Sunday, March 25, 2012

LIGHTNING HITS THE HORNS OF THE MORNING SNAIL


LIGHTNING HITS THE HORNS OF THE MORNING SNAIL

Lightning hits the horns of the morning snail
like the tines of a tuning fork
and the larkspur sees in the ashes of the holy one,
a tiny urn, no bigger than a cigar butt,
a deep connection to the stars
at the root of its ultramarine towers,
the ugly and despised become luminously beautiful
by what they’ve been touched by. Same
with candles, night, the human spirit, a poem
and the stars and planets
that ride the film of our eyes across the sky
or slide across the poppies of blood that bloom
on the other side of our eyelids in the sunshine
like blue sunspots and serpentine rainbows
on the deft wings of the houseflies aspiring
to penetrate the heights and mysteries of being
as if they approached God like an ineffable windowpane,
and the black mirrors of the oil slicks
that eclipse our faith in our transformative power
to change things. Two petals of violet cosmos,
two eyelids of a new way of looking at things,
swaying ethereally in the wind
as if they were keeping time
to a faint music they can hear
way back somewhere in their mind’s eye, fall
and stick themselves to the back of a snail
inching its way along a garden path in metric
through a crosswalk of rococo shadows,
and who would have believed
something so low and slow could fly
if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes?

Show me anything your eyes have ever been deprived of,
however ugly, however visually tantalizing,
inside our out, even if you can count more than the usual three,
and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t learned
how to be grateful for the generosity
of the black hole they’re living in
like one of the darlings of light.
Clarity isn’t just a matter
of straightening out the wavelengths in your line of sight
and then looking upon everything you see
as if it were flatlining in parallel event horizons
everywhere you looked for signs of life
and came upon death, and mistook it for peace.
It isn’t just a matter of contemplating sundials
in erratically disciplined Zen gardens
until you come to understand how to use the shadows
on behalf of your own spiritual insight
as readily as you’ve mastered your weapons of light.
No one’s ever been purified by a holy war.
Not even the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope.
You can exhaust a whole new generation of third eyes
trying to make it all one out of a lot of little separate pieces
that reflect the whole in every part
of your shattered chandeliers and mirrors,
that long pilgrimage, that fire walk of shining splinters
that dazzle you into believing it’s skip to my lou my darling
all the way down a Milky Way of stars
from here like a fingerling of light
to there like a wild salmon of oceanic enlightenment.
Beauty isn’t an essence you can extract from the ore
of who you are as a human like an existential alchemist
trying to distill the stars from the medium they’re shining in
as if you were pulling a sword from a philosopher’s stone.
All the shining spiritual metals, copper, silver, mercury, gold,
unless they’re alloyed with the darker elements of earth,
are too soft for combat. Merlin relies
on the iron forge in his own blood to work his magic.
He knows a holy war is just an exorcism
on crusade against a seance. A calling
of the dead to the dead. Not the work
of the living spirit that resides
in the human divinity of everyone of us
like a birthright of shining
that’s as indefensible and unassailable
as time and space. Clarity doesn’t try to part the heavens
like a mansion into single rooms for every afterlife
that goes into exile looking for an excellence within itself
that knows how to keep a promise to the earth.
Knowing how to fall is half the art of rising.
Learning how to get up off
your knees, your prayer rugs, tatami mats
and all those flying carpets
that don’t fly straight in any direction
with compassion for the human being you are
as you see yourself looking at you
through everyone else’s eyes,
and hear creation being said within you
like the fleeting meanings of life
that shadow the life of meaning
as fast as it’s being spoken
in the mother-tongue of everyone
who can look upon a morning snail
and hear how a grubby little buddha
of a sticky sacred syllable
that crosses your path in the morning
is saying you into existence twenty four seven
the way everything else is each other
in the wholly imaginable beauty
of a creative language that isn’t
a tongue-tied stranger to anyone.

Look at any grain of dirt on whatever path you’re on
and light it up with the shining
from the oil lamps of your own eyes
and you’ll see how easy it is to enlighten
what’s under your feet like the billions of stars
that spontaneously followed suit like wildflowers
once you got the first one lit and realized
in whatever direction you search and seek
the spirit isn’t looking for the right road of thorns
to cut its feet on, or lacerate its knees on a holy stairwell.

Put a pair of cosmic wings on a morning snail
and the whole earth turns into a landing strip
of green boughs in blossom, even
when the fireflies take over the nightshift
like microcosmic demonic nightwatchmen.
Go ask the bees if you don’t believe me.
They can read the petals of the secret starmaps
that bloom like love notes and shared recipes
for honey that tastes like a solar flare
transformed by the transactions of a spiritual atmosphere
that pearls this grain of nacreous earth
as surely as the air that breathes us does,
into auroral arrays of beauty and compassion.

If you can’t love the veils, how are you ever
going to learn to love the face behind them
that smiles back at you in a likeness of yourself,
all eyes, and stars, flowers and nocturnal metaphors
for what you’re looking at?
A morning snail with two petals of cosmos for wings,
with flashy grains of dirt on its back, each
a world within a world in its own right,
rising chromatically over their event horizons
as a sign of a significance of their own
as poignant as the silicates and stars they’re reborn from,
delivering the mail at its own pace
as if its wings were two loveletters
addressed to itself by the wind personally
each sealed with a kiss
like two complementary eyes
you must look into deeply if you want to see
how the hourglass flowers in your gazing
like larkspur and shapeshifting desert stars.
If you don’t want to live your whole life
like a scar looking for a wound you can believe in.

Even a morning snail, if you’ve got the eyes for it,
can make a trail of the silver veil it leaves in its wake
like a smeared mirror on the path to enlightenment.
If you only love the light at moonrise,
and despise what’s fallen into the dirt
like so many windfalls of
demons, stars, snails, angels, apples and humans before it,
your life is not adjusted to the time-zone you’re living in
and your heart keeps missing a beat
you go endlessly wandering over the earth to look for
through the gardens on the moon
and the starfields above
when everywhere and always
it’s been right under your feet all the time
like a snail path shining like the Milky Way
on the garden walkway through
the blue and white stars of the larkspur
like lightning in the morning
that flashes from your own eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETHING SAID SOFTLY


SOMETHING SAID SOFTLY

Something said softly in the night
like a tendril on a windowsill
tasting the moon, a whisper, a word
that walked in the light without
abandoning its shadow,
a phrase with wet wings
dreaming itself out of its chrysalis
not knowing whether it’s a leaf or a dragonfly
until the whole tree wakes up beside it,
something sought but rarely said
saturated with the meaningless life of meaning
that could touch space like flesh
and make it feel the thrill of new eyes
running down its arm like tears.
And it’s not that I want
to unsay the night or God
to define myself as a human,
and it’s of little moment to me,
seed on the wind,
what worlds are born of my words,
what ends, what begins,
what comes of what I cannot say,
but I want to say something
with the savour of time in it
that’s worth living for a little more each day
like a small tree rooted like a thought
in a crevasse of eternity,
greening the moon.
Late at night, in the darkness,
while the silence is off preserving something,
and all I can hear is your breath
off in the distance like an ocean,
I want to unpack my vagrant heart
like a patched guitar-case,
a grave-robber in a pyramid,
and attune my afterlife
to the key of this one
in such a way
I can play like a new star in Orion
to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment
that hover over us like living constellations of our own
not bound to any paradigm of light
that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.
I want to paint something
that feels like the flower
that just brushed against your hand,
I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight
like window glass fired in the kiln of a star
that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,
their atrocities and deprivations,
their terrors and wrecked joys,
compassion has turned it into an eye so clear
you can sip water from it like tears
that taste of the history of blood and wine
that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding
with a bride of rain that unveiled herself
like falling chandeliers.
Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human
in the shadow of thundering magnitudes
that feel like the extinctions of gods
that time has wheeled out
to the enormity of the gravepit
that limes every abyss of the heart
with the stars of a new universe,
I want to add one candle to the shining
in a folly of insight so illuminating
even the earliest galaxies
forever entering the darkness
on the threshold of their first shedding
could see it, something
so profoundly vernal and intimate
even I can believe in it.

