HE KEPT SAYING TO HIMSELF
He kept saying to himself
it’s not that hard to know the truth.
The truth is what you see
when there’s no one else there
to witness you witnessing it.
When your nakedness lets you be you
without worrying too much
about who that is.
He kept saying to himself
the truth is the infinite elaboration
of an archetypal fractal.
Keep it simple and austere.
The truth is a subatomic shapeshifter.
When you look at it it acts like a particle.
Turn away and it’s a wavelength beyond comprehension.
The swords of the cannoneer cattails
banged on him like a shield in passing
as he covered his eyes
to bull his way through the underbrush
heaving his mud-caked legs
over the hurtles of the fallen birches.
What animal ever moved
with as much clamour and damage as this
as it nosed it way along the soft lakeshore at dusk?
He kept saying to himself
since when has the silence
ever needed anyone to speak up on its behalf?
What idiot spreads a starmap out on a table
to show space where it’s located
or tell time what hour it is
though neither of them have asked?
He kept saying to himself
like a swamp that reeks of enlightenment
now watch where you step
as he monkeyed himself up
a jawbone of grey rocks
to a thin pate of yellow grass
that looked as if someone
had bleached their hair too much.
He kept saying to himself
as he lay upon his side on the ground
and watched the wavelets on the lake making jewellery
and spotted the two great blue herons
on the far shore
standing like gatekeepers
among the dishevelled palisade
of dead trees with its stakes all askew
like an abandoned Iroquois village
that was content to forget what it knew of pain in silence;
he kept saying to himself
because his thoughts were as inter-reflective
as sky and water
nothing needs to be here
none of this
not the herons the lake or me
and yet here we are large as life
each facilitating the other’s interdependent origination
whether we like it understand it embrace it or not
everyone’s the matrix of everyone else.
The waters of life have made a waterclock of the womb
and the day we stop being born
is just a short bridge of water away
from the next bucket of being
that pulls us like a rabbit
out of the top hat of a wishing well.
His eyes tweaked by the occasional glimpse
of the silver eyelash of a star
in the blue-green sheen of the peacock air
breaking through the Persian silks of the sky
as the sun goes down with Venus in its wake
he kept saying to himself
it’s all picture-music without meaning
you can hear in your blood
with your eyes
at your fingertips
on the nape of your neck
like the breath of a friend
or the breathless scent of an enemy
who’s finally caught up with you
like loveletters and death threats from the past
that forgot what they were going to say
when they were given a chance to speak.
He kept saying to himself
as he watched the aerial ballet of swallows and bats
swooping down low over the water
through the starclusters of frenzied gnats in ecstasy
over their fifteen minutes of fame in the after light of the sun
bleeding out on the horizon
what could it add to their bliss
if everyone of them were to have a star named after them?
He lingered in the ruthless beauty
of the spontaneous inconsequence of all this
and felt even less employed than they
as a witness who wasn’t called upon
to provide an alibi
for his awareness of the creative liberties
and impersonal risks life takes with itself
like an isolated imagination
with no more motive or purpose
than the wind when it plays
with the waves and the leaves
and taunts the the autumn willows
to drop their veils
like rotten curtains
blowing ghosts out the windows
of an abandoned one room schoolhouse.
Nothing to learn.
Nothing to teach.
Nothing to conceal or reveal.
No paradigms of spontaneity
out of reach of the mind
that grasps at them
like air and light and water
he kept saying to himself
as he felt the darkness
alert his eyes to a deeper vigilance
opportunistically alive in the woods
watching the anomaly of his presence here
from deep within
like a snapping turtle looking up at waterbirds
like a pair of wire-cutters
sticking out of a tool box
at a no trespassing sign in peril
of taking its purple passage too literally
to heed its own warning to drop everything
and take to the air
before it’s pulled down under
like Cygnus into the starmud of the cosmic Id.
Here self-reflection comes to die
like a third eye in a graveyard of mirrors
that can no longer recognize their own seeing
in whatever appears before them
as the unlikely similitude of a sentient being.
He kept telling himself
you can’t raise a phoenix out of a sumac
when its flightfeathers are falling all around you
like Icarus out of the sun
and expect to find your way out of here
by asking a fire pit of ashes and smoke
how far to the next manger
with a star overhead
before it gets too dark to see where you’re going.
