I DON'T WANT TO HAVE MY EYES GLAZED OVER NACREOUSLY

I DON’T WANT TO HAVE MY EYES GLAZED OVER NACREOUSLY

I don’t want to have my eyes glazed over nacreously

if I were a grain of sand, a diamond in the rough,

living in a pearly world. Cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky. I don’t want to live in a spiritual trance

blissed out like the first crescent of the moon

smiling down upon everything as if I weren’t

attached to any particular atmosphere and all

the waters of life were frozen like tears in a jewelled locket

I kiss once in awhile in a rush of gushing devotion.

I love the mystic details of the concrete specifics of the world.

The stylus of the birds that can write with their beaks and feet

like cuneiform on the skin of an apple,

and wormholes that burrow even deeper

into the sweetness of the flesh, neolithic barrow tombs

aligned with the vernal equinox, and that soft blue talc

as if the dew had turned to powder that clings to the autumn grapes.

I like the spelling errors fate makes

on the staves of our foreheads where it writes

the picture-music of our destinies in such a way

that everything that’s written there, over the course of time,

our eyes will live long enough to see.

I don’t want to turn my spirit into a cosmic perfumery

and extract my essence from the ambergris of my presence.

I don’t want to transform whale vomit into an alluring fragrance

that isn’t naturally its own. Or suggest to certain flowers

they gargle the rain like mouthwash, or smear

the eyelids of the rose with a snailtrack of stars.

What did the Zen master say? The stone is lustrous,

but there’s nothing inside. The ore is different

but from it comes gold. Why hide the bruises and scars,

sunspots like black eyes, or the pitted complexion of the moon

from the third eye of Galileo’s telescope trying futilely

to show a Vatican cardinal the mutability of the firmament?

Things are rough out there, and happenstance is neither fair

nor unjust. Things pass into their return like the earth

going around the sun in a five billion year old roulette wheel,

and every asteroid might dream it could grow up to be

the cornerstone of a planet, and then come down

on the dinosaurs like an avalanche without sin

that threw the first rock at Mary Magdalene.

I don’t want to disperse every breath I take and exhale

aurorally like veils, as lovely as they are, over the face of the sky

as if it had something indecent to hide like snow on a dungheap.

I don’t think the dung needs to be dressed up like a festering virgin

that needs to be purified. Snowflakes on a slow methane furnace

I think the dung and the snow go the way of all flesh

though some walk, some run, some flow, some evaporate

and some are just inflammably combustible, but all

know their own way back to their roots as well as anyone.

Never known a river that needed a guru

to find its own way back to the sea, or a cloud

that was ever unhappy about the way it was shaped by the wind.

I wash my hands, and I’m bathed in the waters of Jordan.

I open my eyes, and God says fiat lux, let there be light.

I walk over to the window and look down on the morning street

and Muhammad makes that my quibla, my direction of prayer,

and under the eaves there’s a mourning dove

singing the shahada like a muezzin to its young.

I put my clothes on, slowly rising to consciousness

until my thirteenth year and I’m wearing my tallit and tefillin

at my own bar mitzvah, listening for the Aliyah

to call me up and recite the Torah. I admire the stamina

of the petunias still brimming over the rims of the whiskey barrels

municipally placed between the parking meters

in a biting autumn wind, and the Buddha hands

Ananda a flower and smiles as if I could understand him.

I rescue a fly from drowning in a toilet bowl

with a piece of kleenex like something it can cling to

because I think one day that could be me

praying for a lifeboat, and Beelzebub commends me

for my lack of discrimination, and Lucifer’s intrigued

while Jesus befriends me because my compassion isn’t fastidious.

What’s so unspiritual about mundanity as it is?

Samsara is nirvana. Delusion the door to enlightenment.

Every chore, a religious ritual, a do, a path in a participatory world.

Every farmer in the Perth Restaurant at their daily coffee clutch

a sage as wise as the rocks and stumps he’s cleared

like a backhoe from his fields laid out like scripture

covered in mustard, goldenrod, vetch and purple loosestrife.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You want to touch the soul,

it’s not out there out of palpable reach, it’s

the starmud between your fingers and your toes,

under your nails, the sweetmeat of your brain

in a black walnut shell, the very stuff your hands are made of.

And this is more of a mystery than looking for it anywhere else.

The black-eyed Susans, the New England asters,

the last of the wildflowers aren’t just things to look at

but seers in themselves the stars consult like oracles

of what’s to come, and when you look at the maple trees aflame

who needs anymore martyrs or heretics than that,

and sometimes you can even see Raphael throwing his paintings

in the Bonfire of the Vanities while Savanarola rails like the wind

against the Medici he’s trying to drive out of Florence

or the Taliban trying to purge what’s she’s reading

out of a young girl’s eyes with the formic acids

of stinging nettles and ant heaps clinging to the Koran

like a no trespassing sign at all the crossroads of life

where the Sufis whirl like galaxies into rapturous extinction

and Allah sends no more rasuls like prophets with books

and forgoes the words for the grammar of natural things

as signs of the Friend within and without

and everything’s a metaphor of the tauhid and unity

of the worlds within worlds in light upon light.

Work is as much a form of worship when you see it right

as the Hindus do, as love is. So when you’re feeding the cats

or putting out oats for the horses, this is the mysticism of action

beyond the contemplative, actualizing the abstract

in an act of devotion such that for every roofing nail

a carpenter drives into a rafter, a temple is built in the heart,

and hundreds of loveletters are released for free

like doves and flamingoes or sidereal swans and eagles,

Japanese plum blossoms into the sky that writes back like the moon.

And, yes, there are times when I go mad in my isolation cell

and fling my inkpot at the wall like Luther at the Devil,

and want to get out of here so badly I set my desk afire

and let it drift like a Viking funeral ship all the way to the bottom

and the next thing you know coral’s trying to grow

a Gothic cathedral out of it, complete with angels and gargoyles,

virgins and saints, and grief turned fluid once more

is flowing like a river of stone back to the sky again

as all the masons and their families that laid the heritage field stones

dance around it like fish in the Great Barrier Reef

as the cardinals stand around in their bifurcated, goose-necked,

bi-valved barnacle hats astonished by what metaphors can achieve

polyp by polyp, drop by drop in a limestone cave, star by star

in an expanding universe, or cell by cell in the body of a human

when imagination is free to work in tandem with the random

like genetic mutations on helical stairwells of dna

sliding down the bannisters as if even evolution

were a game of spiral snakes and ladders with oxymoronic rungs

and if you’re lucid and want make things clear as starmud

you have to resort to speaking in tongues.

PATRICK WHITE