EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW CREATION

EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW CREATION

Every morning of the moment, a new creation,

the distillation of the dreams of the night before

when the moon was as fertile as the dew we were born from.

I start out each day with a new face. By nightfall

it’s just another phase of the same old ageless deathmask,

heavier than a bell that’s been talking through my mouth

for more light years than I’ve got tears to measure in mirrors.

That’s usually when I start thinking like a potato about stars.

Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening me like a vision

I’ll only ever get to see backstage like a forlorn clown

trying to hang on to his faith in laughter.

You can pursue happiness, but it will only

run from you like the light, or you can cover your eyes

and try to avoid it for fear of losing it like the last time,

but when you turn around, it’s right behind you,

flirting with your shadow. Better to let it come and go

of its own accord, like a waterbird in a moonrise

reflected on a lake. Then when you speak of things

you increasingly know less about the more

you’re intimate with them, your voice isn’t

a bird net trying to cage words on the fly

but an aviary as open as the sky when

Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the Lyre’s

a larynx for the asking. And you’re free

to sing your heart out as if no one were listening

but you and the trees and the stars you hit like high-notes.

Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the coydogs

if you run out of lucky feet and that’s what comes up

like snake eyes. Lap the experience out of the bone

until there’s nothing left to eat but your appetite itself

and among the myriad flavours of life you’ve exhausted

that will taste the sweetest of all to that emptiness

that harvests the world like a blue moon that’s never full.

Is the moon not the equal of its waxing and waning alike?

Is it trying to enlighten its dark side?

When the candle goes out, does the light have any trouble

handling it? Fear returns to what it knows the best.

It hugs the shore like a tidal pool beside the sea,

a dead starfish or two it can get its arms around

like a worm’s-eye view of the galaxy, and the shell

of a red sunset in the morning on the carapace

of a crab that left its hovel for a house in

a more upwardly mobile zodiac. Sometimes

it comes down to that. Quantum level gravity.

A gravitational eye with myopia that bends the light

like a stick in the water, a mirage of sand in an hourglass

that’s afraid of being swept out to sea

with nothing to hold onto but the lifeboat

of a shucked clam Venus just stepped out of onto land

to have sex in a new medium like an artist

who’s just switched from water colours to oils.

You’ve got to accept the down times as all part

of the same wavelength you’ve been riding

like a snake scaled in white caps of light

that break on shore in a turmoil of kelp.

The cosmos doesn’t need to be put in order

and chaos doesn’t need any help. Listen to your sorrows.

Summon them to a seance of yourself

and apologize to their ghosts for not having the voice

to let them speak through you about

learning to swim with the stars further out of your depths

than you’ve ever been before. First you drown

in the fathomless immensities of even the smallest detail,

and then you bubble back up to the surface

of a multiverse with an oceanic awareness

of what’s been hiding under every eyelid of a wave

like a overturned lifeboat that’s waking up

to the fact that everything floats like the moon

in the reflection of its own mindstream.

And whatever sail you spot coming up over

your event horizon, whatever constellation

or black hole you take for a sign of salvation

or salvage, it first had to sink

before it could rise to the rescue.

PATRICK WHITE