WHO COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED?

WHO COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED?

Who could have anticipated being who and where we are

this moment? Did we imagine now, did we see

ourselves here when we were children? These windows,

that view, those stairs across the street we’ve

never walked to the top of into the stale darkness

of a room that hasn’t been used by anything

but flies, echoes and shadows for years?

The hollow stillness, the white gold ray

of winter light illuminating an emulsion of dust?

How strange to be the awareness of anyone.

To take your identity off like a name tag,

to shed your skin like a wavelength weary

of being a particle and when no one’s looking

slip into the vastness without making a ripple

like a watersnake as supple as smoke among the stars.

Peace in the evanescence of my eyes, my heart

unfeathered like the petal of a wild aster,

a forgotten poem, the small gesture of a thought

that didn’t take root on the skull of a rock.

If the rain were a flower, it would be columbine.

I’m standing on this aquiline precipice

scattering my ashes on the wind like words

that were fire once when I was younger than tomorrow

o when was that?---and sang like an arsonist

with a blue guitar about the women I loved

and the sorrows of the mysterious wines

they mingled in my blood like a seance of bells,

and the joys, out of thousands, that elected

like a moment or two of auspicious beauty and bliss

to winter with me through these lightyears of solitude

as if life were indelibly thriving under the ice-caps

of a shepherd moon like an introverted mindstream

that kept returning to itself like the solar flare

of an unopened loveletter stamped: No longer

at this address. Even a starmap can sometimes

get lost in the abyss. You are that. That is this.

Shadows of the mind, ricocheting splinters of radiance

lodged like mystic thorns in the heart, the Burgess Shale

encyclopedically contained in every fossil of a memory

imprinted on my imagination like the life forms

of words anyone of which could have been my mother-tongue.

My lyrical innocence may have passed, but not

the wonder of listening to the stars singing to themselves

like nightbirds getting on with the labour of longing

as if work were a form of worship, as the Upanishad says.

The hour liberated from its waterclocks and sundials,

the empty lifeboat of the moon from its urgent rescues,

unmoored from the wharfs and umbilical cords

of its earthly obligations, just to drift like a compass needle

in deep space, unaligned from its addiction to true north.

If I take one step beyond being, it isn’t death, or oblivion.

I’m only washing my skin off the world so I see it afresh

like the bright vacancy, dark abundance of what’s shining

through the flowing lens of an unpolluted abyss.

It’s the return journey that reflowers the wild grape vines

that lose it in the winter. Every breath, a miraculous revival

of wines that have deepened their dreams in the interim.

Images and symbols are overlaid in space

like the playbills of a visionary hunting magic

still looking after all these caves and labyrinths

for the unattainable prey of the mysterious female

I keep following like the life-giving herds of the stars,

the ghost dancers among the white buffalo of the clouds

that gather and disperse me like the world out of nothing.

I can hear my life howling like a wolf moon

over the dark corpse of these hills, but I’ve never known

where the music’s coming from or why it’s grieving.

Or why so many open windows and returning birds

greet the spring with odes and epitaphs in the same breath

like galaxies passing through one another, the ghosts

of two strangers encountering the unknown

like the harmony of infinite points of view

going in radiantly contradictory directions at the same time.

Life on the burning bridges of the stars like a lover

trying to span the universe with cosmic thoughts

reflecting the face of the other on the underside of time.

As if one were the light, and one, more vastly sublime

than even the night can find the words to speak of

shining like eye sockets of dice in the black mirror

of the prophetic skulls orbiting the prayer wheels

of the mind like interlocking mountain gears of the rain

on the downside of a species whose time has come.

Though I still think it might be crucial to know

who you aren’t as well as who you think you are

before you go extinct. Who sends a cold furnace

or an urn of the ashes of the nightbirds to speak

like a shabby messenger for the light as they knew it once

in the wildflowers of the earth sowing the starfields

with seeds on the wind about to open their eyes again

from the long dream of trying to shine from the inside out?

My starmud is rooted in light and flowers in the darkness.

The supersymmetry of above and below make one hourglass.

As many demons in the nightsky as there are angels in a cemetery.

Heaven and hell, one electron, that can be in several places

at the same time, how many worlds is my mind sustaining

where everything is an infinite elaboration of this one

and that of all the imaginary alternatives that are

necessarily bound to occur like the will of someone so free

it spontaneously has nothing to do with any of them

like the imageless image of the creator we create

in the likeness of to resemble ourselves without our faces on?

I give my oceanic thoughtwaves the same free rein

I give the wild mustangs of moonlight

an immeasurable range of emotions to roam in

without being broken, saddled or spurred

toward any destination in my homelessness

knowing that all movement is a characteristic feature

of the stillness that keeps it all going. The more you focus

the more you blur the effect. And when you look

out of the corner of your eye at life, it’s as if

a thief of fire with the insight of a wolf moon

that thought it howled alone in its own forsaken mindscape

discovered us awake at the window listening to it

and like the picture-music of a shaman on a limestone wall

put his finger to his lips to bond us like carbon

to a secret we all share without ever telling each other.

PATRICK WHITE