HIDDEN JEWELS IN THE ASHES SKINLESS AS LIGHT

HIDDEN JEWELS IN THE ASHES SKINLESS AS LIGHT

Hidden jewels in the ashes skinless as light.

It’s a big place when you only see it through your eyes,

but see it through your heart, and even

your deepest tears are a wound shy

of the bell of silence that overturns the fountainmouths

of even the most efflorescent of the arts

so many paint on their windows so as not to see it.

It’s crucial to be a sincere sword in any holy war,

but how rare it is to meet anyone with

the courage of their clarity to peer beyond that

and look up at the stars from a dark, open field

and see, despite the way the light shatters like chandeliers,

we’re not living in a world of broken mirrors.

You can look into the eyes of the dragon

that weeps like rain. You can feel compassion

for flying reptiles and then you can kneel

at the end of the futon in front of the beaming window

and add your own ray of light as if your were humanizing

prismatic power mandalas through an antique kaleidoscope

by adding your eyes to the sand painting the next moment

is going to be erased at the zenith of fulfilment

and all the apple bloom like the circus tents

of the enlightened clouds and clowns,

are going to blow away, as if time weren’t

just the younger sister of space, but a kind

of sad, lyrical wind as well that keeps

shedding our lifemasks like the petals

of the wild roses and the wings of the flying ants,

as autumn comes looking for the maple keys

that could unburden your heart and sweeten your sleep

like a windfall of the fruits of life that replace it all

with a better return journey than when you went into exile.

Mentored by suffering the improvised myths of our origin,

keeping our third eye on the twists and turns

of the washboard road we’re driving home on,

not to be surprised about what’s around the next bend

or the rock like a hidden chip on a soft shoulder

waiting to be knocked off, wondering if life

has just provided you the occasion

to love again as inexhaustibly as you once did,

as if someone’s just uncovered you like a hidden housewell

or a buried telescope in a graveyard of famous constellations

with an afterlife of born again stars, you turn a corner,

bemused to be alive, as if you’d forgotten the feeling,

and your truly surprised, startled even, when you look to your left

that there’s a field, half-returned to the bush, beyond a cedar rail fence

patched by lichens that look like the seas of the moon

eclipsing their wounds as if time really could heal all things,

and the last of the common mullein were flowering

out of an urgent dream just before dusk, and the light,

I swear the light was making making everything

glow like effulgent honey, as the leaves on the trees

were on the verge of burning, and the goldenrod

and the purple loosestrife stood out like complementary colours,

mutually enhancing hot spots on the wheel of birth and death,

and the star clusters of New England asters

and blue chicory blooming by the side of the road

like floral prototypes of the new starmaps as the night comes on,

each as original as the last, and you’re mystically entranced

even in passage, of how reality, even in the midst

of its dissolution, can sometimes take your breath away

with the beauty that’s immanent within us all revealed

spontaneously like a stranger at the open gate

swinging on its hinges of hello and good-bye

that I took as a sign this was always the right path to be on

after all these light years of driving through the dark on my own.

PATRICK WHITE