COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

Compassion is the sweetness that enters

the wounded apple of knowledge after

you’ve taken your first bite out of it.

It’s not an antidote to the facts of life and death.

And you should know by now if you’ve suffered at all,

and it’s impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,

the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light

that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.

Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart

and first muse of the mind that can taste only

the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,

gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.

That’s why the heart knows more about it than the head.

And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable

of loving us who must doubt that we’re worthy of love

to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open

the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things

like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break

like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings

like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words

for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees

and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,

I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake

swimming across your blood like a mantra

of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets

to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose

whose petals and eyelids are always smashing

like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams

against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes

like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony

of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely

hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking

through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,

words that dance like light on the mindstream

rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses

the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.

You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.

Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.

Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber’s night

when everyone is underground and the bummers are out

plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.

Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself

to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be

the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird

singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn’t know

it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic

in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out

of the mountains without end he’s being trying to befriend

like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment

like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye

of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane

with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie

compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies

with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart

like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images

that didn’t know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see

until compassion tempered their impression of themselves

as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears

in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance

from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,

laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn’t a dry fire.

It’s the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat

that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born

in the undertow of the tides of the new moon

until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard

who’s been swimming through glaciers of tears

like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years

afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.

Compassion is accepting everyone’s death as a portion of your own.

Everyone’s life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.

Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.

Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration

in the eyes of the older sister of the muses

who walks too much alone as if she’d devoted her solitude

to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way

when she let her hair down like willows of rain

to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain

until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art

trying to divine the smoke of what’s burning in their hearts

like autumn leaves they’ve heaped into books

that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.

But if compassion turns her eyes toward you

like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing

the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins

and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details

in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating

like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,

lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground

to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,

in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

PATRICK WHITE