Monday, July 23, 2012

I SEE YOU'VE MADE A GATE


I SEE YOU’VE MADE A GATE

I see you’ve made a gate
of the skeleton of the wing of the bird
you should have set free.
And it’s closed like a book you haven’t read.
The wall of a garden you haven’t
found your way into.
No one can show you
how to offer your heart
to the black rose of your blood
in total eclipse. I could point out
a few stars, and tell you their names
but that was hierarchies ago
and now they’re waiting for the metaphors
to come from your own mouth.

To say them so deeply
you can’t help breaking into light.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN IMAGINATION AND REALITY ARE ONE


WHEN IMAGINATION AND REALITY ARE ONE

When imagination and reality are one
and there’s no recourse for civilization
to distinguish between them by usage and consensus,
and the light of the stars isn’t condemned
to a life of hard labour as a torch in a coal mine
looking for diamonds you can drink by the grailful
until you’re as satiate as oblivion, there’s no doubt
the mind is an artist riffing on the new strings of the rain
or painting it in picture-music like a poet or a scientist
who look deranged to those who’ve averaged out
the crucials of the mindscape like the odds of a lottery,
convinced as they are like pilgrims walking
from one end of their sacred asphalt driveways
to the other, that one size fits all, and that these
enlightened journeys without destinations
are just circles that haven’t been squared yet.

But if you’re off on your own,
making roads with your walking you’re the first
to set foot on like the moon of a spaced-out planet
you’re trying to turn into something habitable,
remember it’s an act of compassion not to lock the door
to the available dimensions of the future when you leave.
Remember that all six of your senses
live in the world you creatively visualize
like the aura of the life that surrounds you
like an ongoing masterpiece of incompletion.
Without them you might be a master of making trees,
but, hey, man, where are the birds?
I don’t hear anything singing.
There’s nothing to taste or touch or listen to.
No appearances to deceive your consciousness with.

When your eye’s got an idea of the kind of star
it wants to be, before it’s learned to see, it never shines.
Wondering what flora to root where in the expanding abyss
of the night before you, scatter the stars across the firmament
as if you were sowing the unknown seeds of the wildflowers
that scuttled themselves like arks
in the cracked creekbeds of your neocortical starmud
and waited patiently like hibernating frogs
for the conditioned chaos of the rain
to come like a flashflood of life-nourishing insight.

And when you’re annihilated
by the mystic terror of your own freedom
jimmying with the G-spot on your prison locks
to get them to open up like a coven of doves
that want to release their omens like feathers on the wind
that can scry and fly where they want,
don’t linger in the doorway of your liberation.
Hesitation is the flypaper of light.
Stare straight into the eyes of the Medusa
until she’s the one that blinks first in the savage snake pit
and the stone bird of your heart thaws like a volcano
potting islands in the draconian heat of its bloodstream
and the Gorgons start dancing to the music of their classical hair-dos
as if they could hear the wavelengths
of a pan flute lapping nearby like water.
Kiss the serpent fire on the head
if you want to honour the shapeshifter
that sets your dark energy free to assume the form
of the world that moults the chrysalis of your imagination
that reassembles the rubble of the last gasp
into a house of transformation that fits you
like a bubble of supple skin where you alone
are the myth and physics of its origination.
And whatever world provides you with the mindscape
of your exploration, you recognize by the style
it’s painted in as everywhere a work of your own
signed by the wind in the left hand bottom corner of the sky.

Hard to tell the wells from the fountains
in the mingling mindstream that flows like life lines
into the frayed deltas of your palm. And what madness
hasn’t always alloyed its backbone to the swords of the sane
defending their indigenous traditions of soft metal?
Don’t stare into your cauldron as if you were trying
to read the future by the lint in your belly-button.
Actualize your magic and stir the womb a bit like a master of departures
with an intuitive genius for unitive metaphors.
Mix the paint on the palette into necromantic shades
of new underworlds weeping jewels on the roots
of the fireflowers bearing forbidden fruits
they’ll carry by the armful with them out of the garden
like refugees running from an abandoned embassy
that used to give them shelter from themselves with impunity.

No limit. You can live in as many worlds as there are
grains of dust and pollen, where you’re not allergic
to the stars, and the constellations come like the empty baggage
of a book that hasn’t written a word to anyone,
nor appointed an alpha like the book end of a beginning
to balance the long vowel of omega at the other extreme
to let you know when it’s all been said, and it’s time
to lay the cornerstone of a myth of origin of your own,
a pebble in the random tide of providential events,
that doesn’t need more than one leg to stand on
like a heron hunting fish in the bestiaries of the moon
that’s finally given up its dead like a graveyard of Orphic skulls.

Imagine your way like smoke through the eye of a keyhole
into spaces you create by your very being there
to summon them from the abyss, a carillon of dragons
on a holy day of reptiles when the lowest are blessed with wings,
or wall yourself into an aesthetically sealed garden
where the rain perennially washes the blood of the children
who finger-painted the flowers on your thin skin off,
and luxuriate in your fastidious appetite for insignificant details.
Mind is an artist. Able to paint the worlds as a sin of omission,
a sum of destructions, or the negative space of a hand
breaching stone with a spiritual tattoo on its palm,
indelibly invisible as nothing for whom nothing is out of reach.
Make heaven. Make hell. Who you are is where you live.
Nest in a bell like a bird under the roof of your mouth
or root like lightning in a cloud you left unweeded.

Out of the random ignitions and annihilations of dark matter
bombarding your senses like anti-photonic fireflies
emerges a world of shadows into the light
of your imagination like the rising of a new moon
engendered out of you restoring yourself to it
like a lost atmosphere that got carried away by wings.
You can say things into existence word by word
or you can talk them to death in the silence
that follows the ghost of ideas like darkness follows us.
Or you can let the night bird deep
in the solitude of your heart sing
your fervent yearning for a companionable world
into being sweeter than the immensity of your creative freedom
to long for it as if what were missing
would always seem somehow more real than what was not.

PATRICK WHITE