O, AN OASIS IN A TARPIT

O, AN OASIS IN A TARPIT

O, an oasis in a tarpit when being alive

is more than enough, and happiness doesn’t scare me

half as much as it used to. It’s only an eyelid,

an opening and closing of doors, a Cepheid variable,

the blinking of the moon, blue chicory

among the stinging nettles, not the horrific beatitude

it used to seem when I was too young---

When was that? Yesterday?---to let it come

and go. A waterlily of joy, it blossoms among the stars

but its white fire is rooted in the lowest detritus

of the swamp that lives on its own perishing.

Happiness isn’t a reason to live. It’s living

beyond reason, unreasonably. Life without a buffer zone

when you can walk skinless in the moonlight

like a smooth stone in a medicine-bag of stars

that sends you skipping out over their reflections

in a lake without a name as deep as the mystery of life

and then you sink as if you’d been looking Medusa

in the third eye. And what are you, then, if not

a lifeboat of a fish swimming through the nightsky

of a bejewelled underworld resonant with soft laments?

I feel the effervescence of the Pleiades

carbonating the waters of my life. A great blue heron

flaps off like the headlines of yesterday’s newspaper,

or the first draft of another poem inspired by the abyss,

and I’m not unmindful of the sorrows of the world,

and that this is recess, a sparkle in the eye of eternity,

the exuberance of a boy on a dolphin in a great night sea

of perilous awareness, not lightyears of bliss

shed by a firefly that came looking for me in the dark.

I haven’t been rescued from anything. The depths

and the surface are one for the moment,

the highest and the lowest, the silly and sublime.

A dragon. A plumed serpent with a circumpolar outlook

a peacock of a dinosaur flaunting its boas

like a Fauvist painting of sex in the eyes of love and death.

A ghost dance, of sorts, where my beginnings

partner with my ends and together they make

one bird, one candle in a cowled plumage of flame

that took a vow of poverty but has the flightfeathers

of an heretical phoenix to spare just the same.

The nighthawk is riding its own thermals, the owl

isn’t encumbered by its wisdom. I’m free inside.

All the aviaries are empty and I’ve got an open door policy

on my voice-box. The chimney’s mellifluous

with bluebirds in the morning, and by nightfall

even the most feeble sparks of insight are exalted

by the constellations of the Eagle and the Swan.

No companion but my solitude is pleased with itself.

Everything I see and hear, down to the smallest

pale-green frog chirping in the cattails, silvered

in moonlight and water as the black snake tastes it

like a ripe strawberry on the warm, summer air,

is ancestor, bloodline, wavelength woven into

a flying carpet of picture-music I’m riding

like the multiversal destiny of my membranous mindstream

and because I love starmaps and leaves, I’m riffing off

the leit motifs of the stars, I’m writing poems in the glyphs

of the scars like birthmarks on the bodies of good guitars.

PATRICK WHITE