IF YOU'RE NOT WALKING THE WATERS OF YOUR OWN MIND

IF YOU’RE NOT WALKING THE WATERS OF YOUR OWN MIND

If you’re not walking the waters of your own mind,

seeing through the eyes in your own blood, you’re

in danger of falling through somebody else’s mirror

and like one less star in the sky, we’re all a little more blind

and there are a lot of eyes out there depending upon your light.

Shine, my friend, shine. Intensify the grey shadows,

the nipping eclipses and blackflies of pestering doubt

until two days of hot sun at the end of May

puts them all out like pitted match heads and asteroids

swarming your atmosphere and orbits like acid rain

trying to make a sea-change. Go pearl-diving deep enough

into the darkness for the singularity at the bottom

of the black hole. And you’ll break into

a whole new way of looking at the nightsky

with billions of stars you’ve never seen before

waiting to greet you at the end of a tunnel of light.

Just as poverty makes me more generous and wealth

diminishes the value of the gift, doubt is merely

a left-handed way of affirming what I deny

as my denial bears witness to the fact that I am

this suspension bridge that sways between one precipice

and another, one breath, one step, one pulse, one leap

from one shore, one peak, one valley, one wavelength,

one extreme to the next. One moment

I’m Hermes Trismegistus firewalking on stars

with a heartfelt message from the gods, and the next

my winged heels catch fire and I’m Icarus falling

like a cinder into the third eye of the sea that’s going

to wash me out in the flashflood of the very first tear it sheds.

When you fear the abyss. Turn into space.

If the serpent fire of the dragon begins to feel

like a prophetic furnace of cold ashes you’re buried in,

show it how long your eyes have been dancing

like fireflies on a flammable starmap around

the axial Maypole of the vernal earth

and how many times you’ve immolated yourself

in the starfields like a wild flower that blooms

in its own flames, consumed by desire without being burnt.

Let your song conform to your voice

like the skin of music, like the moon’s reflection

to the laryngeal wavelengths of the lake

thriving with subliminal fish that will

jump into your lifeboat of their own accord

as if you were the high note they were trying to hit.

Sing as if you were the first submarine on the moon

to sound the depths of a sea of shadows.

Long before the Impressionists, the sunset

was painting the effect of its own light like burnt sienna

glowing on the cedars and pines at dusk. Write

like midnight and dawn in your own eyes,

not the scenic calendars and schools

of retinal responses to a dying love affair with the light.

Admire the fountains, but seek out the watersheds

of your own efflorescence in the depths of yourself

if you want to shine by your own light

in a darkness that’s never been touched

by the sun and the moon and the stars,

and you’re the only candle, lighthouse

and constellation it’s every known. Shine

like the lantern of a sea star in these depths

long enough and it isn’t the lustre of what you see,

though that’s not a negligible gift, but the eyes

that evolve out of your lucidity that’s the real blessing,

the light upon light of the dark revelation

beyond the obvious mirrors of the moondogs and irises

chromatically abberating the lens at the other end

of the telescope like the eye of a crab

under the carapace of its cretaceous observatory

as if it were enlightened by the flashback of an old acid trip.

The stars don’t abjure the black holes

for not shining, and the black holes

don’t despise the stars for not going deep enough.

Everything’s perennially new under the sun

at every moment of creation, if you open

your eyes wide enough, despite what those see

squinting through seashells in their deathmasks

as if they were hiding something from themselves.

Surrealistically crazy and wisely unrestrained,

the picture-music never uses the same voice twice,

like an oracle never repeats a prophecy

if you weren’t listening to it in the first place.

Every morning’s a new dance-card. Every night

a standing ovation for the lyrical improvisations

of the wind in the leaves of the willows

and Byzantine silver Russian olives with metal feathers

that never rust, until they want to, down by the river.

Sing your heart out, your eyes, your mind, your blood,

your doubt, your confusion, the evanescent absolutes

of your jubilation, the fireflies of cosmic eurekas in the dark,

the heavy bells of the sorrows you had to abandon

by the side of the road like one room schools and churches

and walk on lonelier and lighter down the road

like the wanderlust of a wayward spirit that blindly trusts

in its own imagination to reveal the hidden harmonies

of chaos as well as the cacophonous dissonance

of conditioned orders of consciousness going to extremes.

The logic of metaphor doesn’t move in a straight line

like an interconnected freight train whistling through town

as bars at the railroad crossing come down and go up

like the thresholds of duelling swords on the clock

while jaywalking immigrants cut through a hole in the fence

and have no idea what hour it is, except

none of the dream grammars of their mother tongues

have a past tense, or a table of contents for their solitude.

PATRICK WHITE