O IGNEOUS ROSE

O IGNEOUS ROSE

O igneous rose, are you the furnace or the urn of the butterfly?

Or should I ask the vatic wind which pyre is mine?

Will I be be food for the stars again, will I mulch

the dark matter of the roots with my remains

or will my ashes retain some semblance of the light

like the ghost feeling in the heart of a spiritual amputee

or linger among archetypes like fossils in the Burgess Shale

that haven’t reached their full potential yet?

Not Hell, not Heaven, not Hades, Sheol, Tartarus

Dis, Avernus, Jana, Jahannum, Nirvana, Samsara,

or the great abyss where nothing is even in the slightest,

and presence, and absence, and time aren’t even

anachronisms of their past lives. I’m not going

anywhere when I die, because death is not discontinuous

from life in the known universe, though one’s a lifeboat

and the other’s what you need it for to stay afloat.

Wherever your mind walks in unison with your heart

deep in emotional thought without too much attention

to where you’re going, you break trail like a river

and the stars start flowing into your alluvial fields

and the green mountains you left walk with you

all the way into the pyramids like the source of the Nile,

not tombs of death, but tombs of life pointing like starmaps

to the indelibility of your afterlife in Orion

as the scion of a great house of mystic hunters.

I’ll be here. Just behind your eyelids. Like a dream

I’m having until things come true again for the sake

of distinguishing my extinction from one bone to the next

like yarrow sticks throwing away their crutches

like the hands of a clock to read the Book of Changes

to see what’s bubbling up like the multiverse from the bottom

and every eye of air, each a complete science unto itself

or an occult art, where it’s been fully realized

chaos is the root of all imagination

even when it’s writing Horatian odes and haikus.

Chaos is as smooth as Hermes writing his own flightplan

with his heels, and where he arrives, is as much of a message

as the word he holds in his mouth

like coin for the ferryman in his moonboat

at the end of the long wharves that are the last to see us off

to the other side of everywhere. O come now

surely you didn’t think life was going to let you off

its prophetic hook that easily before it got

its last crescent snagged like a koan in the mouth

of the golden fish that thrives in the dead seas of the moon

that reels it in for questioning, only to throw it back?

Everybody satisfied with the answers for awhile

until the questions get bored with hanging around

like mere coathangers, and bite off more of you

than they can chew again. No more than a windowpane

can hold the whole of the sky the way any drop of rain can,

can you without washing the dye out of your tears like an iris

that encircles the blackholes like rainbows around a wishing well

where what you see is what you wished for from the beginning

because chaos conforms to any vision of reality and delusion

that conceives of it as a feature of the conditioning mind

that shapes it like a simulacrum of the inconceivable.

So the same well that the stars and fireflies look into

holds a mirror up to them like a reflecting telescope.

And all it takes is a quarter gram of vaporized aluminum

to silver the whole universe with a prism and a drop of dew

trembling in the web of a spider mount like a psychic butterfly.

Chaos and cosmos. Igorance and enlightenment. Reality

in contradistinction to delusion. Life and death yoked

like two oxen to the oxymorons of the helical star wheels

that dance like Sufis at the naves of their retrograde crossroads

to weird what direction to go in like witching sticks

in the mouths of the dragons that undo the locks

on the gates of the rain with skeletal keys of lightning.

I shall be here. Where the light and the water

illuminate the blossoms and quench the roots of things

at the intersection of time and the timeless where

there’s no more need of religion than there is crosswalks

or moonboats and ferrymen to the other side of the river

that know what season it is by the colour of your sails.

I’ve always flown under the skull and crossbones

like a sea wolf that didn’t evolve back into a whale

howling in the mountains on the moon in a savage agony

of the longing to live yourself to death as intensely as you can.

The sublimity of laughter that makes the clown profoundly sacred.

That beatifies the candles like eyes in the unapproachable darkness.

That takes one world after another in hand

like a party balloon and lets the clowns and magicians

twist it into the shapes of worlds within worlds

where the ground of being is always and only

the liberated exercise of their creative imaginations.

And every world we pass through the sum of all

we’ve imagined it to be, and a little bit more

just to keep the mystery from being perfectly contained

in the three and a half pounds of starmud we call a brain

and root our shining in it like flowers gone to seed.

Make a muse of the wind, or a church out of a rock, the same,

or pitch a tent or a pyramid on the dunes of the shifting stars,

or in a nunnery of desert mermaids who gave up singing to take vows

make your obeisance to the unknown with laughter, grace, and style.

Best show in town, and the ticket was free, and who

so ungrateful they could leave the table that fed them, fouled?

Holiness isn’t a threshold where you take your body off

at the door and separate your mind from the Braille of the flesh

you need fingertips to read just as you need eyes in your blood

to see a lover’s heart from the inside out. True holiness

is not holy. It’s not fool proof. It’s not stake-prone.

It doesn’t pour honey all over your head in the morning

just to feather you with doves and expect you to glow

like secret diamonds in the dross of the ore. Listen.

You can hear the light walking across the grass.

The snakes are teaching their occult wavelengths

to the shadows of the trees leafing in the moonrise like veils.

There are mad poets all through these pathless hills

waiting for inspiration like a singing coach

to raise havoc among the high notes of the bush wolves

that leave you guessing what they’re really mourning for

that’s actually missing. Grains of sand,

we grow like pearls and stars and expanding universes

beyond the limits of what constrained us yesterday.

The seed splits its cotyledons like Solomon’s baby

and scarlet runners burn like heretics at the stake

in an auto de fe of enlightened immolation

of serpent fire running up the spine to get to the stars

as a circumpolar constellation with small flammable flowers

before the last watch of the night blows them out at dawn.

PATRICK WHITE