SEEKING THE SHADOWS OF WHAT YOU ARE

SEEKING THE SHADOWS OF WHAT YOU ARE

Seeking the shadows of what you are

you miss who’s standing in the light.

Eternity with its tail in its mouth

can’t taste much else in life but itself.

Where did these words come from

just a moment ago out of nowhere,

and if it were to rain, would that be

shallow or deep? And maybe a labyrinth

is just a snake that’s swallowed its own head

and is wandering aimlessly in despair

through its own digestive track

like a salmon leaping upstream

through a waterclock with self-similarity

on its mind, oviparous replication,

the material immortality of genetic time.

Nothing’s irrelevant or inelegant

if there’s nothing to choose from

so everything shines in every mystic detail

as if it had never come unglued in its solitude

and bifurcated its unity into the subject

and the object of its awareness just to have

someone to talk to, an intimate familiar

it could rave at or serenade in a manic love affair

it was having with its own creation

like an artist talking to his masterpiece

with the caress of every sable-haired brush stroke.

Insignificant for the long haul, or famous

for fifteen minutes, either way,

you wouldn’t know it by looking

at the fossils we didn’t bring back from the moon

or sifting the grain from the chaff

from the ashes of the wheat

the wind scorched like a dragon

on its way to bring rain. Why

drive a nail through your third eye

and delude yourself into believing

you’ve been crucified, the king

of the waxing year sacrificing

your body parts to ensure a good harvest?

You want the virtues of your noble enemy?

Slay yourself and eat your own heart.

This is your nagual, your tulpa, your mirage,

your nightmare, your doppelganger,

your reflective familiar, your shadow

holographically projected in 3D by the pineal gland

of your third eye tattooed on the skin of a black hole

that is neither an ignominious exit through the grave

or the celebrated entrance into a secret garden,

and it can’t be any more empowered than you are,

and there are no walls to walk through

if it wasn’t you that built them to keep the poor

from vaulting them to steal your apricots

like the hungry ghosts that haunt

the orchards of your abandoned thoughts.

Savage homeopathy, perhaps, a holy war

of starmaps torn out like pages of sacred text

against the leaves who think they’re responsible

for keeping the whole tree they both spring from intact.

The autumn burns like an heretical apostate

that’s fallen away like faith in itself.

What nonsense, when they’ll both end up

doing a ghost dance on each other’s graves

where neither the dead nor the living

can be reunited in peace at the same seance

because the flame of life is duelling with its own candle

like the branch of a spear with the flint-knapped blossom

of the point it’s trying to drive home through its own heart.

A lethal waste of energies for echoes

to seek the destruction of their original voice.

When the waves of the light, the sea, the mind

bare their necks and swan

for the double-bladed axe of the moon

that separates things like conceptual consciousness

as if it were cleaving water, and heads come off

like the leading rose-buds of multi-cephalic hydras

that bloom the more they’re pruned like zinnias,

even death considers the slaughter an abuse of time.

If you want to live in the house of life as a martyr,

a bodhisattva, a spiritual mujahedin who

blows himself up in the temple of the money-lenders

and discount dove merchants, or even a poet

who enlisted in the ghettos of the Chilean art brigades

like Victor Jara, or Archibald Lampman’s

warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope

dying of a heart attack in Ottawa at thirty-six,

or Emily Dickinson listening to a fly buzz when she expired,

the only blood on the blade you fall upon

you should ever taste is your own if you

want to speak to a big-hearted bell of enlightenment

without the forked tongue of a perjured witching wand

or the self-defeating absurdity

of seeking clean water with dirty hands

or trying to reach out to touch the stars

when they’re pouring through your fingers

like the sands of an hourglass remembering

all its past lives gathered around the village wells

like telescopes looking through the wrong end of themselves.

PATRICK WHITE