THIS OR THAT DELUSIONAL CHOICE

THIS OR THAT DELUSIONAL CHOICE

This or that delusional choice, great exercises of the will,

chromatic aberration of the optics of consciousness,

must there be a you, must there be an I

for us to understand each other, paint rags of a dream,

fleeting lines of a poem uncoiling like smoke from a candle

a gust of jealous stars blew out to make a bigger impression

upon the dark. Radiant fossils of the constellations,

every star in their eyes down to Albireo in the tail of the Swan,

a brilliant mutation, a masterpiece of evolution

tweaking its own creation with hotspots of genius,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

must our thought waves divide the sea of awareness

that isn’t troubled by its own weather on the turbulent surface,

or the low pianissimos of its kingfishers at peace with the fish

in a halcyon mood with each other like a truce of music

in which we drown like the moon every night,

a sword of light returned in tribute to the waters

wounded by the beauty of an act of grace

like a tiny stone in an oyster shell that lacquered it

into a lunar pearl hanging from the neck of the earth.

Must there be a you, must there be an I,

when our theta-waves are weaving a flying carpet

under both our feet pacing back and forth

like the shuttle-cock heartbeats of clacking looms

in front the windows, worried like needles in haystacks

if someone were going to pop our balloons of laughing gas

like joy’s grape against the palettes of our mouths,

extemporizing Keats at a Grateful Dead concert,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when the iron in our blood is still

the youngest bell of the sun at the marriage of light

where atomic numbers join together

that which none can put asunder,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when we’re both children of the same fire-womb,

same dragon mother, same midwife, same wet nurse of the earth?

Separation is not real in an interdependently originated world.

There are quantum entanglements like little knots

in our hair, wild comets that just got out of bed,

hearts being what the other needs as they change

their spin like partners in a dance of stars at the crossroads

of the wind when it gleefully loses its sense of direction

like starmaps and leaves in the euphoria

of an autumn that put its burdens down

on the soft shoulders of the road and walks on

lighter than freedom, more naked than water,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

where two rivers join in an alloy insight and intuition,

is that not the secret meeting place of the imagination

where you know what the rocks are thinking

by the columbine growing out of their prophetic skulls

in the spring, and the vulvas of the visionary crocuses

get a leg up on the nuns of the snow, as if they hadn’t heard of sin,

but merely suggested they must be a good place for spring to begin,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when the alluvial silt of our starmad settles on the fields

and gathers in the same delta renewed every year

at the annual flooding of the headwaters of the Milky Way?

If we both lied and said we were the victims of war,

there wouldn’t be anything left to fight over any more,

no tilting at the shadows and mirages of words

that don’t realize they all were born of the same mother-tongue

when every syllable was as sacred as a hermit thrush

in an aspen grove, and the wildflowers bloomed

from the bottom of their roots up, without saying a word,

like loveletters to the bees with irresistible R.S.V.P.s,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

and the God particle that doesn’t want to be identified

as the archon of gravity that lavishes on everything alike,

a gift of mass that gives us somewhere to stand in space,

face to face beside each other in the bilateral symmetry of the light

that doesn’t divide us a convenience of consciousness

whenever the mindstream needs a bridge and turns

the blueprint of one reflection toward another in order to build it?

Can you see how the star is the mother of the eye,

and the eye gives birth to Al Tair in Aquila,

as if the indissoluble bond between us and everything were

one long umbilical cord of seeing and being,

thrown out to us like the strong rope

of an unravelling string theory making waves

among the drumheads of the membranes resonating

with the parallel lifelines in a guitar shaped universe

to a lifeboat in the abyss that hauls us into it

so we could all meet each other like music

on this spherical dancefloor of a planet like earth?

Ignorance isn’t ignorant when it doesn’t discriminate

between itself and wisdom, and wisdom isn’t wise

if it does. Both revel in the same bliss

as the stars and the lightning and the fireflies

illuminating the aniconic darkness with mandalic kells

and constellations that never wear the same fire twice

like Isis, the Queen of Heaven, however young her future grows,

remembering all the cosmologies she abandoned in her youth

like lovers that couldn’t keep their eyes off her

as she hinted at dark secrets in her past that kept them glued

to the evanescence of her starmaps like a fragrance of light

reminiscent of many nights in the astral gardens of earth

among the lemons and the pomegranates, the grapevines

and the moon a gesture of water on the limbs

of the naked arbutus trees cooling off their sunburns.

Our eyes, twin navels of a world of wavelengths

that can never be tied off and cut by the knife

of consciousness if the Conservation of Data Principle

is true even in the deepest black holes, the singularity

of an original insight like the thought in your mother’s mind

at conception that contains each of us within the other,

worlds within worlds within worlds, shepherd moons

in the pearl beds of the elegant dreamers who can take

a bit of starmud and teach it to shine like a black sun at midnight

or an albino one at opalescent noon, a positive and a negative,

both sides of the same moon as the embryo emerges

in the womb of a dark room like a picture of the same music in all of us,

must there be a you, must there be an I, must

we grow heads upon our severed heads like grapevines,

hollyhocks, cemeteries, asteroids and hydras

because we don’t realize we’re all metaphors

seeking our likeness in the eyes of each other

to express the hidden secret in the lifelines of the poem

that wished to be known as the water, blood, light, love, night

of the one mind in all of us so elemental that what it writes,

what it expresses, what it unceasingly sings when it creates,

isn’t an image or sound that acquaints it with its own unlikeness,

but an ear, an eye, a tongue, a fingertip, a nose,

five open petals, five chemoreceptors, five original words

of the one flower that blooms in us like the mind

in all directions at once, like a star that turns its light around

to see itself like the past looking back on the future,

realizes, even after its light is spent and it’s deepening its insight

on the path of the black dwarf that doesn’t mean

there be a you, there be an I, that sprouts a rosary

of heads like prayer beads on a spinal cord

that snaps and scatters the mindstream over a precipice

like a waterfall of separate grains of wheat

ingathered by the wind in the siloes of the abyss

into a single harvest of broken loaves and a string of fish

like baby shoes. That doesn’t mean when the music’s over

turn your eyes out. That doesn’t mean standing here together

in the dark feeling the same astonishment, fear, and love,

three waves of the same mind, that we can’t see, that we’re blind,

that the poem we’re writing to Arcturus in the crowns

of the black walnut trees, or the crows in the sumac, ever

comes down to any one line like a hummingbird in the larkspur,

that isn’t the undiscriminating end and beginning

of everything all at the same time.

PATRICK WHITE