AND WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT, IS IT WHAT YOU DREAMED?

AND WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT, IS IT WHAT YOU DREAMED?

And when you get what you want, is it what you dreamed?

Did the mirage live up to its reputation, did it exceed

your expectations or is there another award beyond this one?

O endlessly hungry one, pleonaxic emptiness, were you born

like a black hole on a midway of blazing radiance,

a blinding light that serves as a guide to star-nosed moles?

Fulfilment or doom, depression, disappointment, as if

some clown had washed his face off like a painted tear

in a green room mirror, and discovered he was still crying?

You grasp it like the garment of a passing ghost,

sand, water, cloud, and it changes shape in your hands

like the nature of a bird when neither of you understands.

We all wake up to spend the wealth we hoarded in our dreams.

We even greet death with money under our tongue.

In Zen they’d say we’re all stealing the Buddha’s purse

to buy the Buddha’s horse one way or another

whether we can ride it or not, and if today you’re disappointed

you’ll be mesmerized by something else tomorrow,

a junk dealer going through a widow’s private treasures.

You’ll open your mouth again like an oyster farm

trying to breed pearls like the philosopher’s stone

labouring to turn all these new moons of pitted ore into gold.

Good luck. Hope you’re the wiser for it. As for me

and my house, I’ve never been disappointed

in my wonder at the world, and what I’m doing here

being aware of it all as the world tracks its starmud in

across my homeless threshold and all these ancient footprints

are dance steps back to a self that’s just a tic of the emptiness

I catch once and awhile out of the corner of my third eye

abrogating credit for a dream it had nothing to do with

because that’s a bird still flapping its wings in a shell

thinking it’s being upheld by the wind until someone

cracks it open like a brittle atmosphere and all that space

comes rushing in and you realize with a cosmic sigh of relief

like a sunflower bowing its heavy head, what a great debt

you owe to the nothing that you are that can’t possess anything.

You’re standing there in all your spiritual bling,

gold necklaces around your throat, chakras and chains

looped like nooses in knots at the end of your spinal cord.

What did you do? Bind yourself to the axis of the earth

to be mistaken for a saint or a martyr, the wobbly snake

of an inebriated caduceus, but where’s the fire, where’s

the heretic, the apostate, the dragon singing in its own flames,

where even one firefly of insight that consumes the universe?

Or are you just another photo op with mermaids

calling you to the soft rocks of a popular song?

A straw dog in the rain smouldering like methane

on a compost heap after another ritual performance?

You’re greedy for joy. You’re greedy for illumination

in the spotlight. But bliss is one of the spices of life,

not the main course. And to want more than this

is to declare you’re a glutton with lousy spiritual manners.

And O yes I know, you think this is like blooming

and having someone throw acid in your face

when you were anticipating rain on your plum blossoms.

You duck through a hole in the fence like a raccoon

caught pilfering corn in a garden, and you want

a Roman triumph with rosewater and slaves

for passing through the gateless gate to liberation

when all you’ve really done is barge through

the emergency exit to run from a shotgun loaded with stars

in the hands of a scarecrow trying to terrify the birds

by shooting straight up into the air until things

begin to take root of themselves, and the locust trees

are feathered with the leaves of nesting lapwings

that don’t have any further to fall though they feign

a dizzying descent of wounded maple keys

and all the shamans have to heal themselves

by ploughing the ground they were born on into bookshelves.

PATRICK WHITE