuse of a right-angled threshold,

your own personal event horizon

that’s crossed with every breath you take

and your skin is a contract with the world

that begins at the tip of your nose

like an available dimension of forms and events,

experience after experience

that keeps on happening all the way back to you

like the singularity at the bottom of a black hole.

But what’s the point of looking for yourself

like a black sail on a night sea

or erecting a monolithic I like an oil derrick

or a misguided lighthouse

to drill for light

when you’re already swimming through it

and the world is arrayed clearly everywhere like eyes?

Everything you see; everything you can be

is the expression of everything else.

A star gives birth to your eyes and water

organizes you like a neighbourhood

and a genius of mud lays a scarlet cloak

of flesh and blood across your shoulders

strong enough to uphold the earth like a head

and space readies itself like a sensitive room

where you can stay up late to watch your eyelids bloom

like waterlilies coaxed out of hiding by the full moon.

PATRICK WHITE