Tuesday, March 19, 2013

WITHIN, AN INTIMACY WITH COSMIC AFFAIRS


WITHIN, AN INTIMACY WITH COSMIC AFFAIRS

Within, an intimacy with cosmic affairs
down to the mystic details of the labyrinths
I’ve wandered in like a lab rat trapped
in my own spiritual fingerprints.
Without, I stare for light years into
the vast, cold, vacancy of the abyss
leeching the light out of the stars
by applying black holes to the blood-letting
like the poultice of an eclipse to break the fever
and drain the delirium of my starmud
by sweating visionary eyes out of my pores.

Reality is no more probable than any other delusion.
If you’re truly ignorant, there’s no confusion.
What could there possibly be to argue about?
That’s why I know less about death
though it’s all around me like an absence
I’m inconceivably unaware of like a nightwatchmen
who doesn’t know he’s dreaming realistically
of bearing a skeleton key like a cross on his back
that would rather make sure things are locked up
and accounted for, than hold his lantern up
to see what’s going on inside beyond the bars
on the closed windows of his one-eyed way
of looking at the world as if he were protecting its secret.

The marvels never cease. The wonder never dissipates.
The mystery will always be the unrecognizable fragrance
of a wildflower you’ve never seen before that haunts you
like a muse of life that aligns your longing with hers
to amplify the whispers of the fireflies talking in their sleep
about unionizing the night shift into constellations like the stars
and the guild houses of the zodiac, each with their own sign.

No need to serve a long apprenticeship looking for your mind
with its tail in your mouth, no need to turn your mirrors
inside out to get to the bottom of your creative origins
that made you up like a story that followed you
around the fires of life like smoke as you got along
the best you could with what you couldn’t help living
like a ghost dance in the ashes of your sacred pyres
and sky burials that taught you the wings
that feather your thermals like a joy-ride in a stolen vehicle
might be yours, but the wind belongs to no one.

You don’t need to get so spaced out about
your mythically inflated enormities you go into orbit
around the earth like a Cyclopean Hubble Telescope
shuttered like the third eye of a lizard looking dispassionately
upon galactic events in a universe throwing
the luck of our bones and skulls up against the wall
like black dice with albino snake-eyes like Castor and Pollux.

There will always be more to the shining
than the sentience of whatever life forms are looking at it
from the shadows of an absence it’s impossible to express
except as a feeling that perhaps this time
you received a secret loveletter
that didn’t go to the wrong address and lifespan after lifespan,
era after era of your infinite afterlives, you’re deeply assured
won’t return you to the lost and founds of the spiritually anonymous.

The notoriety of your solitude will be famous
among the nameless who have never heard of you
but for a rumour or two of some light-hearted hermit
that’s laired up in the cave of his prophetic skull
with the wavelengths of demonic vipers intelligently weeping
like underground rivers from his eye sockets
in the unwalled gardens of galactic paradaisia
in a desert of stars he drinks from
like both sides of the hourglass that intoxicates his seeing
as if time were the measure of how empty and full
a human face can feel under the lunar deathmask
he’s been wearing like the birthmark of enlightenment
since he first opened his eyes like observatories
raining in the ancient grasslands of the Sahara
to illuminate the blooming of wild asters in late September.

When nothing’s revealed. Nothing’s dissembled.
And herein lies the crux and dizzy crossroads
of the essential insight that drives humans
lucidly mad with crazy wisdom, nothing but nothing
is the way it is and isn’t, not the light, not the dark,
not the water, not the mirage or the clarity, and this
is the unlocatable insubstantiality of unattainable reality
and that the omnidirection of the only road it can be approached by.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH TONIGHT


I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH TONIGHT

I can hear crying all over the earth tonight,
sad children in the windows of their eyes longing for things
they dream of growing up to make come true,
fireflies in wishing wells the shadows drink from
on the moon where the spirit’s lost and found dwells
like a small glove shed like a skin of moonlight years ago
as we grew out of ourselves like shells of the dawn in the morning,
waiting for some flesh and blood human hand
to loop back like a habitable planet in its second innocence
and come and claim us like life on Mars again.