He rose to his feet
as if they had somewhere else to go
and followed a deer path up
through a thicket of excruciating hawthorn
that raked his skin like the needles of old record players
screeching across all 78 rpms of the celestial spheres
trying to torture the truth out of him
like petty inquisitors who had all the right answers
to a man who had forfeited his soul
for the courage to ask all the wrong questions
as he kept saying to himself
as if he were standing in front of a mirror
and not by the shore of a lake
if you take the dark glass away from your eye
everything will become clear as night.
If you take the dark glass away from your eye
everything will become clear as night.
He saw the Summer Triangle capsizing in the west
and the Pleiades like a profusion of insights
at the tail end of Perseus
holding the Medusa’s severed head
up to the mobs of enlightened ghouls
gawking in in a bliss of bloodlust
to discover that the light
was no less heartless than the dark
when it comes to blooding its abstractions.
He walked through constellations of spiderwebs
the sun had moved out of
like a jewel out of the house of a dreamcatcher
so far beyond repair
it forgot timing was as important as content
and expired like an out of date calendar
with nothing left to celebrate.
And he kept saying to himself
nothing lasts forever
not even time
and there are holes in the nets
the Circlet of the Western Fish could swim through
like hanged men who fell through a noose
toward paradise
as easily as threading their blood
through the eye of a needle.
No more rites of passage.
No more luminous renewals.
No more transits of nadir and zenith
in chains forged from unlucky horseshoes
or the triumphal wreaths of olive emperors.
The feast of life a mere table of contents
after a long prelude of taboos
that weren’t worth the menus they were written on
once the real dragons were sedated in zoos.
The trespassers not up to their own temptations
and even the great desecrators and idol slayers
indifferent to their salvation through sin
just so many snakes sewn into a bag
and drowned in the river with Rasputin.
And rarer still that atrocity
that can trouble a child’s dreams
who lullabies a voodoo doll to sleep in her arms at night
because today’s passive victim
is tomorrow’s active participant.
He heard the chronic lapping of bare-footed waves
stubbing their toes on the rocks below
when they tried to walk across the lake without a lifeboat
and went down with all hands aboard
and he kept saying to himself
when the wind dies down
only horses and slaves are drowned in the doldrums
and the rest are left to endure their grim continuance
watching their sails wither like waterlilies at anchor
moored to the docks of an empty-handed port
like a return voyage that never left home.
And he kept on saying to himself
be a good explorer and mount
a northwest expedition through death.
Grind your way out of here if you must
like the visionary glacier that once
gouged out the eye-sockets of these lakes
as if they were milling starwheat on stone.
And let the tears you’ve shed
to absolve yourself of yourself
he kept on saying to himself
over the course of a lifetime thaw and gather here
so that the crow the beaver the muskrat
the shrew the mole the bear the deer the bush wolf
the pike the trout and the small-mouthed bass
can drink from their own reflections
as they appear and disappear in your eyes.
And let the Algonquian women beat the wild rice
into their laps and the prows of their birch bark canoes
under a full moon that buffs their stealth with laughter
ride low in the water with the bounty of life.
As he pulled his foot out of the cleft of a root
and regained his balance
by putting all his weight on the other
like a heron when it’s spear fishing on the moon
he kept on saying to himself
you don’t have to go as far as the stars
to discover the origin of everything
when fireflies are a lot closer to home
and their light is infinitely more intimate.
A fish jumps at the stars
as he makes a path of least resistance
through the junipers and basswood trees
and the lake dilates with ripples
like a mind at peace with itself.
Dark energy accelerates his eyes
at the same velocity as the expanding universe
and looking into the starless voids ahead
he keeps saying to himself
one more insight one more insight
one insight more
like Venus in the dawn
and everything will break into light
like gold pouring out of dark ore
like life sprouting out of a dead stump
like a nightbird with a wounded song
falling like a feather of feeling
out of the immensities it encompasses
within its wingspan
as if that alone were enough
to tip the scales of life and death in its favour.
He steps into a clearing like a red-tailed hawk
into the eye of a storm
where some unknown local
had planted a secret garden years ago
that had gone on growing without them
far off the gravel road where the cars
growled by like bears
and no one could see it
and he keeps on saying to himself
if I’m not meant to be here
even in this happenstantial kind of way
for whom did these flowers bloom
and these rocks flint knapped from the Canadian Shield
be gathered here like Stonehenge
so that time could sacrifice its virginity
to the spring equinox
and the last of the wild geese high overhead
returning the souls of the dead
like water to its watershed
and the swallows and Monarch butterflies
who paused here to add their inflections to the palatte
know what hour it is?
