Monday, August 12, 2013

ESTRANGEMENT YOKED TO THE INCOMPATIBLE

ESTRANGEMENT YOKED TO THE INCOMPATIBLE

Estrangement yoked to the incompatible, is it
some kind of heartless joke? Surrealistic, surely,
don’t average out the crucials and tell me
it’s a compromised oxymoron. I’m twisted enough
to see further than that. My imagination
can remember things that haven’t happened yet,
and equally forget the past wasn’t possible.
A labyrinth of wormholes in the hull of a shipwrecked moon.

A snakepit of incisive perceptions. A unified field theory
knotted out of stray wavelengths into the flying carpet
of a cosmic hymen that makes a big bang
beating on the membrane of a drum of water,
jazzy butterflies practising rimshots with their antennae
on the third eye of another bubble floating in hyperspace
that feels like a kiss on your forehead from your daughter
for something you haven’t got the slightest notion of
except there’s something quantumly entangled about love.

Since I was sixteen, in a first year astronomy class,
I’ve always thought you had to add a factor for mind
to Einstein’s energy, mass, light equation if you want
to see the whole of the big picture, not just the postage stamp
field of view of a careerist visionary writing haiku
he hopes to get published in a journal of cherry blossoms,
but the Bayeux Tapestry, Monet’s waterlilies in the Tuileries,
thinking if life and death can open their eyes that wide,
how long would it take a comet of thought to cross
the abyss of the nightsky of the mind before I’m
expansive enough to accommodate the many in the one
like a dimension of intelligent awareness beyond
the other eleven, for the moment, we’re circumscribed by.

Where’s the element for mind in the periodic table?
Am I just a shadow of my own constituents,
or did someone spike the waters of life with a star
on the sly to lead me into believing that mind
was more luminous than mere light and I wasn’t
just glassblowing the hash pipe of an alternative universe
in the land of the cosmological lotus-eaters
dreaming like Cambridge brahmins in deep sleep
that I’m the quantum aura of a dream figure
that got sucked down the black hole of a trap door spider
waiting like the singularity of a predator inside
to weave me into the flatlining mandala
of a new cosmic web that drips like silk
and embalming fluid from its hourglass abdomen.

My body a bag of water with nine holes in it
I’m always paying tribute like a feudal river
on its way back to the sea like an imperial bloodstream
with spoils of oxygen and protein led in chains
like the dna of slavemeat by the triumphant legions
behind the throne of the empire that’s risen like Rome
from the pagan dead within me like a lion
reborn in the blood of the lamb on an altar in the Forum.

I may be mad, quantum foam frothing like the sea
with hydrophobia of the mouth, contrails
of white phosphorus like jellyfish in a cloud chamber
but I’d rather be included in the picture-music
of a nightbird with a communal sense of solitude
than be excluded like the retinal circus
of a cameraman circling the earth like a telescope
he never turns on himself as if it were his head, not mine
under the shutter of the guillotine every time I blink
and a new world issues from the void in my absence.


PATRICK WHITE

SISTER LUNACY

SISTER LUNACY

Shall we dance, shall we spin and wheel, hesitate, advance,
stall and recover, whirl like maple keys, and blow
the ashes of the starmaps we burned like passports
out of the palms of our hands to shine like dandelions
on an eye to eye level with the light they bloom in?
Sister Lunacy, I watch you uprooting your garden usefully
and shaking the stars out of the clumps of grass
as if you caught Medusa smuggling diamonds in her hair,
and I say such is woman when she forgets to be aware of herself,
and the goddess comes down to earth with dirty fingernails,
a gazelle in rubber boots. And no flower of the field,
no planet in the sunset, no eyelash of the moon over a barn
quite adorns the twilight the way her lucidity does.

And I want to take her by the hand like a binary star system
and circle one another like two hawks in the sky
until the night cools and the loons pack up their keyboards
and the stars work the graveshift on into the early hours
of the forthcoming dawn as if the end of all their labour
were extinction in a deluge of light
that doesn’t recognize any of them by name. Shall we dance,
shall we let the picture-music carry us away
like a word that hasn’t hurt us in a long time,
shall we gather wild rice in the holds of our birch bark canoes
as if we were threshing jewels on the shallow end of the lake,
or do you just want to walk the Road of Ghosts with me awhile
and see what blooms along the way, sunflowers and waterlilies
opening up like observatories and prophetic skulls
with a penchant for looking at things the same way?

Sister Lunacy, be kind to the mandalas and paradigms
I bring you like dreamcatchers woven of spinal cords
like tree rings of heartwood, ripples of rain, the net of Indra
where you mark one jewel and they’re all marked.
Or as Jesus said, insomuch as you do it unto one of these,
you do it unto me, and everyone thought he was special.
As if he owned gravity and everyone had shares.
It’s a radical act to come like a sweetness to ripen
the heart of a human that’s stayed green too long.
Just as you and I know madness is the quickest way
of never getting it wrong and if you’re going to argue
do it in song, don’t exorcise the answer
out of the person who possesses it and bid it be gone.
You can’t post a bond against a ghost.
Myriad guests of the mind, but seldom a host to speak of.
And Sister Lunacy you speak as if you were letting
a thousand voices all at the same time use you
as if they had no other mother tongue of their own,
and somehow it comes across as what you had to say.

So I’m asking you now. Do you want to dance,
do you want to bend space the way a body moves,
reshape the universe in its own image, abberate
a few wavelengths into falling out of synch like damp hair licks?
And I’d remember to remember that only horses sweat
and read your aura by the glow of the hot dew on your face.
After the last lifemask comes off, nothing but space.
Nothing but imaginative room to move as if there were nowhere
we needed to go and we didn’t feel bad about it.
We just went off into the ongoing like everything else
that’s looping and coiling its way through time,
a fragility of the air, caterpillars swaying in the wind
at the end of a fishing line tied to the allure of a butterfly.
Don’t be fooled by the vertebrae, everyone’s flying kites
at the end of a long spine when the air revs up.
You can see them tangled in the powerlines of their ancestors.

Sky burials without altars. Road kill. Cheap cremations.
The whole panoply of the tragically absurd.
But here, sister, here volcanoes still strew
islands in their wake and the birds keep arriving with seeds
and coconuts still wash ashore like prophetic skulls
you’re free to believe or not, and the air tastes like emeralds.
Here you could mentor the stars in their myths of origin
as you made them up to honour some quirk in your character
and they began to speak of you as their dark mother.
And nobody need know what you mean when you spoke to me
about those things that encroached on your silence inside.
I know how to listen for dissonant sounds in the night.
I can hear the falling of a single eyelash of light
when the moon goes out, the footfall of a spider on the stairs.
Sister Lunacy, should I take your hand, shall we dance
to the picture-music that overtakes us unawares,
you with your dark tears, and mine so far in arrears?


PATRICK WHITE