AND NOW THE SHALES

And now the shales of the night congregate for revival and great liquid bolts of flowing diamond seek the rivers and lakes the sky inhaled up out of the dreamtime of their mirrors, and angry at the new awakening, photograph God in a line-up, and shatter the fossil record of the life they signed in hieroglyphics, releasing the drums and the orchards and the thunder of scalded serpents striking at the tree that bound them, revoke the curse, destroy the power of the old mandala, kick sand in its face with the ferocious clarity of a truly compassionate buddha, burn and desecrate the ram in its ashes, bleach the blood and igneous bone of all attachments, freaking the assassins in the dark with scars, seams, unstitched threads of light. And this must be made human; even this domain, this dark cleft of furious women, integrated like the black star that burns in the hearts of the poppies into the synaptic squalls of a storm deranged in the form of a terrified human, whirling like an iron-winged weathervane in chaos, all needles north the electric eyelashes of a dangerous freedom from detection, as the rain, the merciful rain, taps its tin fingers on the table, detonates slowly, the prelude of adagios to come, as the flashflood downpour that sweeps the dead boat from its banks belatedly climbs the emotional stairs like a back-up transformer and knuckles the shuddering door. And there’s no help for it but to peer the lightning into flesh, to run your tongue along the razor sword of the warrior iris, and kiss the horned viper on the head, drink from the violent grail of the dark fever that gluts the arteries of the bloodbed with the torrential editions of a man without a stone to smash the window from the inside, and raise the dead. Out of the net, out on the heath, the singed atmosphere wincing with fists and eyes, elemental accusations and the mineral sages, atomic oracles, that answer the indefensible humanity of harsh enlightenments in the random salts of radioactive configurations that cleave the roiling sea of the starless, desert spirit with delirious chariots hounding the prophetic clowns of clamouring paradise. And there are contexts of becoming so severe they fuel the divining furnace with bituminous ores that cower in the heat, pyramids, coffins, mummies, cocoons, the chrysales of the dragonfly’s eyelids, the acetylene hives of the wasp, and all the red oak cordwood of the heart cracked across its ripples with crevices and empty webs of pain, all, without exemption, reprieve, promise or defection heaved into the fire-mouth of a roaring lionstar that staples and holds and tears the throat out of disparity like the hourglass jugular between the crowns and roots of a resigned gazelle, feeling the silence slip out of it into the sand. PATRICK WHITE