Thursday, May 2, 2013

SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH IN STEWART PARK


SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH IN STEWART PARK

Sitting on a wooden bench in Stewart Park
directly behind the jumping statue of Big Ben
frozen in bronze and time beside the black marble slab
that looks like a mini Vietnam wall of corporate sponsors,

staring into the sun at the white water rushing
over the rocks under Little Rainbow Bridge,
under the greening willows, galaxies of stars
winking in and out of existence like fireflies,
whirlpools of radiance spreading out across
the reflection of dark leafless tree trunks
shredded by the blue of the sky then pieced
back together again in the wavelength of a snake
charmed by the muscular undulation of the surface
of the pond rippled like a membranous universe

in some earthbound mode of hyperspace, as if
someone took the Pleiades on a clear winter night
and sowed them like first magnitude wildflowers, chicory
and asters, perhaps, in the troughs and furrows
of the sinusoidal waters moving like supple mountain ranges
toward shore where a clash of wild irises
raised their tender green swords up to the sun,
created and annihilated millions of times an instant
in the blink of an eye, white hot and young again,

and for a moment, as fast as an insight
into the nature of a vast intelligence inspired
by the scintillance of its own light playing
upon the waters of life as if nothing, not the skulls
of the underwater stones striated and webbed
by the waves of the golden webs and nets
dreamcatchers and runes inscribed on the rocks
like a language that never speaks in the same tongue twice
in a world of white shadows in unfathomed depths,

things took off the patina of their deathmasks,
and what was solid and inanimate, even Big Ben
anchored to the earth in the afterlife
of his arcing transit through the air forever,
couldn’t help but be alive and real
in every visionary act of seeing that animated
the whole of my being through the eyes
I saw shining out of everything like aeons of stars
opening loveletters like wildflowers and metaphors
addressed to what’s nameless and illuminating
about the substance of sentience that beguiles everyone
in a world of forms shapeshifting transmorphically
as the mindstream turns and the light burns
for the dazzling face of the stranger behind the veils
of the willows rooted in the spring run off of the Tay River

like a flashflood of life threading the eye of paradise
like the creative rush of the fledgling awareness
of the cosmic unfolding of chaos under the wingspan
of Little Rainbow Bridge reconciling the disparities
of light, love, life, in these recombinant unions
of starmud and mind and the heart that smiles within
to feel what’s liberated thereby like the light upon light
of a million epiphanous suns from one side the mind
reflected like the memory of a face you saw in a mirror
in the depths of a dream where you’re bright and whole
and creatively free to wake up on the other
shoreless river of life to realize there’s only
this small, red bridge of blood you’re standing on
watching the flow of things, without waiting
for anyone to show up who isn’t already arrayed before you.

PATRICK WHITE  

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