ACUTELY AWARE OF THE ONCENESS OF LIFE

ACUTELY AWARE OF THE ONCENESS OF LIFE

Acutely aware of the onceness of life, one

of the many shadows that followed me for lightyears

was the terror of wasting it on myself and not

the mystery of what it is to be here knee deep in starmud,

up over my head in a fathomless atmosphere of awareness,

knowing I was going to leave my body behind

one day like gumboots. Any moment now.

The green light of the firefly about to change to red.

In the last flash of insight to cross my mind,

which could well be, as it has been here,

the foundation stone of a whole new universe,

I didn’t want to get caught, one foot in and one foot out,

trying to weather the storm like a lifeboat

still moored to the dock like an apple in winter

on the tree of life, not risking what I had to let go of

like seeds that abandon the rafters of the tree to be true to it.

Some people trip, some fall, some plunge,

some swan-dive into the abyss. I made

a big black hole in my heart and let all the stars

leak into it like the creative side of the light when it

turns around to look at itself without being rebuffed

by its own reflectivity. I’ve danced under the chandeliers

in the blue-white palaces of the Pleiades

when the air was full of mirrors, and that was

as elegant as a graceful woman on the verge of tears,

and often, I’ve worn my eyelids like hoods and eclipses

over the falcons of my eyes to keep the lunettes of my talons

from seizing the heart of the dove like a bouquet of blood.

Like the gutter receives the spent flames of the leaves

and the Japanese plum blossoms, like the baleen

of a blue whale harvests the krill and knows

by the taste in its mouth whether it’s autumn or spring,

when they were tired of shining, I let the stars

go slumming in my humanity as if I were a spiritual nightclub

where they could let their hair down like black dwarfs

sick of photo-ops and burn out alone at the bar

like bruised black and blue flash bulbs any way they wanted to.

I brought the stars back down to earth as often

as they raised my skull up like a grail

they poured themselves into until my eyes

were brimming over with their radiance and never once

did I ever hear them say when. Or enough is enough.

My capacity for emptiness was and still is limitless.

How else could you hold all that shining within yourself

and not go blind? How could you ever hope to know

what hour it was like the zeitgeist of the times at home

in a material eternity if you didn’t live space

like an intimate experience there were only the stars

and a few nightbirds you could tell it to who could understand?

Though the signs were everywhere like a secret

that wanted to be known. All you had to do

was open your heart and take a look through the third eye

of a black hole dilating in the middle of your iris like a new moon

climbing the rungs on a ladder of event horizons

as if it were crossing the thresholds of each house of the zodiac

back into the burning arms of the black sun no one could see

that wasn’t intrigued by the mystery of the dark eyes

behind the veils and lifemasks of the light

that paled them like nightwatchmen making

their final rounds on the grave yard shift

turn their lanterns down like stars in the dawn.

Acutely aware of the onceness of life,

I cherished my fingertips, not what they touched.

I exalted my seeing, not what it saw. I honoured my voice

for the nobility of its calling, not what was said in my sleep.

I gathered up all the myriad thoughts and facets of mind

like wavelengths of the omnipresence of the universe

like fireflies and lightning, and delighted and horrified

as I was by what they revealed, looked deeply into the eye

of the one jewel of the world concealed behind all the shining.

I’ve firewalked the Milky Way on a pilgrimage

of ghosts and smoke and taken the hands of many lovers

as if they were my own like an Orphic leper

come back from the dead like a moonrise silhouetting

the green boughs of a tree that had suffered many dismemberments,

to revel in the return of life to my limbs like an orchard in spring,

not the windfall of the fruits of the earth that fell out of their sleeves

like cornucopias, wishing-wells, and the caressable magic of lamps.

Though I praised the fountains and goblets, the flowering

of the starfields after the ice-storms of Orion thawed

like a chandelier over the candelabra of the trees

I drowned in the godhead of the dark watershed like the source

of the great rivers of my life returning to the sea

like the stray threads and frayed deltas of my blood

reworked into new flying carpets on the loom

of the lunar ebb and neap of my tidal heart

seminal with life along the island coasts of consciousness

when the moon is in the corals like a sower in the fields.

But more than desire itself, I celebrated my heart,

not for what it longed for, but the art of love that mastered me

like a down and out stranger I once met in West Van

when he saw I was out of cigarettes, and opening his hand

like an ashtray of butts he’d been picking up off the streets,

and saving for himself, picked the longest one out

and gave it to me as freely without forethought

as any highroller ever shot the stars as if he had no limits.

PATRICK WHITE