Tuesday, March 26, 2013

TIME TO STOP DYING AND PRAISE THE SKY


TIME TO STOP DYING AND PRAISE THE SKY

Time to stop dying and praise the sky.
Time to set your eyes free from what
you’re looking for and marvel at the stars.
Time to forgo the Leggo girders of your intent,
and offer up a few sand castles to the tide,
release your mind from the petty chores
you apply it to and grow astronomical
in the way you let things come about as they will
without trying to raise a sail or attach
a rudder to chaos, as if you could so easily lead
chaos astray into doing things your way,
forgetting you’re not the road, you’re
just the one who walks it like a dream figure
in the omnipresence of the rain. So many eyes,
so much to see, and you’re still looking at it all
from the angle you were born with.

Sylvia, uncuff your shepherd moons
from the dungeons of your bedposts.
Life is cruel. Stop blaming the swallows for it.
You ever get caught nude in a squall of fireflies before
and stay in the water long enough to feel the delicacy
of their lightning sending little shocks of ecstasy
whitewater rafting down the axons of your deltas
as if you had a chance to drown in your joy
at being alive for a change, instead of holding your head
underwater in your sorrows to see if you’re a witch
that’s huffed too much rue? Time to let go,
fledgling, your first nightflight into the abyss.
Time to ride your own thermals, my kestrel,
like bannisters down the stairwells of the maple keys
then swoop up like an arrow from the bow of a lead guitarist
and take hold of the moon in your talons.

You can do it. Turn your scales into feathers.
The low raised up high like moonrise
on the threshold of your wingspan, come on, dragon,
one big gulp of atmosphere to overcome
your fear of koans at these precipitous heights,
stop lingering in the doorway like a portrait in a picture frame
it’s time, it’s time, it’s time to jump.
Don’t tax the tolerance of the wind for shore-huggers.
Get rid of all those thought chains that tie you
to your own wrist with a hood over your head
and designate your prey like an agenda with a menu.
Thinking about freedom enslaves it. Don’t try
to earn it like a gladiator longing for a wooden sword
from the emperor, take it. Be a great thief of fire
and do a victory roll because you got away with it.
You jumped into the black hole of chance
and trillions of stars smiled favourably upon you
like a zodiac of fireflies when the sun’s off road on its own.

Sylvia, dry your tears like puddles on the footpath
and let your eyes, vapours in the sky, fly on the wind
as if your seeing weren’t a lapwing and your crying
weren’t a housewell with a lightbulb that keeps burning out.
Get around like sentience in a dream for a while,
No lack of nightmares in the world to make you sleep
like a trap door spider peeking out from under your eyelids
like a false dawn, or squinting at the stars as if
you were looking into oncoming highbeams,
frozen in your tracks like the ghost of a doe on asphalt.

Lavish some space on yourself and take a bubble-bath
in the universe and you can tell the gargoyles
on your Gothic cathedral you’re sitting in a blast furnace
trying to come up with new ideas for stained glass
and you think you might be on to something
more seraphic in its zeal than fire and blood.
You’ve got the attitude. Maybe it’s time
to de-alpha your beatitude as if life were a friend
with nothing to prove like a river that isn’t always
swimming for its life or a waterclock that overidentifies
with aqueducts and is convinced time runs in a straight line
only a slight gradient off true midnight well within
the margin of error between the mountains and the swamps,
between this inconceivable life and that unbelievable death.

What are you holding your breath for, it’s
a generous atmosphere, let it out like genie from a lamp
no one’s ever wished upon before. Imagine,
a star of your own. The first time the light’s ever
seen your eyes you weren’t trying to hide them
like sunspots, though all those beautiful
auroral storms of yours were a dead give away
there was a star sapphire somewhere beneath
all those bruised orchids of yours you grew for lightyears
in the shadow of an outhouse in a shitty world.
Don’t be so corvid in your approach to the moon
you forget you had a bright side once as white as doves
when you went looking for land and they went looking for you.

So what if the dove came back with a leaf in its beak?
Silver-tongued cousin of diamond, you still speak
less incorruptibly, an eye to the eloquence of moonlight
on the dark side of your neglected veracity.
Black is always the colour of wisdom in an aniconic abyss
that compassionately takes every wandering wavelength in,
every one of them a prodigal daughter of the dark mother,
that’s you, Sylvia, raven flint-knapped from pure obsidian,
all around you like the thorns and petals of a black rose
little chips and lunettes of a spear point in an eclipse
of the new moon, the new moon, Sylvia, opening
its eyelid like a star or a waterlily out of the muck
in the cauldrons of our fetid starmud working its morphic magic
already one white feather into the flight of a wild, wild swan.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE CEASELESS SILENCE


IN THE CEASELESS SILENCE

In the ceaseless silence, is it my soul I address
in these barely audible whispers of blood,
you, are you there, a friend to me, aloof companion,
intimate stranger, are you just the longing of an echo
after the nightbird’s flown, the light that goes on shining
well after the star is dead? Did I create you
out of the loneliness of my imagination
to talk to under the stars down by the river,
where life seems so sad and beautiful much of the time
and even the most trivial seems supercharged
with a significance that bears no resemblance
to the tiny fireflies of meaning I attribute to the stars,
vaprous candles sublimating in the blaze they try to illuminate,
my eyes, mere raindrops in an infinite sea of awareness?

