HALLOWED BE THE GENTLENESS OF A PACIFIED MIND

HALLOWED BE THE GENTLENESS OF A PACIFIED MIND

Hallowed be the gentleness of a pacified mind.

Uplifting, a gust of stars, dust doing wheelies

in a back alley like a vehicular Sufi in a Ford,

because, and this is significant, it doesn’t, I swear,

mean a damn thing and therein lies the joy of it.

Inspiration never aspires to meaning. It doesn’t

cling like a God particle to give the matter at hand, mass.

The morphology of the multiverse is bubbles.

Iridescent, rainbow-smeared grackle-headed bubbles.

And that includes the black-pearled oil slicks

shining like new moons after their first eclipse.

Meaning, that hovers like a ghost of grammar

over the things of the world that can find

their own place in it without consulting anyone.

Who turns around to ask their shadow where they’re going?

Grammar’s a dead shaman. Time for new orthodoxies,

to let the rain make some new creekbeds to flow in

when it’s lamenting the death of a Spanish guitar

like a gored matador scarred by a Babylonian bull.

I’m smothering in the parachutes of the morning glories

as if it just snowed outside by mistake. It’s not fake.

It’s playful, profoundly playful, unsayably so.

Putting things together like table legs

is the basis of perception. Put any two

disparate elements together that share the same metaphors

and guarantee you you’ll laugh at the shock

of photonic insight discharged like a power-surge

down the backroads of your nerves, out for a joy-ride.

But you’ve got to be free to do this. Unpack

all those preconceptions you’ve hoarded

like a coral reef you’ve got to navigate around

to keep from running aground without a life jacket on.

Travel light. Don’t even take yourself. On the road

let your thumb go on by itself like an over eager companion.

Hellfire’s just the smell of burning rubber

bored by life on the farm. No risks worth taking.

Life refuses to be denied its vastness, stunted

into a black dwarf that limps like the king of something.

Even the stumps of the clear cut slopes of literature

are being burnt out like old gurus in their pine-cone temples,

seeds opening their eyes in fire like a nirvanic experience

that nobody knows anything about. Who can’t hear,

anti-solar gegenshein above the horizon, the distant mutter

of another breech-loading revolution in the distance

moving like a weather front toward us with eviscerated intent?

You don’t have to live like a bird in an air-raid shelter,

a canary in the mine, you just have to gain some elevation

on the bombs. Let the sky do the flying for a change.

And then move on to stars where you can trade

your flight plans in for the source of your own radiance.

No more Nazca lines. No more fireflies organized into runways.

You just shine. Amazed at what you can do, as the light

always is, at what can be achieved without even trying.

Joy and inspiration, for example, love, wonder,

shape shifting in the mystery without having to be anyone.

Anywhere. Anytime. Anyplace. As if you had

a message to deliver that would upstage the course of history

and you sent it downriver like a paper boat

so the butterflies could marvel at how easy it is to float.

PATRICK WHITE