SILENCE, THE FIFTH BORN DIMENSION OF THE WORLD

SILENCE, THE FIFTH BORN DIMENSION OF THE WORLD

Silence, the fifth born dimension of the world,

solitude, the sixth, miasmic picture music arises

like the fragrance of a dream resonating in the night air,

out of nowhere, the ghost of a waterlily you once loved

like an earthbound angel with the soul

of a Pleiadeian sapphire embedded in starmud.

When was that? O, yes, I remember now that autumn

when the shadows of the leaves fell down the wall

and more amazing than perishing was the fact we weren’t

for the moment, at least, and moments passed

like eras back then, when love seemed to show time

how to take the focus off itself for a change

and kick back like the missing link in a chain

of dynastic waterclocks in an inevitable succession

of flashfloods and dry creek beds that ended up casting

the long shadows of hapless mirages that evaporated

like a lunar atmosphere disappearing with its waterbirds.

When has it ever not been so? Even the future memories

of the prophets can’t recall approaching a crossroads

where time hasn’t intersected the timeless

like the celestial equator intersects the ecliptic

at the vernal equinox as spring comes like a shock

to the heart that starts thriving its way toward death again.

What could it mean to the journey that the beginning

has an end that can’t be differentiated one from the other?

Or the living have a tendency to forget

they’re as often descended from ghosts as smoke is

from fire, as they are the collateral fruits of pre-natal desire.

You can enlist a whole choir of candles to weep for you

if you wish, you can wait for it to dawn on the black pearl

of a new moon that you’re an eclipse that should be taken

seriously, but love puts the darkness to better use

and that tiny little flame like a single-petalled flowering perennial

keeps on dancing at the end of the burnt-out wick

of your spinal cord as your sorrows harden like wax

into sacred pools that only fire’s magus enough to clarify.

Let the light excite the ice on your mindstream to start flowing again

as it dances to the picture music of who you’re becoming

when you look through windows of rain that aren’t gift-wrapped

in the funereal bunting of amber glaciers mourning in your wake

for who you should have been, or might have been,

or might be yet, by some fatal stroke of luck,

that uproots your shining from the starfields

and transplants it into a secret garden to bloom

in someone else’s paradise with less incentive than your own

to seek knowledge even as far as China and end up

returning from North America with Aztec starmaps.

If you’re lost, look upon it as a course correction.

If you think you know where you’re going check

the integrity of your astrolabes, get out your plumb lines

and compare the shallow draught of your moonboat

with the mountainous reefs in the depths of your watersheds

and holler gung ho back to your nervous captain pacing the deck

wondering if he should mutiny or maintain command of a shipwreck.

PATRICK WHITE