Thursday, August 23, 2012

HIDDEN JEWELS IN THE ASHES SKINLESS AS LIGHT


HIDDEN JEWELS IN THE ASHES SKINLESS AS LIGHT

Hidden jewels in the ashes skinless as light.
It’s a big place when you only see it through your eyes,
but see it through your heart, and even
your deepest tears are a wound shy
of the bell of silence that overturns the fountainmouths
of even the most efflorescent of the arts
so many paint on their windows so as not to see it.
It’s crucial to be a sincere sword in any holy war,
but how rare it is to meet anyone with
the courage of their clarity to peer beyond that
and look up at the stars from a dark, open field
and see, despite the way the light shatters like chandeliers,
we’re not living in a world of broken mirrors.

You can look into the eyes of the dragon
that weeps like rain. You can feel compassion
for flying reptiles and then you can kneel
at the end of the futon in front of the beaming window
and add your own ray of light as if your were humanizing
prismatic power mandalas through an antique kaleidoscope
by adding your eyes to the sand painting the next moment
is going to be erased at the zenith of fulfilment
and all the apple bloom like the circus tents
of the enlightened clouds and clowns,
are going to blow away, as if time weren’t
just the younger sister of space, but a kind
of sad, lyrical wind as well that keeps
shedding our lifemasks like the petals
of the wild roses and the wings of the flying ants,
as autumn comes looking for the maple keys
that could unburden your heart and sweeten your sleep
like a windfall of the fruits of life that replace it all
with a better return journey than when you went into exile.

Mentored by suffering the improvised myths of our origin,
keeping our third eye on the twists and turns
of the washboard road we’re driving home on,
not to be surprised about what’s around the next bend
or the rock like a hidden chip on a soft shoulder
waiting to be knocked off, wondering if life
has just provided you the occasion
to love again as inexhaustibly as you once did,
as if someone’s just uncovered you like a hidden housewell
or a buried telescope in a graveyard of famous constellations
with an afterlife of born again stars, you turn a corner,
bemused to be alive, as if you’d forgotten the feeling,
and your truly surprised, startled even, when you look to your left
that there’s a field, half-returned to the bush, beyond a cedar rail fence
patched by lichens that look like the seas of the moon
eclipsing their wounds as if time really could heal all things,
and the last of the common mullein were flowering
out of an urgent dream just before dusk, and the light,
I swear the light was making making everything
glow like effulgent honey, as the leaves on the trees
were on the verge of burning, and the goldenrod
and the purple loosestrife stood out like complementary colours,
mutually enhancing hot spots on the wheel of birth and death,
and the star clusters of New England asters
and blue chicory blooming by the side of the road
like floral prototypes of the new starmaps as the night comes on,
each as original as the last, and you’re mystically entranced
even in passage, of how reality, even in the midst
of its dissolution, can sometimes take your breath away
with the beauty that’s immanent within us all revealed
spontaneously like a stranger at the open gate
swinging on its hinges of hello and good-bye
that I took as a sign this was always the right path to be on
after all these light years of driving through the dark on my own.

PATRICK WHITE

THE CLOSER TO DEATH, THE MORE RISKS YOU TAKE IN LIFE


THE CLOSER TO DEATH, THE MORE RISKS YOU TAKE IN LIFE

The closer to death, the more risks you take in life.
Whatever’s left of your dark abundance, you spend it here
on things you know you won’t be able to take for granted
in a few light years, windows and wildflowers, dragonflies
and Venus going down blazing blue-white in a tangerine sunset,
the haiku novel you write spontaneously in your head
about the future of the red-haired kid with floured skin and freckles.
The way the light waxes lyrical about the larkspur.
Even the hairy scab of the spider you found
stranded in the bathtub after he’d put himself in peril
to come out of the darkness for a drink. And the long
pathway to heaven you laid over the side
like a two ply Milky Way of toilet paper
so it could be gone, as it was, in the morning
with blessings on its head and house. So much time
and then there’s forever. We don’t run out of it
we just plunge into one hell of a lot more of it
than we can use.

So given what I know
as one of the few certainties that have
brutally enhanced my intensity for life,
is going to happen to me sooner than later,
twenty springs, twenty summers, twenty autumns
if I’m lucky beaded out like new moons
on the optimistic abacus of my fingers and toes,
how could I not, like Tolstoy walking with Turgenev,
at the crepuscular end of an epic life,
crush flowers against my face, or let the stars
tattoo my skin with whatever constellations they wish?
How could I not admire the immensity of the light
thinly smeared on the delicately leaded stained glass window
of the fly’s wing, lying like a black maple key
on the windowsill at the foot of the sky it couldn’t unlock?

I absorb every mystically specific detail
the way I breathe. The inconceivable uncanniness
of its being here, just as it is without amendment, at all,
and me as well, to witness that all there is
to my unlikely presence is the fly on the windowsill.
Is the unknown star I’m trying to name
the constellation it’s so furiously from
shining through the crowns of the birch groves
pulling their leaves up around their throats
as autumn approaches for all of us. So far
not moribund about death or the passage of the flowers.
If it were a bad thing, the animals would know,
and be afraid of it, and yet I’ve witnessed
some of the highest summits of dignity
in the way an animal dies, accepting what must be,
with such grace and dignity, even in the clutch
of great agony, I just have to remember
what I saw in their eyes as they looked at me calmly
as death underwhelmed them on the inside
without the slightest disappointment
that this was the end of life. And no panic,
no sense of possibly having lived it wrong.
Just the calm of a flightfeather making a soft landing.

All my life I’ve tried to have the courage of my calling
and look into dark spaces and forbidden realms,
fathomless abysses that staggered the imagination
with their imageless prolixity, the hidden harmonies
of archetypal starmud subliminally suggesting
themes and metaphors of picture-music that might
shed light upon my emptiness and yours as if
we, too, were hidden secrets that wished
to be known creatively, the way the moon is,
when the seminal dew is on the grass like the waters
of a breaking womb, though a lunar life is strictly visionary,
or there’s an orgasmic frenzy of silver fish
flashing their lunacy like sabres of light
in their urgency for life in the rising tide
of a providence that inspires them when it’s high
to do or die, or expire in a tidal pool of shore-huggers.
I’ve looked into the dragon’s eyes directly
like two switchblades in a back alley
and recalling Rilke’s advice, tried poetically
to kiss them back into princesses I’ve neglected too long,
to humanize them back into my good graces again
like the dark side of the moon taking off its deathmask,
and turning around, showing me its face, eye to eye,
as if mirrors hadn’t been invented yet,
and I wasn’t a bird that had to be afraid of turning into stone.

PATRICK WHITE