EVEN HERE ON EARTH

EVEN HERE ON EARTH

Even here on earth where indifference,

not rebellion, turns the place into hell,

slag of the angels, and dark ore out of

the gold pollen of the honey bees,

and self sets false humans up

like fallen idols to Mammon,

and the hearts of children are crushed

like strawberries, the wise are tormented

by trivia, and the fools are given pulpits

on behalf of a cult of coffins,

small mystical acts of compassion

keep happening like salt and water,

light and bread, slipping between the cracks

like one prisoner passing another

a cigarette through the bars

they climb everyday like ladders.

Who hasn’t cursed the long labour of worship

carving yourself out of light is, or given up

halfway through the dawn that lasts

until sunset when the nightshift comes on?

I don’t think I’m especially good

and is the inability not to empathize

with everyone, a vice or a virtue?

Mark one jewel and they’re all marked

like the dew shouldering the moon

in every drop, or the eye

the superclustering of galaxies

in the afterbirth of myriad multiverses.

Insomuch as you do it unto one of these,

you do it unto me. That’s pretty clear.

You see the worst and best done everyday.

Everytime somebody looks at someone else

the whole world changes out to the furthest star.

For your eyes only never made any sense.

An aspen leaf whispers something to the wind

and the seashells hear it oceans away

as if it were a secret they were keeping

like lockets to themselves. Something

their mother said in a good mood, remembered

since childhood. You were fathered

by every stranger you’ll ever meet

the night you were conceived.

You share your genes with everyone

like a mother tongue back to Lilith beyond Eve.

There isn’t a drop of amniotic fluid

that isn’t a waterfall. There isn’t a star

that wasn’t born in the womb of your eyes.

Sentience is the light turning around to look at itself

through your point of view. Sunflowers, too,

and gnats and fish and birds and wolves.

We all cast shadows. We all live penumbrally

in the half light of the moon, and by noon

the blazing’s washed us out like watercolours

and we’re a disappointment to the sundials.

Everyone’s tears are on a grail quest

for an inkwell that will help them live

indelibly happy with the outcome

of their prophecies whether you call them

fact, fiction, or spirituality, the issue’s the same.

One to blame, we’re all to blame

in a bigger frame of reference. Like roadkill

on a country road when even the dust

is as sweet as a locust tree in bloom,

just to be here is to be inescapably complicit.

Even driving the white-gold chariots of the sun

there’s a lot of slum in all of us that comes due

inestimably sooner than later. Do you know how long

you have to hold your breath before

you become a pure fish in polluted water

trying to belly flop up toward the sky?

Do you know how many fish are dying

of thirst beside a freshwater lake

and all they’ve got to do is roll over and drink?

I’ve been witching for water in hell a long time.

I’ve been trying to decipher the crackling

of my starmud like lifelines in the dry palms

of my creekbeds. I’ve been attempting to live

as if meaning had some artistic talent

as a medium of the absurd and the very inanity

of the effort is enough to prove I’m on

the right track. The seance is making

an honest effort. I’m a journey man apprentice

to a travelling circus of sacred clowns.

Some people want to make a big splash.

With me it was always a total eclipse or bust.

Indefensibly human you do what you must

and hopefully won’t need an alibi that will lie

behind your back, just as you’re coming clean

as a new moon with yourself, and everything’s black.

Nothing’s bigger than one, and sometimes

I think I’m the grand master of God’s Own Zero

then someone unusual comes along and pops

the docking Zeppelin, and I’m a conflagration

of mythic deflation astonished by the progress

of my humility just to have something to hang on to.

What’s come as a retroactive shock, recently, though

is how many muses refuse to be saints

and yet there’s still an echo of goodness in the air

tending the heart’s home fires in danger of going out

as if it were a reflex of the second nature of oxygen

to keep things lit in a dark time, brighten things up a bit.

Extraordinary ordinary decencies of life,

small acts and gestures of kindness rare

as orchids in the winter time, and just as shy

as deer caught in the headlights on a spring night.

Their own two hands the only clay tablets

brought down from the mountain

after talking to God like a gate, not an exit,

they ever obeyed like commandments

carved in granite like glaciers in the rocks

of the Canadian Shield. The alluvial soil

of a northern mindstream with small asteroids

of circumpolar ore circling a midnight sun

like gold in the heart of a human that never sets.

How one eyebeam of genuine starmud

without an agenda for shining touches the heart

and the whole valley’s alive with fireflies.

PATRICK WHITE