PATRICK WHITE

WHO ISN'T TRYING TO LIVE


WHO ISN’T TRYING TO LIVE

Who isn’t trying to live
as they vaguely hope they are
whatever extremes of moderation they’ve gone to
behind all the masks and fraud?
Crosswalks and bridges of fire
trying to get to the other side of themselves
like the promised land, or God,
ladders up to heaven
like vertebrae and ribs,
and ropes like spinal cords
down a well on the moon
that hasn’t enthroned hell in her depths yet,
everyone’s trying to put a face on chaos
they remotely hope is their own.
One by one the plum blossoms
fall to the nightstream
like loveletters
from the branch of the tree
that read them once and then let go.
No one knows where they’re from
or where they’re going.
Some give their wings up
like graduate degrees to the ants
and others are raising their sails
like the flames of a great fire
that consumes the prophet
who wanted to hold his arms up
like a wishbone to the lightning
in the revery of his desire
until everything is ash and nails,
and others who think they’re
the rudders and keels of the flowing.
Sometimes I am nothing more
than this terrible inevitability
of flesh and bone
alone in the vastness of my unknowing
where neither ignorance nor wisdom prevails
and then it’s as clear as stars
on both sides of the window
that everyone’s everyone else’s good guess
as they encounter one another
passing the time
in a crumbling game of graveyard chess.
I don’t know why what’s wise about me
always ends up listening to myself
like a fool’s confession
but I’ve run out of rosaries
like habitable planets
and my homelessness has exposed
the ruse of divining purity
in the afflictions of compassion
as if everything had evolved in sorrow
like a heart-bending occasion for tears
as the mountains that fell
like an avalanche of cornerstones
into the valleys they’ve dug
like pyramids and graves over the years
abide like salt in the eye of the sea.
Intelligence might be an elaborate mode of paranoia,
but eased into the wonder of being here at all
with trees and stars and the midnight rainbows
on the necks of the grackles
and the hectic butterfly among the grape hyacinth,
since I was enlightened
by my absolute uncertainty,
I have gathered all my voices together like leaves
and burned the old texts of myself
for not being much of a liar.
Five petals opened
and one flower bloomed
like a good laugh.
Now my awareness
is a kind of playful fire that doesn’t burn
what it consumes
though the light
still tastes of the jewel
and even as the good-byes deepen their voices
like echoes in wells,
because I’ve grown older
and autumn keeps shedding its choir,
the hellos still take on a life of their own
as if nothing had changed.
An illuminated clown
I am astounded by the profundities
in every jest of being
revelling in the creative hilarity
of its mystic specificity
and how every time I get serious about something
as if I had just remembered myself,
I bring the house down.
Only a hypocrite is humble enough
to underestimate his own irrelevance,
and go sorting through himself
like a cellphone in the ashes
but for those who have become fire,
aspiration is achievement
and fulfillment and desire,
one breath. In every event
there’s nothing to be
further than you can see.
But that doesn’t mean
take a harder look
as if your life were a book
you were learning to read
or a mirror you had to stare into
until your eyes bleed
to know who you are.
When you stop thinking
every perception is a clue
to who you are
you’ll shine out like a star
ahead of its own light
and stop trying to recognize God
through the featureless eyes
and vigilant simulacra
of a stolen identity.
You will be neither partially
nor wholly yourself
and before and beyond
will not seem
the unending extremities of now
rounding the skull of a clock
that’s lost its way home.
Your seeing will grow deeper than eyes
and you will stop sending
your reflection out
like the moon’s last lifeboat
to haul you up out of the abyss
like a fisherman gilled in the tangled mess
of his own s.o.s.
You’ll let go of the oars
and breathe easy like the sea
and in every blossom of being
you will taste the whole orchard
drunk on its knees in laughter,
not knowing where to begin.

PATRICK WHITE