IN A DARKENED ROOM

IN A DARKENED ROOM

In a darkened room I see shadows in the hall

moving under the door like an astronomer

counting the planets around a distant star,

transits and occlusions and axial perturbations

of insight into the possibilities of life.

And more than life, it seems, at times,

the cosmic odds of love not being the victim

of the way it has to live to preserve itself.

Yevtushenko writing Lima Junction, first line:

As we get older we get honester. Most of us

either exhausted into the truth, too lazy to lie,

or trying to make an anonymous impression upon life

like the Burgess Shale on a grailquest for oxygen.

How much can be made of so little. Predators

growing eyes and prey encased in exoskeletons.

Pikaia drops a thin lifeline into the waters of life

and everyone’s been climbing up their spine

like scarlet runners and serpent fire ever since.

Burning siege ladders storming the parapets of heaven.

Thermophilic cyanobacteria the hard drive of the planet

look at the software that’s evolved from that

like happy apps to keep our left front parietal lobes amused.

I never planned on a purpose in life. I think

all paradigms of the truth are potential liars.

There’s something more honest about an iron chain

than a gold. One smells like blood on the snow,

the other, too much cologne on a sunset. Religion,

art, science, the disclaimers of secular spiritualism

like a ghost denying the gene pool it’s hovering over,

all well and good, the junkie’s got his moonrock,

and we’re well protected by an umbrella

of intercontinental, ballistic Clovis points,

and the shepherds of the black camel, obviously oil,

are raising tall buildings in the desert like the horns of unicorns

among the obelisks and minaras, and I’ve got

more ways of expressing myself than I’ve got

things to say, but, hey, it’s the twenty-first century

and still the heart’s the mushroom cloud of a stromatolite.

Lady I wish it were stars and fireflies with me too

all of the time, windfalls of golden apples

in the orchards of the Hesperides, ripening

like the halos and auras of moondogs

and mystics wheeling in their shadows

at the crossroads of sundials in a vertiginous trance

at the thought of meeting you like a willow at midnight

at the zenith of a bridge in an aquatic garden on the moon

where the mindstream is always at ease

with the oceanic night sea it’s flowing into

and the poppies in our blood were dancing like solar flares

to the wild timbrels of the savage celebration

of the conflagration of life they were returning to

like a watershed of light. Fire flows in the dragon’s veins

and a corona of solar flares turns into a rosette of flame-throwers.

Fossils flower in our starmud as the earth’s answer to constellations.

No suffering. No salvation. And the physician left

to heal himself. First from his ignorance. Then the wound

of salvation itself. Private conjuring put on public view

is propaganda, not spiritual art. I have a symbolic mind.

A paleolithic future. I wear the hides of my insights

like wolfs’ heads. I die like a shaman in front of my paintings.

Bury my bones under the hearthstones like a pyre of kindling.

Spit paint my portrait in red ochre like dried blood

bound by animal grease. There are elk horns

in the middens of my starmud, mother of pearl in my eyes

like another moonrise whispering strange dream grammars

that express the solitude of the creatures of night.

And an inexplicable longing to understand the mystery of sorrow.

Were the first hominids troubled by the birth signs

of the new mindscape they were emerging into

as most of us migrating with the big-game stars into

the available futures of our vagrant imaginations

looking into an abyss of gaping astonishment and silence

at ancient galaxies rising like smoke from distant fires,

realizing we are not alone with our genetic codes

like surrealistic poems looking for happy mutations.

Relative to the future memories of stars yet to shine,

we’re all troubled apes in prime time trying to crack

cosmological koans with the rocks of good ideas.

Sponges filtering the krill of the stars through our pores.

Wisdom teeth pushing up through our jawbones

under the molars of the bi-valved goose-necked barnacles

of our observatories on wilderness mountaintops

several mirrors closer to deciphering the stars

as the creation of the intel of our own senses.

No dirt. No pearl. Whether you throw it before swine or not.

The true harvests of the soul are still sown

under the fertile crescents of your fingernails.

PATRICK WHITE