THE STARS KEEP HAPPENING FASTER THAN I CAN REMEMBER THEM

THE STARS KEEP HAPPENING FASTER THAN I CAN REMEMBER THEM

The stars keep happening faster than I can remember them.

So is everything else, exponentially. Memory makes me

a continuum I’m always creating and calling myself.

Memory cross-references its matrix like the web of a spider

and soon I mistake the habit of the web for me, continuously.

I’m attached like a badge or a bird to the strings of my own guitar.

The seeing isn’t in my eyes. Neither is the music in the instrument.

I keep giving the stars new names every night

just to keep up with the possibilities of what they’re becoming.

Nor have they ever shone down upon the same man

looking up at them two nights in a row. I rearrange them

into different constellations and give them symbolic meanings

they never knew they had before. I step through the door

and every house in the zodiac changes. The sun

is less lucid at dawn than when it started the nightshift.

There isn’t a point on the ecliptic that isn’t the equinox

of a prayer bead that gets its way by not asking for anything.

Watching the world, I witness my own creation

as it’s happening. The star becomes aware of the eye

that’s observing it and it begins to see things

as if it had its own imagination. We celebrate

each other’s possibilities and awareness is born

of the binary of you and me, so we can dance,

not two, like a happy secret that can’t be known

by anyone else. No one has ever lifted the veils of Isis,

not even unity, which is to say, if you see her face covered

it means you haven’t opened your eyes far enough

to realize the Queen of Heaven is the shining

you’ve been looking for her with. Astronomy for fireflies.

This world is so interdependently originated

I’m the lifework of a star. I’m the masterpiece

of a bacterium. Starmud, I garden among the galaxies

that blow like the dishevelled heads of flowers in the wind.

My work done. I’m the only weed that’s been uprooted.

The pulse of my bloodstream is the waterclock of the stars.

The moon is in the corals having sex. I’m listening

to discrete variations on a theme of discontinuity

my ears are turning into music like the rain on the plectra

of the thorns and the leaves that ping like the G-spots

of the roses in heat that want to go on blooming forever.

PATRICK WHITE