LOOKING FOR SILENCE LIKE THE OTHER WING

LOOKING FOR SILENCE LIKE THE OTHER WING

Looking for silence like the other wing

of what I’ve got to say, landscaping with meteors,

or the planet having a face lift, some of the words

have echoes and some of them proper names,

and a few still homesick for their prison cells,

I keep painting on the white noise of the world.

I keep writing like a wolf in the fleece

of a shepherd moon with a secret life of water.

Scofflaw, a poet, driven into the wilderness

to listen to the voices of disembodied messiahs,

kings of the waxing year, flesh stripped from their bones

like desert shipwrecks waiting for

the providential tide of their tears to return.

God particles that got in their eyes like sand.

I hear them gnawing on their bones like calendars at night.

And I’ve said it in a flash of demonic indifference

trying to pretend they were listening immaculately

and I was compassionate, as soon as you give

your fulsome assent to a few simple things

you turn into a test of what you refuse to let go of,

as if you were always faith-wrestling with rattlesnakes

you establish a church of denial that will stone you to death.

You save your soul but you render your flesh expendable.

This for That. Betelgeuse for Aldebaran.

How to read a starmap like the Wall Street Journal.

The optical illusion of a bifurcated consciousness,

loss and gain, but the viper can swim across quicksand

as if it were all one wavelength, the Egyptian glyph

for intelligence that hasn’t been wounded by the heart

and spiritually materialized into a path to follow.

Do as the wind does with your mind and eyes. Let go.

Blow the stars off your windowsills, treat all holy books

as if they were trees and let go of their leaves in the fall.

There’s always a few jewels of insight in a gossip column

but most of it’s rut, rant, and judgement, dream gossip

and slaughter, history with an expiry date.

There’s always going to be some demi-god somewhere

asking you for your fingerprints like a paranoid magician.

Kick the skulls off your stairs like last Halloween’s pumpkins

and start acting like you’re in the world and of it.

Break the neck of the hourglass of heaven and hell

and let time pour out of your cells like exorcised mirages.

Illusions are like rats and seagulls and insects. They thrive.

No more than the night, is life a reward. Water

doesn’t live its whole life fearing the indelible

like a wavelength of its own immutable mindstream.

There’s no big sky blueprint behind why you’re alive.

No circus tent covers your foolishness.

And you’re not here to answer for everything else.

PATRICK WHITE