WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVES

WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVES

When the spirit moves it’s the summation

of everything I am without definition,

the averaging out of all my existential crucials,

the dark matter of the moment

expressing the perennial insight

not as signs in the light, but light itself.

I don’t know what it is or it is not,

maybe just an enculturated meme of antiquated emotion,

or a way of hallowing the next breath I take.

I could be cynical and say it’s fake.

But then I’d have to eat my own ashes

with a long spoon, and what would I do

for an encore? Boring if the truth

doesn’t leave you gaping in wonder at something.

I’ve seen the wind at night in full moonlight

silvering the hot gold of the wheat

as if it were cooling a sensitive burn on human skin.

I’ve seen the fireflies in the valley

illuminate the cloud of unknowing

after a summer thunderstorm

like a chaos of lighthouses on shore

signalling to an empty lifeboat.

I’ve been engulfed by the fearful immensities

in the heart of a woman when her dark energies

start to accelerate space up to the speed of light

and even the most quotidian moments,

lipstick on a rumpled kleenex on the kitchen table

beside the abandoned mirror that couldn’t

get a handle on things, blood on the bedsheet,

the cooling red of a farewell rose, all,

supercharged with chameleonic frequencies

of eternity forever the silence of time and the void

when you’re mystically terrified by the passage

of beauty and passion into the carrying forth

of a waterclock just back from the wellsprings of it all.

Who knows where the time goes and everything with it?

I suspect it follows me home like a feral cat

that wants me to adopt it so it can bring me in

out of the cold. I used to think that spirit

was a smudge of a ghost, a gesture of air,

an aurora borealis in a twilight zone

where the sun shines at midnight and the snow blooms.

I used to try to touch the intangible with my imagination.

The void arrays the things of the world.

Can the mind do any less as a serious creator?

That’s when I discovered the fingertips of the very hand

I reached out with was the spirit reading Braille

because I was blind to what the dark constellations

in the black mirror were trying to tell me

engaging the spirit as a scribe and interpreter

one moment, then blowing it in my face, the next

like a squall of stars in a vertiginous gust of wind.

Snuffed out like a matchbook just when I thought

I had things flaring away like sunlight at a rave.

The spirit that witnesses is not a cartographer

with a surveying team on the dark side of an Orphic skull

to assess if all its softer continental plates

had synarthritically reassembled themselves

like Humpty Dumpty back into a cosmic egg.

The lamp might be shattered but that doesn’t mean

the light’s broken. The spirit never really mends.

It just keeps on shining in a wounded space

until it doesn’t feel the swords of the assassins of water

arming their shadows for a firefight with a dragon

that brings the rain like a medic to a battlefield

where the slain forgive their slayers for healing the moon.

The heart governs in silence. But the spirit moves

like a processional stillness through the mind

that shakes the diamonds out of the cuffs of your crazy wisdom

like dew from the mandalic cobwebs of the morning

and turns the lint in your empty pockets out

to show you you were richer than you thought

before you left home to seek your treasure elsewhere.

You cherish the jewels at the expense of your eyes.

One star tweaks your devotion more than the rest.

And they all go out at the same time. The spirit

doesn’t refuse the mind anything that allures it.

The full moon doesn’t obstruct the flight of the blue herons.

The spirit isn’t the voice coach or dream grammar

of what gets written about your life long after

you’re too far, too long, the moment you’re gone, to read it.

The spirit is like sentient space. It doesn’t come

with an entrance or an exit. The axis of the earth

might be the tent pole of a circus going up in a starfield,

and all the constellations swinging on a trapeze

in a travelling freak show of ring masters

and snake oil salesmen pitching their wares

on a blazing midway meant to befuddle the senses

into buying a peek at the grotesque and ugly

so you can secretly gloat at the shapeliness

of your own reality depending upon the comparison

for your sense of ascendency, your shaky rung

on the ladder out of the snakepit it’s got a foothold in

like a black hole cornerstone in an avalanche of galactic quicksand.

Spirit is flame, muse, familiar, sybil and friend.

No more than butterflies need to be liberated from their cocoons,

or dragonflies from their chrysales, the gerry-mandered huts

of their koans and fortune-cookies, does the spirit

need to be liberated from its earthly transformations. Who

can liberate the wave from water. Who can liberate

space from space? Just because the blossoms blow away

doesn’t mean they’re trying to flee the apple tree.

Let the spirit dance to its own picture-music.

Let the spirit play like the sea with its own weather.

In a bifurcated world that revels in reflecting its opposite

to get a rise out of consciousness, need one eye

be the disciple of the other? Speak quickly

or you’ll regret you forgot the answer

and start looking for intercessors to do it for you.

Dark watershed and radiant wellsprings of the muses

hauling up buckets of stars to bathe in like a moonrise,

your spirit a fountain, what need for it to drink spit

out of other people’s mouths, or masticate

the sacred syllables of someone else’s rapture at being alive

but its own? Whether you’re at a foodbank

or sipping nectar from the birdhouses of the gods,

even the angels can’t chew your spiritual food for you

and have it do you any good. Say, ah,

when you look at the world with infantile appetites

like gaping new moons trying to add to their collection

of silver spoons. Let the thief run off with them

like a crow with an eye for shiny things. The sooner

you get rid of the tinfoil, the sooner the shining

will get real for once and everything you rejoice in,

everything you feel and think and grieve for,

your commonsensical ignorance of the goat paths

up the mountain, and the avalanche of asteroids

you bring down on yourself as if your valley were a grave

the mountain dug for itself, to the enlightened lunatic

of your crazy wisdom raving in laughter with the wolves

at the rising moon, everything thereafter will taste of stars

in the eyes of the ageless friend you’ve made

of your own presence sweetening the air of a late October night.

PATRICK WHITE