I'D RATHER LEARN TO SING FROM THE RIVER AND THE WIND

I’D RATHER LEARN TO SING FROM THE RIVER AND THE WIND

I’d rather learn to sing from the river and the wind

than second guess what some conceptualist is elaborating

like a busy fractal in a labyrinth taking his mystagoguery

way too literally to be lyrically credible to the nightbirds.

Crutches might be the skeletal structure of lapwings

like model airplanes we used to build as kids

as we jumped from cliffs and ran down hills

to get a lift out of our Icarian descents, to be swept

if only a little way before the inevitable crash

up into the air, this sack of flesh hanging like a doorknocker

in space, and freedom, do you remember it, tasted

so deliriously exhilarating only the fledglings

of the returning swallows could understand what we meant

when we said daring said feathers and falling took flight,

but a flying buttress can’t teach a cathedral to soar.

I used to take a telescope, a cat, and a journal of poems

up to the rocks of Heartbreak Hill late at night

when most of the dangerous drunks were crashed out

on carseats upstairs in the triplex next door

and sit alone for hours staring at the stars

intoxicated by Keats pressing joy’s grape against his palette

bleeding to believe that beauty was truth

though the truth I knew wasn’t always beautiful.

The silence, the solitude, the unattainability

of a young man’s aspirations to say the stars

deeper than they’ve ever been said before

in Arabic, Greek or Latin, as I wrote down the sacred syllables

they whispered to me in tongues you could only hear with your eyes

have sustained the exquisite beginning

of everything I’ve cherished over the lightyears

I’ve spent exploring the abyss ever since.

I drink to the lees this full measure of an hourglass

as if time were a housewell in a desert of stars,

a bottomless bucket that sips from the watersheds of the muses

and then pours a third back toward itself as a sign of respect

I learned from Dogen Zenji who wasn’t aware

he was being observed by someone eight hundred years after him.

Not a studied charm, but a great grace of gestural significance

that teaches you how to think with your heart

without believing your mind’s gone slumming

because there’s so much emotion in the inspiration

of your insight, there’s no distinction between

the diamond and the coal in a snowman’s eyes.

My spirit’s still a beginning that never grows old.

I’m a dangerous child playing by myself on the moon

many days of my life in red-shifting moods

arrayed like the rainbow body of a tantric chameleon

blowing moondogs like smoke rings in the night.

Stars, stars, stars, and the fireflies I’ve included

in their ranks of equal magnitude in the shapeshifting zodiac

of any starmap eschatological enough to conceive of ends and origins.

I’ve never been wounded by a senile childhood

with a career plan for its voodoo dolls. Cursed retroactively

or beatified anyone whose compassion wasn’t heretical,

whose wisdom wasn’t crazy enough to transcend itself

like a reason for dying, whose hidden secret didn’t burn

like the return of the one to the many. I refuse

to throw a wreath of roses on anyone’s coffin lid

or good heartwood on the pyres of the Ganges of their ashes

if they weren’t blooded by the thorns of their unimaginable beauty first.

I’ve listened to lies that were far more beautiful than the truth.

I’ve wept the stars out of my eyes at the death

of a delusion I mourned like the passing of a mirage

my root fires mistook for the approach of a sudden downpour.

It’s takes more genius to make a brilliant failure of life

than it does to desecrate it with a mediocre success.

To the death! To the life! To the intensity

that transmutates the stars in the crucibles

of the human imagination soulfully intrigued

by the black magic of its wonder cloaking its radiance

in robes to turn down the light enough to see in the dark.

Paradoxes, oxymorons, ambiguities, doubts, nuances

that pour poison in your ear like sinister love potions,

lightning flickering like a snake over the rose-garden

abusing its fangs like a choker of thorns so death never forgets

it’s never very far from beauty, not the labyrinth

of counter intuition that’s fallen into habitual conceptualism

or the despair of a man who hasn’t realized yet

that if he’s singing it isn’t a false dawn, not

the flypaper lacquered with sticky sentiments

as if it shared the same chromosomes with Venus,

not the ferocious blackholes that make farcical absurdities

of following the light over our event horizons

to go pearl diving for singular moonrises

you can’t bring to the surface to show anybody,

despite the mental lampblack and creosote of wet fires,

looking at the world through a glass darkly,

the inexhaustibility of that early beginning

has never grown weary or disappointed with me

though the person who purports to be me often has.

There’s a voice. It speaks in a language of things.

A hidden secret that wanted to be known so chaos

created a universe to communicate like a mother tongue

the atoms share with the atmans. Stars with the dark

and the silence. You hear it once and you’re

singing it for life the long way home knowing

the light doesn’t need to take short-cuts. That

it’s touched you with a vastness that annihilates measure.

You’re nothing. You’re everything. You’re so

creatively free to express the mystery of this awareness

after sleeping on it like wine for awhile, you begin

to feel grateful when you wake that you’re meaningless.

PATRICK WHITE