NOT WITH THE EYE, BUT THROUGH IT

NOT WITH THE EYE, BUT THROUGH IT

Not with the eye, but through it

easy to see all the pristine faults and flaws

in the immaculate mirror of the lake

that asks me to surrender my sword

as proof the scars on the mirage of my identity

were not self-inflicted or mythically inflated.

Sometimes the mind is nothing but a fraud of water,

a handful of starmud from the bottom up

with an ego like the snapping turtle of the world

savaging the plumage of the moon,

a wild swan thawing like an ice-floe

riding her own reflection downstream

like the pale fragrance of an elegant loveletter.

This place is the downgraded stuff of dreams

that animates the misfortunes of decay

with calendar-eyed views of propinquitous mortality.

Stakes of ghostly bones embedded like fractured trees.

Red ochre cedars like the fragile skeletons of filigreed fish.

Dozy limbs of basswood on the damp shore

pulped by a flesh-eating disease

like the hard heart of an old man gone soft

in the limelight of a circus of fungus on tour.

Not an outrage, but a lingering kind of odium,

this whole place smells like a human on its death bed.

Stealth in the indelible silence of the dead

undergoing their dissolute transformations

into the effluvium of the living in the wake

of their passage through life. What was

solid and upright as the rung of a ladder of oak

or the lifeboats of the oar-winged maple keys

before they went down with the ship,

good captains, all, with nowhere left to fall,

let’s its hair down like wavelengths and willows

and returns to going with the flow of things

like ice melting into water again, everything real,

with nothing to stub your toe upon

like the imagined intransigence of the world.

Wing of bat, eye of newt, heart of toad

and the perfect pitch of a virgin hummingbird,

mummified skin from the leaves

of the star clusters of borage sapphires,

the ashes of a poem that immolated itself

like daylilies that no one had ever cried over,

the unreasoned ennui of a seasoned wizard’s

attitude toward suffering to play musical chairs

at the periodic table and rise above the salt

where you properly belong enthroned like a dragon

on the skulls of your incommensurable ancestors.

Salt the earth and it will burn green as leaves

in the fires of life nothing can put out.

The axis mundi stirs the seabeds of the ocean

and visionary wraiths hang above it like rags of mist

summoned to the cauldron of the lake

like a seance to the endless first step

of an ongoing beginning that calls them out of exile,

like the lords of life from the last exorcism

they went through like the imperfectible ideals

of the wind sweeping stars and deserts off the stairs

of an underground passage burial

that aimed its spirit at the stars in Orion

but whose bones only made it as far as a flashlight

in the nervous hands of a grave robber

startled by his own amazement

at whose likeness embers in old gold

on the death mask that greets him like a twin of time.

Waterlilies blooming nocturnally in algaic scum

as if they were spreading their feathers

for any chance encounter with the stars

they’ve fallen in love with in their own images.

Stumps of the beavers, and here and there,

the occasional chain saw, I hear a man shrieking

in the tent of a field hospital trying to heal the Civil War

with the tools of neo-lithic carpenters.

I hear the crow barking orders to its officers.

Significance by association with the lost and fallen

bleeding out like flags on an abandoned battle field.

You fall through the cracks if you don’t jump the gaps

and the rest is just the history of electricity

prodding you to twitch like the puppet-master

of Giovanni’s frog prodded into leaping like the dead

trying to keep pace with the measure of their hearts

like lily pads wired to circuitous nervous systems

grounded in the silken muck at the bottom of things

that has settled like a peaceful sediment

over the useful refuse of our unsalvaged dreams.

The encyclopedic detritus of our arboreal souls

we keep recurring out of like cosmic eggs

in a deep sleep of inconceivable wonders to come.

Wingspans of the galaxies in the eyes of the seed-atoms,

I sow my thoughts and feelings like symbols and images

as far and wide as the Milky Way, the Road of Ghosts,

like an old farmer I heard of who went mad out here

sowing the deep woods, holding on to the tail

of a black bull that tugged at his heart like a new moon

or the harvest of stars in the wild rice fields of the Pleiades

adorning the horns of Taurus in a garland of light

so the wide-eyed native women could thresh them

into the bows of their birch bark canoes.

How long ago was that? Is there still

an Algonquin village around here somewhere

that didn’t surrender its gates to the urgencies of time?

Some memory smouldering like a fire pit under the leaves

that have written over the history of this place

like draught after draught of an autumnal lie ever since?

Did they ever come down to the water like me

to watch the moonlight ricochet off

the wet anthracite scales of a rat snake

sliding its S-curves back into the water

like a wavelength of darkness alone and homeless

in the occult palace of its black diamond eyes?

Did they feel the same chill of recognition

when it disappeared like a sacred insight

into an abyss of enlightened unknowing

that’s as boundless as the myriad infinitudes

of forms and events that arise

out of the creative destruction of the mind

efflorescing out of its own ashes, sunflowers at dawn

when the urns convulse like wombs,

and flowers imitate the garish rainbows

of our afterbirth like the palette of a masterpiece

that’s caught the ruin and renewal of life

in the enigmatic features of our photogenic minds?

Posing like mood-shifting chameleons

aurorally lifting the veils of a dark mirror

to reveal our own eyes looking back at us

when the night turns around, saturated

like ripe fruit with the mysterious sorrows

of being alive to witness our own windfall

like a rootless tree well-seasoned in letting go

of the orchards that once danced with the wind

in their wedding gowns, climbing up

this scaffolding of bones like a serpent of picture-music

helically winding up the stairwells of our vertebrae

like a thought making the rounds

of an unbroken circle of zodiacal skulls

like boundary stones in an unsustainable orbit,

all living things perfecting the simplicity of death

in the labyrinth of their own elaboration

by reducing it to an axiom of collaborative absurdity

then erecting it like a meteoric cornerstone

above the graves they dig for themselves

monolithically from the sky down,

one foot in the boat and the other clinging to shore.

I can hear the music of the spheres

in the hidden harmonies of dark matter

I’ve been listening to for light years

like a song with an impact crater for a sea bed

I just can’t seem to get out of my head and heart.

I’ve apprenticed my darkness to the mastery

of a dying art that might make the dead

a little more lyrically approachable

when the picture-music shepherds them

like black sheep born under a new moon

into the available dimensions of the future.

In everything I see and say and do here

I celebrate the emergence of the carrying forth

of the light out of the dark urgent with expression.

I say tree, stone, star, love, birth, death.

Lonely nightbird, or one of the frogs at night,

I make my sound like my mark upon life,

I add my eddy of light, the ripples of my fingerprints

to the flowing. As ignorant of where I come from

as I am of where I’m going, as homeless behind me

as it is ahead, there’s an expiring calendar

of tree rings in my heartwood, waning or waxing,

always seems to be growing. What has my tongue

ever been, but a leaf on the wind, or my eyes,

if not stars coming out of clouds? Delusion

or clarity, the crazy wisdom of the madly enlightened,

or sorrow looking for asylum in its own vulnerability,

the lab rat in a random experiment with genetic lotteries,

or my voice disappear like the homing bird

of a word in the distance flying toward

the violet hills that adumbrate the sunset in residence?

A physics of the heart, or the logic of metaphor,

two ends of the same sky-borne telescope.

Whether they’re eyelashes or my eyes

are sprouting wings for the journey ahead,

effortless effort of the absurd,

or a labour of elusive significance,

I struggle to celebrate the vital stillness

that animates the heart of all things

into being carried away on impulse

like water and love and life and light

or thousands of fireflies swarming the valley

after a storm of insight, trying to acquit themselves

like constellations in a chaos of starmaps.

PATRICK WHITE