The return journey of the morning glory to unmapped islands
we set out to explore, each to our own star,
like the lifeboats of newly-hatched turtles running
from the cosmic eggshells of our abdicated crowns of creation,
toward the abysmal shore of our oceanic aspirations,
each of us enduring the transformative initiations
of our shapeshifting hearts on the thresholds
of the endless event horizons of the black holes and rainbows
that beguiled us with their joy and despair deeper
into the mirage of the music believing in this desert of stars
even here we could hear the mermaids singing,
and pluck pearls of enlightenment from the third eyes
of oysters open on the beach. Or the mouths of books
that had lost their place in the universe, left open
gaping in the sand at the incontrovertible signposts of the stars.

So many echoes from home you can’t help but lose track
of your soul sometimes along the way trying like the rain
to better the world like a green tree ring pinging
the heart wood of a petrified forest like a tuning fork
or a witching wand that might break into blossom yet
if only we don’t give up like grails and constellations
looking for the watersheds of the shining whether
they’re dragons that swallow the moon to bring the rain
or the bell weathers of irreversible delusions
that fill the abyss with the elixirs and love potions
of our intoxicating affair with our own laughter and tears.

Over the course of the intervening lightyears
the lost flightfeathers of many strange skies
under our wings, lonely prayers in the moonlit tents of the doves
growing like morning glory all over the childhoods
we abandoned like buckets beside the wells we fell into
like hourglasses of quicksand leaking out of ourselves,
like stars from the perfect bodies of contiguous time and space.

We’re exalted in the midst of our humiliations. We’re humbled
by the excess of our celebrations. We ghost dance against
the gathering thunderclouds of preeminent war
like a guild of sacred clowns and shepherd moons
on tour in protest against the bulwarks of gravitas
enslaving third world planets, and for a time, our hearts
feel like angry strawberries glowing in the starfields
as if Aldebaran had just blue-shifted toward the spiritual life
of the Pleiades, and were young again, the red flame
of the poppy in its blood that dreams of sustaining
and renewing life, even if it be just the tender green placard
of a leaf unfolding in the ashes of our urns, one
shy tendril of morning glory seeking the light
in the terrible stillness of an implacable abyss,
we are made young again, clear again, by the gusts
of a moody, blue muse of emotional hydrogen
flaring up in us like the inspiration for goblets and fountains
of cool white flowers hanging our bells and trumpets
like music growing all over the cedar hedges in the early morning.

Can you listen with your eyes? Can you see with your ears
how the ghosts of the stars walk the earth at night
in the flesh of flowers blooming like chicory along the roadside
in the blue irises of the eyes of September, or in gardens on the moon
left untended by the gentle rains of our imaginations
for more childhoods than there are watermarks in the heartwood
of the tears it took to get here like rootless trees
spreading across the earth like an unplanned pilgrimage
of exiled immigrants returning to the ancestral shrines
of their prophetic skulls burning like prodigal stars
in the spacious windows of our visionary homes?

Realizing at last, if nothing else from our insights into life,
the starmaps of the fireflies at the headwaters of our source
aren’t bounded by the hearthstones of our wandering hearts
where the vagrants lay their heads down at last
on the hard pillows of the moonrocks they brought back with them
to dream of breathing new life into the lost atmospheres
of their childhoods returning like the lyrics of the nightbirds
to a wheeling mobile hanging like a windfall of planets
and dancing apples from the rafters and boughs of the ceilings
that couldn’t keep the lid on the toy boxes of their bedrooms
or the hoods on the marvellous third eyes of the falcons
perched on the tree limbs of their telescopes in the corner
trying to see into the dark as far as the wingspan of their light will let them.

PATRICK WHITE