Science too dazzling right now to be wholly credible,
blinded by its light, its field of view narrowed
by its own expansiveness, is there sorcery beyond this
that isn’t quantumly entangled like you and I in the same dilemma
or is it all clear to you who you are and what you’re doing here,
my simulacrum, my shadow, the dream under my deathmask
that will carry on without me like a creekbed in the absence of rain
waiting to return to consciousness like a fish buried
in the sediment of its own starmud, an urn in a kiln
baked to hold its own ashes like the prophetic skull of the moon
until you return again like an atmosphere and the wind
delights in making the waters of life tremble with anticipation
all that has thrived and died within them shall be renewed again
in your presence standing at the gates of all my arrivals and departures
as if your greeting and farewell were one and the same
gesture of acknowledgment. Or am I second-guessing myself
in a monologue of the alone with the alone that sees
eye to eye with me as if we both made each other up
creator and creature of our interdependent origination?

It’s late on the graveyard shift and I can’t help asking
though I know you won’t answer, am I at least getting
the questions right? In this floating world, are there
shipwrecks at the bottom of a mirage, or are we
walking on stars like spiders at the edge of a lake
trying to connect the dots like a waterclock of constellations?
Are we pearl diving in these bubbles of life
for new moons that will help to keep us afloat
by keeping us self-contained like fishing buoys and crystal skulls?
Mindstreams digging our own graves in our travels,
do we labour to see what we have achieved undone
by hands as busy as ours once were? Are we
working at one another like habitable planets, spiritual proxies
of each other’s supersymmetrical afterlives,
the interreflection of moonrise in an hourglass,
the donkey looking into the well, the well looking back at the donkey?

Times I feel I know what you want of me
and you’re easy to adapt to by holding my mirroring awareness
up to you like a shapeshifter, like a lake to the moon,
a candleflame talking to the wind, and things seem
to find their own equilibrium like water flowing
into puddles of starmud and the clouds not getting dirty.

My earthenware integrity is renewed in the peace I enjoy with you
and nothing is excluded. Resigned to whatever
diminishment must be endured as the aperture narrows
the cat’s eye of the needle I’m trying to thread
with a narrative theme that could weld the disparate parts
of my discontinuity into something whole like a loaf of bread
I left out for the ghosts or some kind of chrysalis
I can crawl out of to dry my wings like a dragon
on the celestial parapets of the waterlilies, or the sunset
of a scar that did the decent thing and gave the wound a proper burial,
fulfilled in a way that’s more a grace of the moment
than a reward for anything that was done or left undone,
the shadows of my life are reconciled to the light that’s casting them.
It’s wisdom and beauty, untroubled freedom
and the lyrical enlightenment of inconceivable myriads
just to be alive as a peer of your complementary presence
I’m always breaking into like a star in a windowpane.

But what does it mean to have lived in vain? To spend
the whole of your life on your hands and your knees
looking for a key in a duststorm, whether it’s gold or dirt
that’s lashing your eyes into tears? Time’s holy commandment.
Don’t waste it. You might wish you hadn’t later on.
Not because any immaculate omnipotence is going
to punish you for it but the very sin of omission is itself
the karmic nemesis that arises synchronistically
like a teaching device that doesn’t impart anything to you
you don’t already know. It’s crucial not to underestimate
the inconceivable. To tempt the truth out of hiding
when you’re not prepared for it, duped by your own ideals.

When the stars aren’t there, our eyes are the less for it.
For the lack of other signs, even a mirage sometimes
serves as a direction of prayer like a scaffolding serves
the bigger picture without intending to. Reality is not
a static state of mind, it’s a supratemporal creative event
and everything that happens, irrevocably once, indelible as space,
inseparable as the moon from its reflection on the lake,
is neither fictive nor true, not one, not two, no gap
like an abyss that must be bridged between one
distinct extremity and another, no thought moment
billions of lightyears old between you and I.

I hear you like music in a dream, I see you like a mindscape
painted in fire, I think of you as the bone-box of my innocence,
the avatar that embodies my experience of the intangible,
my scarecrow, my voodoo doll, my dolmen, my anti-self
my strawdog, my mentor, my buddha, my fool,
and a dead branch flowers on a rootless tree,
as we differentiate ourselves collaboratively
in the ceaseless silence of our configurative unions,
the many returning to the one, the one returning
to transcendence, whole in every part.
Five petals of a flower open and one hand blooms.

PATRICK WHITE