Thursday, December 13, 2012

ELEVEN SEAS OF AWARENESS IN EVERY DROP


ELEVEN SEAS OF AWARENESS IN EVERY DROP

Eleven seas of awareness in every drop.
Eleven doors in a see-through water palace
that doesn’t cast stones at the first glance
at the mirror, but flows around them,
the airfoil of a waterbird, the radiant wake,
the long coma of a prophetic skull
plunging into the sun like the dead
waking up in a parabolic orbit once
every seventy-six years. Eleven dimensions.
Seven of them deaf, dumb, blind and mute.
Vertiginous mind at the crossroads
of interpenetrating worlds that pass
right through each other like galactic ghosts
at the intersection of a seance in all directions of prayer.

Mind watching like a cat on an upstairs windowsill.
Alert as still water. Eye of the needle in my gaze.
Jupiter startling over the garish windows
of the eerie, closed shops in wedding dresses
that try too hard, through no fault of the light,
to wash the greater brilliance out with a paint rag
of suspect colours. Alive. The big contention.
How hard everybody strives to establish that
as the one indisputable fact they’ve accepted
by convention. When you can look upon life and death
in the same breath, as two eyes of the one seeing
your indifference might have finally amounted
to something sacred I’d advise you to immediately transcend.

I’ve looked deeply into sanity long enough
to have gone creatively mad three wolf gates ago.
Freedom and bliss have amalgamated like Egyptian gods
on the pschent of the pharaoh. Upper and Lower
traffic in Nubian gold mines and salmon.
I’m standing in the doorway of the new moon
when she opens her eyes in the dark like an eclipse.
When I’m not encumbered like a hill
Sisyphus keeps rolling his stone over like a tomb,
as if it were up to him the sun came up each day,
I like to let my mind wander like a stray thread
of the Milky Way. I strum on my spine
like a bruised guitar in the corner, trying
to come up with a bridge to the chorus
of a new string theory that might help explain
why I act so much like a cosmic membrane
with a broken ear drum. Creatively playing in agony.

Can you give an existential basis to a delusion
like the foundation stone of the moon
to the reflection of the Black Taj Mahal?
The only precedent I know of for the meaning of life
is to make your own. Paint a masterpiece of fire
with your little spark of life. Let it go off
like the collateral damage of the Big Bang
when two membranes kissed in hyperspace
and no one had any idea of how far the light
of all that dark energy was willing to go
just to shine like stars in the indigo nebula
of the wild irises with cool petals as soft
as the skin of an old woman’s eyelids
being woken up from the dead like a dream
she just can’t get out of her heart for the rest of her life.

It’s the becoming, the unfolding, the transforming,
the changing, the burning of the starmaps
like industrial secrets so you can reach out
for what you see in the dark like unattainable fireflies
and by touching them, burn your fingertips
so you can refer to your scars as proof that they’re real.
Think the vision’s ever complete. You’re as dead
as a fly up against a pane of glass. The cat
will push you around like a comma that couldn’t
find its place in the foodchain of a long, ongoing
periodic sentence as incommensurate as pi
in every ripple of rain that falls like a God particle
on your oceanic grave. See how the moon
when you turn your eyes away shape shifts into
the wavelength of a radiant watersnake on the lake
playing picture music on its scales like a crazy keyboard
trying to keep its eighty-eights straight?
See how lovers assume there are no strangers?

PATRICK WHITE

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