EYES IN THE SHADOWS, IN BLOOD, IN SPACE

EYES IN THE SHADOWS, IN BLOOD, IN SPACE

Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light

that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,

and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,

and a redness in the air of this September night,

saturating it like a deep wound it holds under its breath,

a black rose, a fossilized thorn that no longer grows old,

memories fixed like crucified bats to the sticky brown stars

of the fanatical burdock trying to wear me like a starmap

as if every day of my life has felt like the approach of autumn

watching the constellations turn like the pages of a calendar,

a waterclock of new moons flowing like dark matter,

sundials at midnight encircling me like shark fins

slashing the water like sabres with surgical precision

and their eyes, oblivion, a focus of shadows, perennial night

after a supernova of dismemberment, dehumanizing horrors

in a hydrodynamic abattoir. Spirits of old root fires

smelling of pine and cedar at large in the dark like hunting magic.

And the clouds a wolf pack of shapeshifters among the stars,

the exhilaration of spiritual wariness out in the woods alone at night

where it’s unwise to trust anything too beautiful at first sight,

and a sudden flash of inspired self-destructive courage

to do just that in protest of the abuse of beauty as a Venus fly trap.

But it’s not hard to tell a real muse from a false one

because a real muse never wastes her passion on the sane,

and if there isn’t an occult side to a poet who works his madness

like a medium in the dark he had to sacrifice his eyes to see

beyond the visuals of the retinas and the cameras

with lizard eyelids that blink like guillotines, into

these visionary realms where galaxies are shed

like the feathers of migrating swans, gravity’s gone,

and if you want to go up, you’ve got to go up without a parachute on.

Mystic physics. The illogic of the heart delighting

in the absurdity of itself just because it can and you can hear

a sword master of black Zen singing his heart out in a brothel:

A good heretic never disciplines his disobedience.

The brutal moon offers me the cup of my own skull

and says drink, and I know it’s death to hesitate

because you lose control of everything in the moment

if you do, so I drink it like an elixir of dark tears

from the eye of the shark in eclipse, and I peer

into the black mirror of a midnight lake to see

if I’m still alive or dead, and the mirror breaks

like the unleavened bread of a gnostic gospel in my hands,

wholly enraptured by a spell I wasn’t ready to wake up from,

and I can feel the lustrous radiance of a light

so inconceivably darker than the one I go by

like a shadow of that, the ferocity of the clarity

immolates my heart with a terrible joy

in a prophetic furnace of hot diamonds

that howl like the insights of a firestorm of dragons in extasis

breaking out of their cosmic shells like stars out of the void

shining out of the dark heart of things within

like eyes seasoned by compassion

for the low hanging bells and fruits of the earth

trying to express the infinite solitude between birth and death

where we walk alone together forever with everyone

and everything, like pilgrims sleepwalking

in the unattainable dream that animates us all

to keep on divining the inspired limitations of the impossible.

PATRICK WHITE