PASSING INTO A SWEETER SOLITUDE AS IT GETS OLDER

PASSING INTO A SWEETER SOLITUDE AS IT GETS OLDER

Passing into a sweeter solitude as it gets older

the sunset takes one long last look over its shoulder

like the darkening tree line on a wavelength of hills

back at the valley that it’s just lived its way through

following its mindstream like a pictographic musical motif

through an ordeal of blessings that maimed my ability to believe

in any cave painting that says it’s a found religion.

It isn’t any harder to reverence the stars in a parking lot

than it is in the woods. They can burn inside me

like candles at a black mass, or righteous cherubim

with flaming swords like two nightwatchmen

on either side of the gate that exiles me

from the garden of my heart, and leaves me

with the cornerstone of my skull

to enshrine my homelessness in like an open door

without an entrance or an exit; either way

I’ve never been the poster boy of anyone’s morality play.

One Perseid, my meteor shower on a Saturday night

because I’m sitting on the patio at the Imperial,

with Simon, Johnny, Joe, Sheldon, James

and a jumping bean of a girl whose name I forgot

but who was the house dj checking out the quality

of ipads that were looking up the constellations

that shone so virtually in their hand-held eyes

but had been culled to near extinction like buffalo

by the light pollution smudging the view

of the seventh magnitude sky overhead

that is used to being ignored for its brilliance

by blind star-nosed moles chewing through

the white canes of their electronic roots and nervous systems.

It’s good the watchers are handing out

integrated third eyes of what they want you to see

like Pax genes in the Pre-Cambrian,

a Cyclops enamoured of an observatory,

a Dajal, the one-eyed, red-haired liar,

or those so mesmerized by a tv or computer screen

it’s moot whether it was Perseus or the Medusa

who turned who to stone. Bread and circuses,

the watchers are watching the eyes of those

who are watching them like an iris scan

of the same old documentaries that ran yesterday

when the mystery of the light emerging from the darkness

was still camera shy, and the history

of human insight into matters of moment

such as the death of a comet in the upper atmosphere

wasn’t just the photo op of a warning

no one’s listening to, throwing a wild-eyed tantrum

across the sky for the paparazzi mesmerized

like a frenzy of insects around a celebrity lamp post.

I spy with my little eye, like a small refracting telescope

among the technologically mesmerized,

the deconstruction of holistic ways of seeing

into the programmatic focus of billions of pixels

replacing the cells of our eyes with a visual white noise

of spectacular cataracts milking the homogeneity

of a perilous point of view that will turn on itself

like a retrograde wavelength with the fangs of a new ice age

in the eye of this storm of starless foci. As if

someone took Michelangelo down from his seance

on the Sistine Chapel Roof, and photo-shopped it

on the template wings of a million distracted butterflies,

trying to reconfigure with the IP address

of the wildflowers that have gone offline in a chat room

where nothing, however trivial, gets said

that isn’t indelibly impressed into the cuneiform

of suggestible starmud in the library of Ashurbanipal

keeping an eye on things like an exorcism

of those who don’t believe the medium is the message

with a mute button, texting, the internet, spellcheck and redial.

That said and overheard, I still ping what I write

and feel and think and see, in wonder, bliss and tears,

even if it be so little as one of a hundred meteors an hour

off the stars, knowing the eye by which I see them

is the eye by which they see me synched to the light

like intelligence resonating on the same frequency,

not as an app that can be applied like hindsight to the blind.

PATRICK WHITE