A billion pine needles
from as many lost compasses and clocks
softens the ground he walks on
and pungently greens the air
with the fragrance of thick dolorous tears
running down the bark of old love affairs
that never stopped bleeding out.
And there the New England asters
who batted their violet eyelashes
at the stars all summer long
to catch their attention
hags of the last frost that killed them
like the cold shoulder of a disinterested universe.
And he keeps saying to himself
like a mantra under the duff of his heart
it doesn’t matter whose ghost
was meant to be summoned to this stranger’s garden
like the memory of some cherished intimacy
long past the point of no return
slipped under the door
that’s hinged like the earth is to the sun
to our exits and entrances
like a parting note of farewell
as profoundly poignant as autumn in passing;
all that matters is that someone anyone
however lost or overwhelmed by despair
however helpless or alone
however far from the nearest fire
makes their way through the dark
to a moonlit clearing in the woods
just to sit by a secret garden of their own
and watching their breath
like a wraith on the cold night air
answer it like a prayer
that went off into the unknown
like a thread of smoke from a dying candle
without appealing to the stars for anything.
Just to sit there without saying anything
no razor to your wrist
no complaint
no prophet in your belly
no spiritual lost and founds
looking for the lost innocence
of their missing children
no protest
no surrender
no serpent fire
burning up the ladders of your spine
until you’re frantic with the crazy wisdom
of realizing how much you can’t
and you’re looking for water on the moon
to quench your fever for life
no rejections or rendezvous
with fire-sprites or witchy manitous
no reason to be here
no reason you’re not
the silence not expecting a response
and the sound of life on the nightshift
while everyone else sleeps
and only a solitary watchman
to shine the occasional light
through the windows of their dreams
where what is and what appears to be
is reflected on both sides of the same translucency.
No muse to inspire an elegy to an unknown human
as if the earth itself weren’t enough of a headstone
to lay your head down upon
and listen to the deep underground voices of the dead
rooted in a garden that outgrew its sorrows
like the blood of a wild rose
left untempted in the wilderness
transcends its thorns with the beauty of a wound
that only a human exalted
by the spearhead of the same event
that humbles him to death
could suffer and celebrate in the same breath.
No mixed passions of starmud
that slip like Indian paintbrush and chicory
out of the palms of our hands
when the painter falls asleep
and the landscape finishes itself.
Just this small gesture of a shrine
this tiny enclosure of the heart
to some foregone human divinity
that once made it shine
like enamel buttercups
and scarlet columbine
tinkling in the spring rain
like wind chimes above the moss.
The ululations of a delinquent loon
couldn’t make the night feel
any more lonely than it already was
as he kept saying to himself
real not real
life is art.
Art is life.
The reality of delusion is art.
The delusion of reality is life.
There are toys in the wrack
of the worst catastrophes of life
and serial killers in the toy boxes of art.
You make it up like trout lilies and loosestrife
as you flow along with your own mindstream
like a leaf on the theme of your heart
whether you’re falling
into billions of individual degrees of separation
and the strong rope you were trying to climb up to heaven
frays on the edge of the world
into a million weak threads
of monadic drops of lonely water
working out the lyrics to go with the music
like wild irises in a secret garden that’s gone to seed.
Or you’re weeping like a chandelier
whose candles have gone out in a palace of light.
Or you’re the free-spirited genius of rain
the dispirited wizard of a starless night
or the nymph phase of a waterlily on the moon that died young
as the man said of the things
he just couldn’t keep to himself.
The mind is an artist.
Able to paint the worlds.
As someone here once saw something
that inspired them to paint
this prolifically sad human heartscape
like a bouquet of local wildflowers
and when they were done
and their eyes had gone with the light
from their vision of life
where a black sun always shines at midnight
and sets at dawn
left this palette of complementary emotions
like the fire pit of a phoenix
that’s flown south for the winter
with the spirit of the autumn leaves
that leaves us alone in a place like this
to add a few touches of our own.
Less blue in our longing for death.
More moon in the auras of life
and over there where
the ruby-throated hummingbirds
added their highlights like whole notes
to the picture-music of the wild grapevines
a deeper more loving delirium of stars
like the royal jewels of the underworld
inspired by the darkest muses
that ever shone a light
into the depths of the night in the eyes
of this most human of mysteries
burning in the crowns of the disrobed trees.
PATRICK WHITE
