Thursday, June 6, 2013

YOU TAKE IT IN LIKE A BLACK HOLE

YOU TAKE IT IN LIKE A BLACK HOLE

You take it in like a black hole
and you let it out on the other side,
new, white, and shining just the way
the night transforms the light of the stars
into the insights of a mind so radiantly efflorescent
even the fireflies are blinding.

Why is it the next burning bridge
you’re about to cross is the one
that’s going to give you a chance
to make a new world of it
on the other side, on the other side,
mahaprajnaparamita, gone, gone, gone,
altogether gone beyond to the other side
of this river of life that has none?

Seven come eleven in the casino of your genes
is a lot more exciting than playing the lottery
week after week like a calendar with
an astronomically expanded vocabulary
that remedially assists you in apotheosizing yourself
by cowing your friends and detractors
in the shadows of your imaginary wealth.
Go for broke. Or don’t go at all.

In a desert of windows that have clarified
the universe in a grain of sand, sometimes
even to taste an echo of water on the lips of mirage
is enough to replenish the seas with golden fish.
It’s not wisdom to mythically deflate your delusions
or underestimate your distinctions. I’m grateful
for the mistakes that made me who I am today.

This is the way, that’s the way to the abyss,
the void, the reservoir, the silo, the watershed,
the saline aquifer in the third eye of a dead sea
that knows what it’s like to burn when you cry
as if someone just threw acid in your face
like a spitting cobra with a reptilian grin
on the locket of its skull the moment it opens its mouth.
This is the intimate emptiness when all that’s left
to feel affectionate about, is friendless, boundless space.

Look for a teacher among the pupils
who never attained enlightenment
and apprentice yourself to the liberation
of your ignorance and when your aspirations
of breathing in and out for yourself
have been thoroughly defeated in their turn
like the flashflood of a waterclock that ran out
in a salt flat before it could make its way to the sea,
exalt like a master in the crazy wisdom
of the blazing failure you’ve become in the eyes
of a world it’s impossible to imagine without you.

Sooner die in a bad dream you’re the hero of
or be the princess who rescues a dragon
like a black rhino from the poachers
pimping a bestiary of sexual aids
like the horns of unicorns and black bear livers
to superstitiously impotent totemistic nerds,
than live fictitiously in the shadows of your own shining.

Even if, as I hereby do concede, when you read this,
you’re either too bright to understand me,
or you’re not dark enough to see it immediately
for what it is, a star in daylight, or the lantern
of a new moonrise guiding an eyeless eclipse
through a labyrinth of copulating wavelengths
redshifting like a sunset through a colour wheel,
the precession of the vernal equinox
through an underworld of occult zodiacs
flowering like jewels in the eyes of cosmic root fires.

Trouble begins the moment you stop taking
your life so seriously like the imagination of a child
on the moon grown so intense in the face
of its eventful immensities, she learned
to play with it in defence of its draconian innocence.


PATRICK WHITE

SILENCE, THE FIFTH BORN DIMENSION OF THE WORLD

SILENCE, THE FIFTH BORN DIMENSION OF THE WORLD

Silence, the fifth born dimension of the world,
solitude, the sixth, miasmic picture music arises
like the fragrance of a dream resonating in the night air,
out of nowhere, the ghost of a waterlily you once loved
like an earthbound angel with the soul
of a Pleiadeian sapphire embedded in starmud.

When was that? O, yes, I remember now that autumn
when the shadows of the leaves fell down the wall
and more amazing than perishing was the fact we weren’t
for the moment, at least, and moments passed
like eras back then, when love seemed to show time
how to take the focus off itself for a change
and kick back like the missing link in a chain
of dynastic waterclocks in an inevitable succession
of flashfloods and dry creek beds that ended up casting
the long shadows of hapless mirages that evaporated
like a lunar atmosphere disappearing with its waterbirds.

When has it ever not been so? Even the future memories
of the prophets can’t recall approaching a crossroads
where time hasn’t intersected the timeless
like the celestial equator intersects the ecliptic
at the vernal equinox as spring comes like a shock
to the heart that starts thriving its way toward death again.
What could it mean to the journey that the beginning
has an end that can’t be differentiated one from the other?
Or the living have a tendency to forget
they’re as often descended from ghosts as smoke is
from fire, as they are the collateral fruits of pre-natal desire.

You can enlist a whole choir of candles to weep for you
if you wish, you can wait for it to dawn on the black pearl
of a new moon that you’re an eclipse that should be taken
seriously, but love puts the darkness to better use
and that tiny little flame like a single-petalled flowering perennial
keeps on dancing at the end of the burnt-out wick
of your spinal cord as your sorrows harden like wax
into sacred pools that only fire’s magus enough to clarify.

Let the light excite the ice on your mindstream to start flowing again
as it dances to the picture music of who you’re becoming
when you look through windows of rain that aren’t gift-wrapped
in the funereal bunting of amber glaciers mourning in your wake
for who you should have been, or might have been,
or might be yet, by some fatal stroke of luck,
that uproots your shining from the starfields
and transplants it into a secret garden to bloom
in someone else’s paradise with less incentive than your own
to seek knowledge even as far as China and end up
returning from North America with Aztec starmaps.

If you’re lost, look upon it as a course correction.
If you think you know where you’re going check
the integrity of your astrolabes, get out your plumb lines
and compare the shallow draught of your moonboat
with the mountainous reefs in the depths of your watersheds
and holler gung ho back to your nervous captain pacing the deck
wondering if he should mutiny or maintain command of a shipwreck.


PATRICK WHITE