Friday, May 31, 2013

LESS AND LESS THE HEART ENGAGED

LESS AND LESS THE HEART ENGAGED

Less and less the heart engaged, though not dispassionately,
with emotion intensifying into form, and the elaboration
of its shadows into a sign language of the light.
More a clarification of time, how the golden apple,
about to fall, looks back on the blossoms of the spring,
and sees how everything has already been achieved
by the beginning blooming like a tentative leaf of foxfire
in the ashes of the stars that cram their urns
into every cell of the body to honour the creative detritus
of the light all things are the embodiment of.

How gently the stars open our eyes to them
amazed at how much tenderness can be expressed
by a dragon at a distance sage enough to know
life is a function of its shining blindly into the dark.
And we’re all trying to second-guess like children
anticipating gifts, what’s behind the tent flaps
on the midways of our blazing that drowns the night out
with the white noise of our mind. The careerism
of being alive, the lucky throw against the odds
that wins the prize that mythically deflates the carnie
as he hands it to you like the best of a bad situation,
happy to see you gone like an offence to his opportunism.

How many have wandered off a path that doesn’t exist
except they make it, rogue planets across the starfields,
leaving their wake like a green shadow in the wavelengths
of tall grass that soaks their shoes as if they were crying
and there were seeds in their tears like the waters of life.

Heretics convinced they’re blessed by an inviolable freedom
to dispossess themselves of the conventional fruits
of the tree of knowledge by which it is known.
Do you know the name of the emerald star in the core
of the apple when you slice it open with a Sanskrit blade
of consciousness, which loses its edge the moment
it goes looking for something that exists outside of it
to see where the light’s coming from. Easy enough
to return to the ivy-smothered gates of Eden
but there are no more gods in the garden, nor demonized reptiles
the angels have to raise burning swords against to keep out
of the no fly zone above the exiles and refugees
fleeing the wrath of Nobodaddy like the sock puppet
the manipulative wear like the deathmasks of their unmollified humanity.

There’s a dynamic that’s missing from our creative solitude,
alone with so much beauty it hurts our eyes sometimes
just to behold it and know there’s no one to share it with
but strangers just as amazed as we are at the lack of mirrors,
that there is no more mystery behind it when you peel back space
than there is in who we are, though only the dangerous
know for sure. You can make a housewell of this, or
you can risk drowning in your own watershed like a diving bell
crushed in the depths like a coke can, looking
for an ancient shipwreck that might give you a clue
to where you’re going, as if the truth were still
the prophetic skull of a cave-dweller buried in fire.

Should we dance to the music in the voice
of the life of meaning inspired by the riot of its absence,
and call that liberty, or submit to the slavers of a police state
with a golden chain linked by a consensus of selective orbits
we’re allowed to revolve in without arousing
astronomical catastrophes of petty suspicion?
Should we trust death more than we do life?
Turn over custodianship of our indefensible humanity
to evil clowns that laugh like lobbyists for the rich
at all the wrong things? What’s impotence if not the habit
of letting someone feed you lotuses or bread and circuses
in a repressively tolerant garbage-can?

Little doubt it’s easy enough for the light to be bent
by the gravitational eyes that warp the spaces
we live in like cameras born without eyelids
keeping watch on us in the weird belief
they’re keeping a prison population safe from themselves,
though they plead the focus of their seeing is fraternally pious.
Our children’s children will have mastered the shallow art
of seeing with their eyes, but how rarely, and what
a life of pain will pursue the visionary who actually
sees through them as if light were merely the key
to the magnificent gravegoods of our imagination
long after our children have forgotten how to see in us
what they’re not looking for in themselves.

Waterclocks pouring into the available dimensions
of an empty future, for the sake of the unborn,
let us carry the seeds of metaphors that will bloom
of their own accord in the starmud of the nascent imaginations
of our children so we don’t lose touch with them
precisely when they need us the most to be human.

To share the scars and shadows of our maculate conception
of ourselves, the way we’ve been invariably defeated
by the best that’s in us as a protest against death
that hasn’t suffered enough to understand
the genuine transcendence of a symbolic gesture
that took its hands away from its face as if the sun
weren’t ashamed to shine on it in the full light of a long day
of wandering where we will by the river to include

the wild irises some bush hog has cut to ribbons
in our transmorphic gaze, as it raises the unlikelihood
of the battered stalks of its budding colours up
like the torches of two blue-white, ultra violet flames,
to a suggestion of the Pleiades to bloom like a paintbrush in the face
of the sword that slashes at the beauty of its freedom of expression
like the spirit of the living word to exceed the bounds
of all plausible definitions of itself that limit
the sacred syllable of disobedience caught in its throat

like the blue-blood of an aristocratic nightbird
bleeding out into the future of longing in our children’s eyes
like the ancient anthem of what’s heroically perennial
about humans defying the self-imposed imperatives
of their own tragic existence, by blooming nonetheless
like stars renewing the innocence of our children’s sense of wonder,
our dark abundance shining into the bright vacancy
of the unknown spaces their faces are slowly emerging from
like moonrise over the burgeoning mindscapes
of sleeping hills dreaming aerially like fruitive familars
into the blue distance and intimately human shadows
of our inheritors tasting the same stars in their seeing
that lit up ours when we bothered to look up like wild irises
that refused to be laid low along the shores of our mindstreams
that insisted like water in its outflowing upon
the miraculous follies of an incontravertible life of awe.


PATRICK WHITE