THAT MOMENT OF LOVE WHEN LIFE CALLS TO ITSELF

THAT MOMENT OF LOVE WHEN LIFE CALLS TO ITSELF

That moment of love when life calls to itself

and the summons is answered creatively

and people and things come forth, the stillness

moves and the silence is a song sweeter than words,

the darkness, a shining brighter than the light of stars.

All things are flowers of the mind even

the absence, even the shadows, rooted

like river deltas of lightning in the marshlands

of lilaceous starmud breaking into waterlilies

that enlighten the heart awhile with a beauty

born of perishing, as if all eternity were

included in it, just for a moment, a mystery

beyond wisdom when the words fall away

like petals from the calyx of a star to reveal

the dreamer in the lotus of her emptiness.

Like love, at times, it seems the light

is a kind of impoverished darkness. Bright vacancy,

dark abundance. The candle on the windowsill

of death is a grave-robber opening the eyelids

of the seeds like tiny coffins by the spring.

I’ve seen the radioactive wavelength of the water snake

hunting chlorophyll frogs among the wild irises

harbouring their eggs like the future in the eyes of life.

Happenstantially, it appears. No purpose. No motive.

As if meaning weren’t the end term of what

there is to live for, or why, not even the seeking itself

the grail I’m drinking my life from to green

the ailing kingdom. Love is a happy tragedy

however long it takes the light to get to know you.

To humanize the seeming vastness and indifference

of every star that awakes from its grave within you

like a prophetic skull that’s just had a dream

of a creation myth that leaves the vital heart

of its endless beginning, unexplained. To gentle

these dragons of the abyss with three feathers

of moonlight laid like the three best breaths of life

you ever took, wonder, gratitude, and praise,

each in its own right, the waterbird of an atmosphere

that takes the whole homeless world in under its wing

like a dark mother and gives it shelter for the night

as if it weren’t in her nature not to love

the wayfaring stars that show up at her door

lost, taking their eye off their own light

in a labyrinth of rootfires burning like a starmap

of New England asters to show them where they are.

This is earth where everything we love perishes

like a return journey strewn with plinths and petals

all along the way like the hands of a circuitous waterclock

that renews what flows away on the mindstream

whispering into the ear like the dream of a night creek

to a man walking in his sleep toward a voice he knows

as the woods know the nightbirds. Wake up. Wake up.

We’re almost there.

PATRICK WHITE