COMING OUT OF A BLUE FUNK

COMING OUT OF A BLUE FUNK

Coming out of a blue funk, this seal,

under a sky thickening like sheet ice all day

has found an airhole it can breathe through for awhile.

Been wondering about my life. What

it’s been doing to me for the last fifty years

for the sake of poetry, for the sake

of pursuing an earthly excellence

though it hardly matters why anymore.

I used to have an answer on the tip of my tongue

when I was young and thought more

with my mouth than my heart. Less so now.

Time, death, suffering, love and the devil,

certain intense realms of creative bliss

attuned to the dark harmonies of hidden roots

that flow back like the delta of a river

to the watershed of a single drop of water

that got it in its head to do something big with its life

and turn something trivial into the sublime.

Did not the sun and the moon, the whole of the sky,

fit it like skin? And that was just the outside.

It would take more than light years to measure

the wingspan of the abysmal spaces within.

Even time would run out of itself

before it got to the end of anything.

My life in art has been like keeping a fire alight outside

in a rainstorm of tears. To see clearly

through windows that thawed in the heat

of looking through them with the compassionate ferocity

of a crystal skull poured out of a terraforming meteor impact

like a prophetic lump of coal, a diamond in the rough,

that refused to burn in the furnace to prove it had the right stuff

to shine like a star, no one could follow, on its way to somewhere else.

Not a sign post. Just a sign. Your eyes

once you see it, are never going to be the same again.

You won’t look at a starcluster like the Pleiades

as if you were waiting for the traffic lights to change.

You’ll take your three and a half pounds of brainy starmud,

like a meteoritic kissing stone, a falling star,

and run it through a diamond tipped bandsaw

and discover the jewel of life that’s been glowing

in the core of the ore since time immemorial

like a dna molecule wasted on space

that transforms the medium and the messenger

into a voice, free of content, that’s the whole of the message.

I walked out to this dark, deserted place, redolent

with the duff and detritus of life, the flotsam and jetsam,

where the half life of the rate of decay of my insights

into your heart, eludes being used as an atomic clock

to determine the agelessness of either of us.

I came out to look at the stars but I’ve been startled

by the photonic discharges of your bioluminescent fireflies

ever since I started looking up like a starmap to make sure things

were where they were supposed to be. One moment

you get in my eyes like the sandstorm of a mandalic power painting,

a masterpiece of the wind, and the next,

I can feel the intransigence of your vulnerability

dyeing your hair like a comet to attract the attention

of the sun at midnight looking for asylum from a black hole

where it’s third eye used to be.

You’re a mermaid on the rocks of Andromeda singing to a telescope

to look up to see how far its got to sink in an ocean of stars

before it hits bottom like a shipwrecked moonrise

gone pearl diving for habitable planets

that can say I love you and mean it like an atmosphere

it’s not going to lose again. Only in the Braille

of the scars on your heart so far, but I can read your pain

like the glyphs of an Aztec temple

I’m still clearing from the jungle of my indirections,

that recorded in imported stone how many times

it’s been torn out to please the gods with a kidnapped sacrifice

worthy of the priestcraft in the sacred abattoirs

of modern drug cartels when you’re too susceptible

to feeling too much, the same as me, when I’m thinking mythically

about what I’ve endured to be acceptable in my own eyes

that might shine across these aloof distances like a star into yours

that lights you up from the inside like an intimate familiar

whispering into your ear like a dream grammar of sacred syllables

that have liberated themselves from the syntax of the stars

just to speak subliminally in the same sign language as you

like the chaos of fireflies I see in the black mirror of my mindstream

bending space like the surface of a lake at night

where you can hear the echo of a loon ululating

like the wavelength of a mysterious love song

among these dark hills shapeshifting in the moonlight

toward you like a mirage of picture-music

emerging as something real in this wilderness of transformation

like a new constellation of fireflies I want to overhear with your heart.

PATRICK WHITE