LIKE A RIVER IN ITS RUNNING, LIKE LIFE, LIKE TIME, LIKE MIND

LIKE A RIVER IN ITS RUNNING, LIKE LIFE, LIKE TIME, LIKE MIND

Like a river in its running, like life, like time, like mind

no point of departure that isn’t also a moment of arrival.

Toxic parasols and meteor showers shot precisely

out of the green radiants of the candling umbrellas

and half-hearted parachutes of the water hemlock.

Starbursts of flowers that scald like welding sparks.

Bouquets thrown backwards over the shoulders of mean brides.

Alone in the high, wild grass, I just want to lie down in the sun

until half of me leaks into my watershed and the other half

evaporates into the cerulean bliss of the oblivious sky,

just breathe myself out into unfathomable volumes of space,

a riff of sacrificial smoke from a guitar on a pyre

as unconcerned as fire about where I’m going from here.

I like the metaphors that spring up like wild irises

along the mindstream, so I guess this is flowing,

though I could as easily be walking down a dirt backwoods road

feeling many of the same things, as I exalted

in the early blossoming of the chicory as a cosmic event

with mystic implications for those who can see

eternity embodied in the earthly simplicity of flowers

and that time, in the long run, has nothing to do with enduring.

I’m going to trample out a deer bed and lie down here

sketching starmaps of this year’s flotilla of waterlilies

until the light of the isoscelean Summer Triangle breaks

like chalk on a blackboard. I want to clear my mind

like the Nazca Plateau and let the fireflies build runways

like well lit jungle zodiacs for the extraterrestrials.

Not expecting the wind to whisper secrets in my ear.

The trees can keep their secrets to themselves.

I’m not here to read the private life of the moon

left open like a diary of telescopic wavelengths

too intimate to be revealed to the one-eyed peeping toms.

Just want to settle into my own wake awhile

like dust kicked up by a wheel, numb the turmoil

on the wonder of things that embrace me as if

I were a stranger to myself the same as them

and our chief function in life, if there’s one at all,

were merely the expression of our presence here

arrayed in the eyes of all like moon rise in a drop of water.

Things flashing into this openness like constellations

of fish and dragonflies in a mirror elaborating their ripples

into flying carpets of musical effusion

that are never out of hidden harmony with chaos

even when seeds are scattered like dice

on the ghost of a chance on the wind lamenting its luck.

Don’t want to mean, or be, or do.

I’ve been through those doors so many times

I’m beginning to think my feet are retrogressive thresholds

or stone mill water wheels grinding out my daily bread

like a Mayan calendar with a new moon at harvest time.

Nothing’s resolved except perhaps you perceive

how the sublimities of life arise like Arcturus

out of its utter insignificance through an opening

in the crown of the black walnut tree you’re lying under.

Whatever I am, whether I bear a message or not,

or I’m just a witness that wasn’t called upon to testify,

comes a time when it seems more fruitive to let

the medium adapt its grammar to me to say what it wants

than I should try to shape it to the unsayable

that always leaves the taste of abandoned books in my mouth.

It’s possible to flute your emptiness through the top

of an empty whiskey bottle making nautical sounds below decks

like the s.o.s. of a lifeboat in distress. Or you can percolate

like a breakfast clutch of black-capped chickadees in the willows

trying to get them to take something seriously for once,

or mock the crows like lumps of coal too cynically short-sighted

to spot the diamonds in their soul. Or you can

stop imitating yourself as if you were the proto-type

of someone who hasn’t made it to the showroom floor yet.

They’re all feasibility studies in pragmatic absurdity.

Given time, any lifemask you’ve carved out of your unlikeness

will grow to resemble you as space

has become a similitude for the dead.

Me? I just want to lie here until all I’ve got left for a voice

is a bird homing in the twilight, and when I roll over

to look in the water and see what remains of me, is a face

as unrecognizable as the universe.

PATRICK WHITE