Friday, February 8, 2013

IF NOT KNOWING IS A SIGN OF THE DEPTHS


IF NOT KNOWING IS A SIGN OF THE DEPTHS

If not knowing is a sign of the depths to which
I’ve penetrated the darkness with a handful of fireflies
aspiring to a constellation of their own, something
more shapeshifting than these eighty-eight paradigms
of fixed shining, and managed to lose the starmap en route,
then I’d be urged to say I’ve been negatively illuminated
by every black hole I’ve ever fallen into. How is it with me?

I’ve been pearl diving for singularities and nacreous eclipses.
I have no idea of what I’m looking for that isn’t eventually
going to find me, but I’m a hybrid of wonder
and an agitated curiosity that makes me feel
I’m wasting some crucial element of life
if I don’t go take a look for myself or listen
to the picture-music flowing through me like a mindstream
through the woods at night more acutely than my eyes
can see enlightenment right under their nose
that can tell what it is by the smell. Larkspur or sulphur.

Witness to a dynamic awareness I’m more and more certain
isn’t mine, though it bears my name, I resist being tempted
by a partial fossil of thought to lay claim to it
as if it went to all that effort just to be me. Not self-abnegation,
which is like trying to sweep a mirage out of a desert
with a broom you haven’t learned to ride, but immersion
in an abyss that dwarfs the universe with inconsequence.

I’m more intrigued by the life of meaning as it expresses itself
as a creative medium for the ten thousand meanings of life
scattered like eyelids of apple bloom by the wind
than I am in divining provisional parameters
to rationalize the superstition of reality that regards
its own unactualized potential with an evil eye
that has to be occluded for the sake of pregnant goats.

Just to be here is the most magnificent achievement
though whether you pulled it off or not is definitely moot,
and I tend to intuit when the silence is comprehensive enough
I’m participating in an interdependently originated
creative collaboration where creation is the past tense
of what we’re about to do next without knowing it.

We exit by the entrance. Even spoliation and ruin,
the withered root, the amputated stump, the delinquent blossom
that left it too late, the imaginative context, the seed bed
for the speciation of new life forms arising out of the dead
like a child with flowers in her arms who can’t imagine
what it’s like to be old and see yourself in the doorway
asking where you keep the crayons like stubby buds
in a drawer with a rainbow she wants to draw for you
if you’ve got lots of red, and, as it happens, you do.

PATRICK WHITE

No comments: