WATER IMAGINING MIRAGES NO LESS REAL THAN IT IS

WATER IMAGINING MIRAGES NO LESS REAL THAN IT IS

Water imagining mirages no less real than it is.

Delusion, too, one of the many flowers

on the bitter herbs of enlightenment

that bloom in fire under the eyelids

of the pine cones dreaming on the roots

of broken evergreens towering like pagodas

in the starfields of elemental meditations.

The imagination makes an impression on the world

like the charred fossil of a leaf on a cement sidewalk,

reminiscent of a fallen starling with outstretched wings

in the autumn, aviaries of constellations singing

like canaries in a mine with hoods over their heads,

and the shape-shifting medium of this space

we inhabit, each a planet unto ourselves,

undemonstrably accommodates the suggestion

into the experience of actuality we call ourselves.

We live in the worlds we propose for ourselves

but these houses of life we occupy aren’t based

on the foundation stones of our ideals,

or the lack thereof when they turn to quicksand,

but the aesthetic approach we can’t help making

toward our own stars and atoms, as if we

were the inspiration behind their creation,

the singularity of the eyes in the black holes

of the life and death masks we keep shedding

like the eyelids of a rose in an ongoing dream

that keeps changing fragrances we can sense

but can’t explain like the numinosity

of unnamed wildflowers in an atmospheric mind.

Individuals creatively collaborate

with the collective presence of everyone

to make a persona of themselves

they only wear in private when the mirrors

turn their backs on the stars like nightwindows

lit on the inside by the fires of more intimate candles

light years closer to home. Doves of white light

or crows of black matter the same.

What do the great seas of awareness

have to fear from their own weather

in a deluge of forty days and forty nights

without landfall? Every top of the mountain

was first a seabottom, every ark,

the shipwreck of the lifeboat that saved us

from drowning on the inundated flood plains

of our own depths. And it isn’t relevant

whether the heavy bells on the nightwatch

envy the buoyancy of the moon or not,

they’re all adagios of the same picture-music

emerging like waterbirds from the same well spring

as if everything broke like the sacred syllable

of one prolonged note of a hidden voice

resonating like an empty grave beside an open coffin

in a guitar-shaped universe singing to itself

like the ocean in its own seashell, or a bee

in a big yellow rose with just a touch of sunset.

PATRICK WHITE