ANOTHER LIGHTNING STRIKE DIVERTED FROM THE OAK A MOMENT

ANOTHER LIGHTNING STRIKE DIVERTED FROM THE OAK A MOMENT

Another lightning strike diverted from the oak

a moment so I can uproot my nerves,

steel them to the sensitivities of the light

on a rampage, electrical snakestongues of fire,

welding sparks jumping the gap between

one neuronic synapse stripped of vitamin B

and the next, the entrance and exit of a collapsed bridge.

I want to go out the way I came in, a poet.

All my prophetic skulls laid out like stones in a river,

an inundated cemetery of moons hoping

to catch the next providential tide of spring run-off,

I’m still trying to get to the other side of why

I’m alive, by jumping like the moonrise of a pinball

from one extinction event to another, keeping in mind

the meteor that gave its amino acids

to the elaboration of life on the planet in the first place

will also be the one that takes it eventually.

A blow to the solar plexus of the earth

that knocks the atmosphere out of it.

But my mistletoe isn’t fried quite yet

though I’ve had to pawn my golden sickle

just to survive the deforestation of my sacred places,

I’ve got the eyes of the Gulf of Mexico

though given the oilslicks and astronomical catastrophes

that always come as a suprise, I’m undergoing

a sea change of self somewhere in the Cambrian era.

I’ve integrated a sense of compassion into my cells

like the mitochondria of my mother. I empathise

to the point there’s nothing human under the stars,

from cartels to Cepheid variables that I don’t take personally.

Some people collect souvenir spoons. With me,

it’s scalpels. Especially the ones still buried in my wounds

like crescent moons waxing and waning

like the phases of my eyelids, the bright vacancy

of a full glass of emptiness, the skull cup of the dark abundance

of the ghosts in the shadows that refuse to be conditioned

by the medium of anyone’s seeing but my own

as if they were all familiars of mine from a long time ago

I met at a seance they summoned me to as if

I were the one who had died in this dream of life

and the living and the dead stood eye to eye

like binocular vision in the observatory of the same head.

Water, time, suffering, and the wind blunts the sharp edges

I flintknapped like obsidian from the eclipse of a new moon

that slowly pressed into my flesh like a black rose

in the pages of a book I seldom open anymore

like a bone-box with my fossils in it that an avalanche

on the sea bed wears like tattoos on the inside

to remember me by. There are wines and inks

as indelible and dark as the night, pumping

through the heart forever, long after

the last tear in the rain has flowed away

like a watercolour of a fallen leaf under the bridge

of the mindstream you’re walking on like a great blue heron.

Don’t let the brutal sorrows make you defect

like a plague rat the many joys of the moonboat

that used to unload its cargo of roses in Genoa.

As soon as you fall like a cynic on the bitter thorns of life

it’s oxymoronically inevitable you’re going to become

quantumly entangled with someone who strews

rose petals in your path with such disarming tenderness

you’re seated like a fool on the impoverished throne

of your own defeated predictability. Bad, prophet, bad.

Tomorrow mutates to adapt to the available dimensions

of a future that has no conception of you even

existing yet here in the past where the real business

of living is done and now, though you cut it infinitely fine

like God particles that turn out to be your own mind,

never comes because time is what you are and what

you shall be, embodied in the throb of your own humanity.

Live up to it like the cause and effect of the only

regressive alibi that has stood up for you so long

it’s becoming a paradigm of stars and fireflies,

a new myth of origin among the constellations

that count on your imagination to sustain them.

Fire in the eyes of a snowman. Shine, shine, shine

like diamonds in the coal, wine in the bitter grapevine

that doesn’t know where all this ends like a road

gravelled with the skulls of hospitable planets

across the firmament so some drunk can stumble his way

home alone, all his darkness and light singing

in harmony with the stars and daylilies

of the flames in his heart he’s standing in for

like an unrecalcitrant martyr to the heresy of the art

of staying drunk on the moonlight, the orthodox

who decree they know what’s right burn in effigy

like a scarecrow because there’s no body to dig up

when you drink life down to the lees of the crows

looking for hidden jewels in the ashes at the bottom of the cup

as if the urns of dragons are the seed beds of the stars.

PATRICK WHITE