SOLID ENOUGH IN THE WORLD FOR ONE DAY

SOLID ENOUGH IN THE WORLD FOR ONE DAY

Solid enough in the world for one day

sit down at your desk and evaporate like something real.

Let your spring mindstream wash your detritus away,

lave your overturned roots like feet that have stood their ground

long enough, as if it were keeping an octopus wet,

or you were sitting down on the job having a good laugh

with radical crows who cherish you like an iconic in-joke.

One sweep of the sword and the knot in your heartwood’s unravelled

like the rain, like the pain you’ve been carrying inside of you

like the bottomless bucket of a baby that’s never going to come to term.

It’s grey outside. The air is opalescent. You’re

pearl diving in an hourglass like a nacreous agitator

that wants to add a little lustre to life. Something satin

that isn’t wasted on a coffin. Fair enough. It’s one

of the nobler ways of ruining your life in the name

of something no one ever completely understands.

Make your mind dark. Walk homeless within yourself

instead of saying you’re lost when all you are

is overwhelmed. Be overwhelmed. Astonished.

Awed. Full of wonder. The way the sky feels

every time the stars emerge like unexpected insights

into the abysmal nature of its creative potential

coming out like wildflowers, each in their own hour,

in the Lanark hills. Trout lily, hepatica, crocus.

Enthrone yourself like a queen or a mermaid

on a rock you like down by the run-off of the river

but this time don’t ask the willows what they think of your song

look at the red-winged blackbirds gathering on the hawthorn

that can tell by the way the wind applauds in the trees

you’ve been practising since they’ve been gone.

Is it so bad? Is it so wrong to enjoy the fire

from the smoke’s point of view once in awhile?

Just drift away into the night as if you had something in common

with the white, sweet clover along the Road of Ghosts.

Who knows what genies might spring from the lamp?

Is it so hard to imagine having a heart like yours

and being at ease with it? Peace doesn’t mean

you take the tension out of life or you have to dance

with the fireflies if you don’t want to. Nothing’s prescribed.

No need to try and heal the medicine. The blue stars

of the sage are shining like sapphires left over from last spring

when you went down into the underworld but refused to drink

what it offered you. A chance to taste death as if

you were homesick for a past you looked forward to having.

The river clarifies itself in its own running. Be carried away

circuitously, as if you’d wandered lightyears from the shrine

of your own lost pilgrimage. Ask any experienced oscilloscope

there’s more intelligent life in a curve than there is in a straight line.

But don’t hold it against the turkey vultures

they’ve got an appetite for roadkill. We’re all buried in life

like organ donors with no idea of who we’re going

to give ourselves to except we hope it’s useful in retrospect

when it comes time to clean out the garage, that we suggested

the mind can make out all right on its own, but you couldn’t part

with your eyes if they didn’t go with your heart

like moonrise in early April, like apple bloom

in the abandoned backyard of the house you were raised in.

Haven’t you suffered enough on this long night journey of your soul

following your gut like runic scars on a Viking sunstone

to dapple your wings in a few fountains along the way,

run down to the bay naked and laughing as if

there were nobody around to scare or plunder

and even Eric the Red must have had a child in him

that sometimes came out to play like a pup seal on an ice floe.

Stop asking the tongues of the roses to say awww

as if they had thorns caught in their throat

like polyps on a voicebox or starlings in a chimney.

Treat your heart to the down and contrails

of unknown flightfeathers for a change

and skip the usual darning needles like an eye

you don’t have to pass through if it’s always closed

this time of the season. There will always be hard rocks

willing as an avalanche to take some of the load off

by kicking your foundation stone from under your feet

like the footstool of the turtle the world mountain balanced on

in a race with Haigha, the mad, March Hare and the Mad Hatter

to see who can make it all the way to May.

Relax. It’s all out of control. No need to be

progressively droll or superciliously altruistic

about bettering a world where the peasants ate cake yesterday

but today they’re engaged in a holy war over the recipe.

Blossom or windfall, leaf or meteor, let things

fall out as they may. Don’t give your roots

a nervous breakdown when the lightning

is witching for water by testing the air with its tongue

to see if you’re enlightened or not, and if not, bite

so you can return like spring every year released from death.

Sit down at your desk. Barefoot. Feel the starmud

ooze between your toes, as if the flesh and mind of the earth

were your flesh and mind, as they are. Be smoke, be tendrils,

linger along your own path fascinated by all the blades

of the wild irises sprouting like jackknifes along the way.

Look at the leaves unfolding like scrolls the way

we used to roll and unroll our tongues as kids.

Could you do that? Or did you whistle better than everybody?

Everybody’s got something that makes them special

some little trick or quirk they’ve mastered

whether the world recognizes it or not, some few did

and they’re still standing there somewhere in time

gaping with their jaws open you could do that

and that was the cherry blossom of the moment

when you were perfect. As the Upanishads say

This is perfect. That is perfect. Take perfect from perfect

it’s still perfect isn’t it? The question’s mine.

But that’s what we’re born and perish with however we change.

The big questions in life aren’t lacking anything,

and the answers, they’re so simple, they don’t like to be asked.

Treat the solid to something new once and awhile

and make it real. You’ll stop being in such a rush

to know who you are when you realize you’re

an ongoing event, not a thing that had to stay home

and look after the farm, and a few exotic peacocks

that moult their eyes every year just for show.

The rich man dies of democracy on his death-bed.

The genius longs to be credibly stupid among people.

The beauty-queen grows jealous of the stars like a firefly.

The athlete grows love handles like a trophy on his perfect physique.

The lover lives in a moment that longs for the past the rest of her life.

The sage wonders if wisdom is a sacred clown or a trickster.

What has the dove got that the crow envies?

Why should you harry oblivion like an alarm clock

as if life were wasting its time on you if you didn’t hurry up?

PATRICK WHITE