Sunday, January 13, 2013

THE WESTERN LIGHT


THE WESTERN LIGHT

The western light
comes right in through my windows
and glows in a golden haze on the dirty panes.
It slashs geometric shadows on my landscapes
like some mad abstractionist
who took them way too personally.
And all they said
was moon tree star light stone flower river sun
as if that were enough of a vocabulary
to say the whole of creation
quietly under your breath
like a secret that’s shared by everyone.
Guess I’m not enough of an ideologue
to comb the swamp for my own skeleton
like the ancestor of modern art.
I’ve gazed too long and hard
at the waterlilies in the Fall River
as if I were meditating on koans
that effortlessly open by themselves
not to waste my mind on anything
that didn’t include my heart
like a work in progress
like a river on its way to the ocean.
Dark soon.
The night sheds petals of insight
like moonlight making waves
on the shoreless seas of enhanced awareness
where I stand like a human candle
with my little standard of flame
trying to light up the universe
so I can see what I am in the depths
of my own eyes.
If I’m the tragicomic clown of my own catastrophe
or if there’s something more profound
going on around me
than time and light
glancing off the mindstream
like birds against the delusive skies
that lie like the windows of insight
until you break through them
like the sun at midnight
shining its light
on a conspiracy of mirrors
against the moon.
I must have been mad before I was born
to see things the way I do now.
Everything is inconceivably probable somehow
like a fortune-cookie
that’s had its tongue cut out
for telling lies to the emperor
or the lack of a sign
for the thirteenth house of the misbegotten
in the neighbourhood watch of the zodiac.
Even when you lose your purpose in life
like a passport in a borderless country
you can still hang on to your identity
like a willess work engendered out of nothing.
You can still firewalk the ghost road of smoke
like stars under the feet of the dead
or follow your own breath
like a dancer that no one is leading.
It’s a surprise when you first come to see
that the greatest liberty of all isn’t death
but to cry as if you were bleeding
from a wound
so much sharper and deeper
than the poignancy of the knife that opened it
like a posthumous loveletter from the gods
you feel
reading your own fate
in the silence between their voices
as if forever hereafter
you could only be killed into life
and that every rafter of delusion
you ever sought shelter under
were the overturned hull of an empty lifeboat.
Sometimes I look at my life
like one of the splendid ambiguities
of a subtly nuanced godsend.
I try to befriend the way I feel
like the generous host
of a dangerous stranger
too cold and aloof
to introduce himself
as my shadow
my eclipse
my potential assassin.
I have tried to stay true to the lies
that led to the myth of my lucidity
like a mirage in a desperate desert of stars
I could drown in like an island
up to to the neck of an hourglass
in tidal waves of quicksand
laying my life down
like the foundation stone
of an inverted pyramid
that yearns for the state of mind
he enjoyed before life
more than that that won’t come after.
I have refused to put the torch out in its own reflection.
I have not tried to uproot
the beauty of the waterlilies
opening their eyes like stars
from the decay and the lies
and the scars that sustain them.
I have put to good use
the dysfunction of delusion
to make a credible raft
to get me to the other side
of this river of shadows
swollen like a flashflood
in a lunar seabed.
I have danced with ghosts
like a lonely shaman
around the unappeasable fires
of desire and death
entreating the nightsky
to rain on my flowerless roots
and sweeten the severity
of the dragon’s eyes
with tears.
I have lived in such a way
to actualize the nameless reality
of a few common words
like love and understanding
I’ve kept alight like fireflies on the wind
and cherished them
as if the seeds of insight
were the perennial beginning
of enlightened orchards
that taste like the fruit of compassion.
I have lived in such a way
like a thief of keys
to relieve the locks
on the nightwatch
of their tunnel vision
that it’s not safe
to give my new address
to my old mailbox.
But even in a black out
I have not kept the light out
by plastering my windows with starmaps
or gone underground
like a blind star-nosed mole
that put its eyes out
to share something
in common with the dead
who would never have dreamed
they would all end up sleeping with their mothers.
I open them to receive the sun.
I close them to remember the stars
I’ve been dancing under
for lightyears
against the gathering storm
like a poor man’s chandeliers.
I have celebrated my defiance
of hitching a winged horse
to a hearse
by expressing the joy I take
in the revolutionary spontaneity
of my unself-reliance.
But of all the things
I’ve ever outgrown
or overthrown
like a sword from a bridge
I gave back to the sacred waters of life
the last to fall
was the ghostship in the mirage
of the image I had of me.
I poured myself out
like imaginary water
from a fountainmouth
in a real drought
to green the secret Edens
at the sacred crossroads
of the four rivers
that might come of it
as if X marked the spot
where I was standing
as the best place to start a garden
on the waterwheel of the mindstreams
that radiated out of its stillness like spokes.
Sometimes you end up stealing fire
when all along
you thought you were meant
to invent the wheel
or make up a new language
out of the echoes of dolphins
breaking into birdsong
as if they had turned in their feet
to go back to the sea
but had not forgotten
that their fins
could fly as easily
as the wings they once wore on their heels.
Many rivers flow into the one sea
and the sea returns to transcendence
back the way it came
without stepping into the same mindstream twice.
And I prefer to think
that the same thing is true of the multiverse.
Everything that shines in the night
or in the mind
down to the smallest spark of insight
locked like a firefly
in a lighthouse of ice
on the same omnidirectional course.
And true north
just the magnetic attraction
of a voodoo doll
in a haystack of needles
trying to get a bearing on things
like the right ascension
and correct declination
of a lost soul
summoned like a deranged galaxy
to the singularity
at the bottom of a blackhole
to exchange the light it goes by
by upgrading its eyesight
to search for itself in the night
on the higher frequencies
of X-ray vision
on board an experimental satellite.
And yet for all the myriad universes
that bubble up in hyperspace
like the last breath of the drowning
I have refused to live
like a diving bell in a wishing well
trying to understand
why nothing came true but the coins.
If you’ve never resolved anything in your whole life
maybe you were meant
to keep the mystery alive.
The medium is not the message
when the message is the mystery.
A meaningful medium
is nothing but meaningless words.
The sky doesn’t intend to say birds.
The water doesn’t mean fish
anymore than an infinite number of other things.
Nothing lives like a machine
for something as small as a purpose.
You don’t have to live like a lens
to keep the sun in focus.
And maybe one of the greatest blessings
of being on the nightshift
is that when the universe is out of work
it has no use for us.
We’re free to be when and whatever we want.
Or thoroughly protean.
Or nothing at all.
A full eclipse of the clock on the wall
or a chromatically aberrant nightlight
like a colour crazy star
low on the horizon of the hall.
As for me and my house
I’ve lost track of the number of times
I’ve brought my starmud to enlightenment
like a horse you can lead to water
but you can’t make drink.
The words crawl.
The words swim.
The words take to their wings
like eagles and dragonflies
and startled waterbirds.
Half a sliced pear
looks like a short-necked Spanish guitar.
But looking for the meaning of this
isn’t the same
as listening to the music.

