Monday, November 12, 2012

SOMETIMES THE INTIMACY OF THE SILENCE


SOMETIMES THE INTIMACY OF THE SILENCE

Sometimes the intimacy of the silence
can grow so profoundly intense
it seems impersonal. Or the heat of life
burn like the dry ice of the holy ghost
as you shudder with spiritual chills in the cold.
And when you see things whole in and of themselves
it’s always as if you were looking through a broken window.
Truly fulfilled, you realize everything you’re missing.
The more you explore the mystery of what you’re doing
just walking around on the earth, aware
of your awareness, the more of a stranger
you seem to yourself, decultified of your identity.

The birches are glowing in skin tight moonlight
and there are sixties hash burns in their white leotards
and the leaves are falling and the river’s flowing
and the Canada geese are sowing themselves
in the wake of the plough of the moon
like black and white sunflowers seeds further south again
and my heart is saturated with autumn’s sad sugars
like a mournful apple at the pathos of their passage
as if time had abandoned everything and all
the solitary soul can do is harvest the loss like a human
with a romantic sense of irony as we dance
on the graves of the dead to celebrate
the bright vacancy, dark abundance of our starmud
occluding and enlightening our solitude
until you’re enthralled to conclude, the darker the night,
the brighter the light. And appearances are only deceptive
to those who haven’t broken on through to
the other side of the mirroring awareness yet like a hymen
over a virgin black hole that’s all iris with no pupil
so all it can ever see are moondogs of exclusion
that begin to look like haloes after awhile.

I’ll write an epithalamion on my wedding night with death,
but while I’m alive I like to toy with euphoric elegies
that weep like old rivers in the discrete depths
of their watersheds. I spend hours by myself
watching the spiders of time stringing contellations
like bird nets between the sacred upper branches
of the aspens to catch fish on the fly the way I
wait for insights to start riffing on the blues guitar
in the corner jamming with the silence of itself
like a poignant wildflower blooming unfashionably late.

If you stare intensely enough into the emptiness,
if your focus is searing enough to burn holes in space,
seemingly self-contained things will emerge like particles
you can elaborate in time and space like the fractals
of worlds within worlds engendered by your own seeing.
But turn the light down, turn your eyes away, dissipate
your concentration, everything reverts to the wavelengths
of the flying carpets unwoven on the waning loom of the moon.

Things done. Things undone. Does the water remember
the growth rings of its ripples, does the snake cling
to the loss of its skin, or fire reminisce in its ashes?
Or scars in autumn long for the springtime of their wounds?
Nights like this sensation haunts me like the ghost
of an amputated heart I dedicated to poetry to add my pulse
to a dying art like the blood of a noble enemy who knew
without saying, the only way to keep the calling alive
was to practice an excruciating discipline of heretical infidelity.

And that’s why I’m out here alone in the woods,
still trying to think my way out of the bone box of my decline
by taking my mind off things by letting go
of the paradigms and symbols that kept me afloat
like the lifeboats and wandering starmaps
of the habitable planets of the past bobbing
like the prophetic skulls of black walnuts back down
the mindstream to Mitylene in Lesbos
where Orpheus still dreams of singing himself
back up from the detritus of his cosmic dismemberments
like Vega in the lyrical grip of a dreamcatcher
casting spells like a widow’s veils on the water
to snare the stars like a fisherman who drowned on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

No comments: