LOOKING FOR A STAIRWELL OF STARS

LOOKING FOR A STAIRWELL OF STARS

Looking for a stairwell of stars in a labyrinth

of fire escapes I can slide down the bannisters of

like a childhood planet in an aberrant orbit

as if I’d wandered off somewhere like an unattended kite

or the black sheep of a shepherd moon

into the same vast spaces where the stars

graze like dragons on the ashes of themselves

and all along the river, fleets of waterlilies

break into light as if they were hauling their sails up

into the wind like the flightfeathers the moon sheds

like a waterbird lending its plumage to the waves

so they can soar in the depths of a borrowed wingspan

or swim through the stars on the oarpower of their own fins.

I’m parasailing in the Pleiades like a dandelion seed

that’s about to ignite into a big yellow sun

with planets all around it coming into consciousness

like life losing its innocence by becoming

aware of itself like a secret it shares with a stranger.

I’ve freed my dreams from the tyranny of mirrors.

My windows into the soul are breeding

with my mirages in a happy connubium

of appearances with the way things are

deep down underneath the rock you turn over

like your heart for the pale, yellow worm

of a meaning to life once you’ve come to mistrust

your senses into making better spies than friends.

I take as much delight these days in the way

things end, as I ever did in the way they began.

I rejoice in my impurities like sunspotted beauty marks

on the coronas of my crazy wisdom

and the alluvial laughlines at the deltas of my eyes

flowing like some soft-spoken waterclock into the abyss.

I sink and rise like the tides of a bell on a shipwreck,

despite myself, and sing out like a pearldiver

that drowned on the moon trying to open its shell,

all’s well, not, hell, maybe heaven, but only for awhile.

I beat myself up like a pinata of the heart

to be a righteous gift at a poor kid’s birthday party,

but I always feel deluded by the sacrifices I have to make

to transform the dupe of my morals into the sacred clowns

of the high ideals that have been making a fool of me

most of my life. Nobody trusts anyone anymore

if they can’t discern a reason for why you’re good to them.

Sad embassies on the moon waiting for a terrorist attack.

Whether you pour an ocean of compassion

into a teacup with a crack in it that’s as seismic

as the one in your crystal skull, or measure it out

drop by drop like some kind of Chinese water-torture,

even if your right hand gets caught spying on

what you’re doing with the left, things ebb and neap

like tidal shadows in the Sea of Tranquillity

where emptiness is always full, and maybe,

we’ll prove most useful when we’re not even here.

Not indifference square in the middle of things,

ignorant of its embittered self satisfaction

trivializing the aesthetics of its own solitude

by carrying the angry placard of a wallflower

in a protest parade that reads, I don’t care,

though it’s never true. When you most expect it to be.

Like a silent majority looking into their cellphones

like the third eye of God making collective decisions

for the mob that’s itching like the internet to flex its authority.

You can say you’re committed to a cause

you’re life’s been a long preparation to die for,

but the greater discipline is enduring the agony

of living it as if it were something beautiful

forever passing away. Like night on the face

of someone you love when you’re not trying to possess it

like a starmap on the black market to happiness.

Or the solitude that binds your quantumly entangled vines

to the wine in the eyes of an opposite,

blood of your blood, bone of your bone,

flesh of your flesh like the shadow you cast

in the form of the other as if it were a mask

with the eyes missing to see deeply

into the dark waters of the mystery of life

that sight is the kind of love that includes

the absence of itself like an old moon

that once knew what it was like to hold

and let go of the new moon in its arms.

PATRICK WHITE