PATRICK WHITE  

IN THE MOMENT BEFORE SILENCE BREAKS WATER


IN THE MOMENT BEFORE SILENCE BREAKS WATER

In the moment before silence breaks water
like a thimble of oceanic consciousness
and the fish are jumping through the underside
of the moon looking for the dark side of their reflections
in the genetic waterclocks of time endlessly editing
the first draft of three quarks in a membranous monad
as the inflationary tendencies of the initial inspiration
cool down into molecules and space gives lead to the light,
I cast one long last farewell of a look
like a waterbird disappearing into the eyes of the void
that have never turned back like nirvana
to ever say good-bye to anyone, indifferent as smoke
to the path anyone takes away or toward it
as you realize you are the journey you’re on,
you’re the vehicle and the starmap, you’re
the dream of getting somewhere that’s making you up on the go.

Marvels and madness. The business of wonder.
Asylums crammed with star-shocked astonishment.
The exponential rush of knowledge, and, as always
the mysteries last to the dance, an innocent lover’s slow advance
to embrace the novelties of this Cambrian explosion
of fractals and facts like the wavelengths of a suspension bridge
swaying between two crows’ nests of straw. Memes
on the memomes, evolution, brutal genius, shaping space with thought
until matter itself is seen to be a translucent mode of sentience.
A dream of stars adrift like an empty lifeboat
in the wake of the path it takes without knowing
where it came from or where it’s supposed to be going
over the edge of a black hole into the tunnels of love and death
with a whole new universe at the other end of a telescopic hourglass
where bliss makes its own molecules, and compassion
the heavier elements of our starmud deep in our sorrows.

