TEARS SPIN OFF YOUR MIDNIGHT OILSLICKS

TEARS SPIN OFF YOUR MIDNIGHT OILSLICKS

Tears spin off your midnight oilslicks

like sad, romantic novels with sexually suggestive faucets

you can turn on and off, and that’s okay

if you’re out watering your lawn in a drought,

bring the sprinklers out, but you’ve got to live it

and live through it to know it, your eyes

opening in your blood like island galaxies

of insight, like Queen Ann’s Lace thriving

in the ditch at the side of whatever road you’re on.

Old hat to add to your wisdom polyp by polyp,

I come in the back door of this burning house of life

by deepening my ignorance into a black hole

with a singularity in it like the prize in Cracker Jack box

of caramel coated popcorn, with the key

to everything I’ve ever been locked out of in life

at the navel of a new constellation

laying its birthmark on my flesh so I can be

readily identified as the shape shifting changeling I am.

My mind is a medium like space that everywhere

concedes its time and place to the wayfaring light

passing through it like a stranger accorded

warm-hearted hospitality, that immediately

implores the potential of any shudder of a suggestion

to step out of the shadows and come forth

into the light where the darkness is realized

and I can catch it on the fly like a bird in moonlight

that disappears into the perennial vastness of the night,

merely a fragrance of a vision of life in mourning

as if there were nothing else in her nature but to grieve

like the tone of a bell that once believed in something else.

Every breath, a wind on the waters of life, the mind

skinless and without form, responds as if

a million wavelengths of eyelids were rippling out

across the quiescent nightseas of awareness

like something serpentine and impersonally sacred

in and of itself, embodied like a journey it was

taking through itself, devoted to the pilgrimage

and not the shrine of anywhere all the time it was headed to.

Cosmic membranes, flying carpets and snakes with wings.

I can hear the water slapping the effrontery of the rocks

to be fixed things, less real than solid, black ice

on a road sublimating like a ghost of smoke

without fire, with all the time in the world,

to pass the peace pipe around with three flightfeathers

it took from its own osprey war bonnet as if to say

I was a man in an abyss dreaming the totems

that would possess me for the rest of my life.

I was a hunter who honoured the prey I lived by

as a gift and not something I took by right

and shared it as the largesse of the void I was grateful for.

I was a warrior with the flightpath of a broken arrow

who never celebrated a victory without feeling

I was standing at my own graveside listening

to the lies of drugstore heroes mismanage the truth.

If there’s not enough silence in your heart

you’ll suffer the blood guilt of a brute

trying to punish the world for things it did to itself.

You’ll leech the colours out of your eye if you don’t realize

the real mastery of the art of life is in how well

you underpaint the void before you jump

to adding the highlights and hotspots of

the chameleonic pigments of the mystic specifics

of your oceanic, emotional life drowning

continentally like granite in the South Atlantic

or a captain who went down with the ship

at his post in the wheelhouse of the moon.

Inundated. Saturated. You have to live it, and

through it, to know the depths you’ve sunk into

are way over your head, like the waters of a womb

that’s always giving birth to you, the dark mother

of all you are and do, moment by moment,

the whole flashing out of the void that lavishes

its emptiness like sparrows and wrens in the fountains

of collaborative creation like a starmap plotting

the magnitude and colour of the iris in the eyes

of new myths of origin no one’s dreamed of yet

and one sip from the prophetic skulls of the muses

will never let you forget, the winged arrow

sings best like Sagitta beside Aquila in the dark,

a nightbird with no particular target in mind

but the liberation of the longing that enslaves its heart

like wild horses yoked to the hearses of a dying art.

In Pegasus, southwest of August, deep sky burials

winnowed like feathers, ashes, chaff

by the wind whistling in the empty urns

of the starmud chimney pots.

Fledgling harvests sparked like pilot lights

in the eyeless darkness of unminded starcharts.

PATRICK WHITE