THE GLOW OF A HUMAN YOU KNOW AS A FRIEND

THE GLOW OF A HUMAN YOU KNOW AS A FRIEND

The glow of a human you know as a friend.

Closer than a candle that believes in stars.

Warmer than a fire when water scars

the names of those who were written into it

like the tears of crystal skulls

no one knows how to heal, and sits

quietly by the edge of the river like a deathbed.

Saying nothing of what can’t be said.

Don’t think it doesn’t make a difference

when humans transcend themselves

and make a space for you in their hearts

as if one wound could care for another enough

to double book the same ambulance

if nothing else. There are gestures of humanity

like breadcrumbs in the snow on windowsills.

There are acts of compassion swaddled in silence

like clean oxygen people breathe in every day

without knowing it until they notice the dog

with two pairs of old gloves on its paws

to keep them from cracking in the cold.

How many doors have been hallowed

by a bowl of warm soup being passed

across the threshold of one hunger to another

and even the ambrosia and nectar

of the infatuated gods never tasted

any holier than that. There are people

who ask for the world. And people

who give it to them like a blade of grass.

And even the perfect black mirrors of the demons

sometimes break down into tears

and welcome the human touch

of an affable familiar who knows about

lightning rods and rewiring chandeliers.

Women with eyes that don’t look upon you

as if you were always in arrears

in a debtor’s prison run by profiteers

bayonetting the bushes at night for runaway slaves.

It’s a mistake to make a religion

out of a kindness that isn’t based

on anymore than why not if it helps.

But what cross, crescent or six pointed star

of a Davidic ritual, ever crossed

a burning bridge as spiritual as this?

No trumpets at noon. The sun doesn’t

stand still. No prophets are rushing

up the fire ladders to heaven. It isn’t

snake-eyes. It isn’t seven come eleven.

It’s just the human divinity hidden

in the sublimity of ordinary acts of people

sweeping thorns off the path of life,

broken glass along this firewalk

on the Road of Ghosts three million light years long.

In dead ends in dangerous cities

with the traffic passing overhead

I’ve stood with derelict men and women

around the spontaneous combustion

of an empty oil drum on a brutal night

and held out my open palms like solar panels

to warm them up as if I were praying

at the shrine of a generous fire-god

cutting up another cardboard box

to keep the flames flowering like poppies.

There are defamed angels in a school

of hard knocks. Soft gold in the hard rocks

that don’t wear it on their sleeves

like spiritual bling. Like apple trees

they just do their thing, and everyone benefits.

Purity can throw bleach in your eyes

to rinse the stains of what’s intimate

and personal out of the bedsheets

of the cosmic membranes they hang from heaven.

You can wring the soiled rain out of the rose

as if it were a bloodstream. You can dream

of the perfect first principles of something

whole and antiseptically clean, and never

need to dirty your hands in starmud ever again.

You can be magically correct about how

you wrong the tragic effect of pain

on human nature. No complaints from the morgue.

Direct access to the heart and mind

outside of scripture. From the very first,

nothing to be taught. Nothing to be learned.

Great enlightenment doesn’t maintain a teacher

Compassion isn’t the star of a double feature.

Things return to the heart hungrier

than when they left, blue wavelengths,

then leave it again like a redshift in the blood.

Dawn, sunset. Mood swings of an hourglass

with a short umbilical cord between them

through which life passes back and forth

like the pulse of a bell kicking in the womb.

Cells are exchanged. Roles reversed. Innocence

returns to the salmon in the mindstream.

Experience lavishes rich silt on the lowlands.

Honey flows from the hives of drones with stingers.

Some night lights can hit all the high notes just right

like fireflies with a constellation of a reputation

among the stars for dazzling insights into love,

but the eyes of true kindness don’t see anything

to shine above. Love sees things on the same side

of your eyes you’re on. Memory being

the mother of muses, recalling when

you were that young, you were that poor,

you had a future memory of growing old alone,

you were that hurt and wounded,

you were that appalling, you were that

inexcusably wonderful chandelier of adamantine tears,

and your imagination used to refract

your submersible emotions in much the same way

before you went galactic, what else

could kindness, compassion, empathy,

a good friend be, but an original work of inspiration

rejoicing in the effortless ease of labouring creatively

in human collaboration with a spontaneous universe?

No human raised on the milk of human kindness

ever needed a primum mobile, a first mover,

a first cause, the corollary of an axiomatc sine qua non,

a Milky Way made straight, a Solonic book of laws

shadowing the real thing like the transit

a shepherd moon. Easy to tell a real lover

from a mere accomplice. Look for udders

of old gloves wrapped around a stray dog’s paws

to keep them from cracking on burning mirrors of black ice.

PATRICK WHITE