Things of the world like a language without a voice
until you say them like a secret you’ve kept from yourself
in your heart of hearts, the ear of your ear, the eye
of your eye, so deeply intensified by your understanding
they begin to shine by a light of their own to say they’re
as alive as you are to live as freely as they seek
the key to why they exist at all, as you do, to know this.
It’s the longing of hunger that inspires you
to use what you have to seek what you’re missing.
Content with what you have, ripeness is all,
you fall from the bough like a windfall of shepherd moons
to erect a provisional scaffolding to climb up again
and paint the creation myths of the constellations anew
in the crowns of the treetops washing in the underpainting.

No sailors in sight, life sings to itself like a mermaid on the rocks.
Out of the mouth of the mountain that wanted to speak
in a grammar of eagles and stars to the next peak over,
in a lyrical outburst of echoes, a valley was born to listen.
One star west, is one star east, one foot after another.
The humanizing of our solitude is deranging strangers at the gate
as the signs of life have become a matter of course,
and the miraculous doesn’t know what to do for an encore.
Even if you don’t, the mystery of your own life
takes you more seriously than your enquiries can imagine.
When a hidden secret wants to know itself
it looks at you in the mirror of your own awareness
and as much as you’ve been given a light to see by
is the colour of its eyes, the shape of its face, the curl of its mouth.

Looking into the mind like a telescope looks at the stars
and the stars look back like fireflies in the well of the telescope,
admit you’re invisible, formless, and start from there.
Or you’ll languish in the timeless eras before the Big Bang
without eternity to back you up. Ripples in the microwaves
of your cosmic background emanation, can you feel the pulse
of an ancient rain in your own veins, or did the golden fish
that eludes you jump into your lifeboat of its own accord
the moment you stopped tying lures to hook it on your questions?
Trickle or sunami alike, everybody makes it back like
a wave of the mindstream to the great night sea of their source.
Like an apple makes it back to the tree that abandoned it
like a god, or an atom, or mitochondrial Eve looking
for a purpose in life that wasn’t too deep to conceive of
given that she couldn’t know what she had to work with at the time.

When you listen to yourself clearly to hear the universe
talking through you, if it doesn’t sound unapologetically absurd
you’re either lying or mindless of the madness in the mirror.
This is what comes of updating your questions
but listening in the same old language. The universe is polyglot.
It speaks in tongues of undifferentiated chaos, and the ear
you give to it is the grammar, the magic of what it has to say
so the message is always collaboratively creative
like the quantum entanglements of binary star systems
dancing around each other like lovers whose bonds
are not proportional to the elastic distances between them.
Just like the impersonal intimacies between crystals
on the same frequency. Go out and look at the stars
on a winter night and say anything you want in their presence
and it’s heard in reverse on the other side of the galaxy.

You can tell who’s been looking at Orion
by the labyrinthine eyeprints of earth bound fireflies all over it
whose light you didn’t think could reach out as far as a star
to leave an indelible impression on the third eye of a sunspot.
Pure motivation doesn’t set the agenda of what you’re fated to live.
Ambition even less. Yet they’re both open doorways to enlightenment
as expedient and delusory as those spiritual keyholes you peek through.
Life accommodates itself to the morphology of your knowledge forms.
Inconceivably, it exists because you imagine it, not because you know it.

Astronomy for poets. Picture-music for cosmologists with stone ears.
The shape-shifting pillars of the moon in a palace of water,
the way all poems move like serpents of light
dancing to their own flutes like the wind on the waves.
Many waterclocks and broken hearts that do,
but the lyric of the mindstream doesn’t taste of time.
There are no ashes of the stars on its tongue,
no new moon like a pupil in the iris of a moondog.
It doesn’t enter the future trying to improve upon its infancy.
It doesn’t hire a tutor to help perfect its spontaneity.
It’s not the idolatrous familiar of its companionable mystery.
It’s not the nightwatchmen of everything it reflects.
It’s not the eyewitness watching you being you in your dreams.
The circuitous blossoming is your own emergent life. Your seeing
flowers into music like stars on the tendrils of the wild grapevines
feeling their way through the darkness like the cursive script
of a serpent of light writing glyphs in the wake of its going
as if any wavelength of water were a sign of intelligence
in a desert of stars where sand may be the measure of time
but the hourglass of the sky never runs out of insights
like fireflies writing back in ungrammatical constellations
of pictographs in the luminous hand of their vagrant imaginations.

PATRICK WHITE