OVERLAPPING BULLSEYES OF THE RAIN
Overlapping bullseyes of the rain
that never misses the mark,
each bullet, each arrow of water
its own target
as if subject and object were none
or seeing the inseparable locus of being
like puddles in the parking lot
and then the gust of a shapeshifter in passing
and every drop turns into a tuning fork
that resonates out of itself like a solar system
or a bird whose wingspan is the duration of every note.
And then someone passes me
like a loveletter they found on the street
under the door of a chameleonic threshold
or a flower down a drain
and I’m alone again
trying to hang on like the last leaf on the tree
to a delusion that has already let go of me
like an address on an aging piece of paper
that’s forgotten its way home.
The mindstream is glutted
with the wrecks of November
and there’s no way across except on the skulls
of these stepping-stone moons
that cling to my emotions
like greasy moss on a moodring
but I’m urgently savage enough
to scalp my own comets
as they venture out of their dark haloes
and exultantly fling their topknots across the sky
like reruns of a warning to an extinct species.
New feathers and fur for old scales, perhaps,
but I’ve always tried
to forget the future before it happens
in order to live now with the assurance of a dangerous dinosaur
and as all the enlightened know
like a jewel opening its eyes
in the back of their brain,
there isn’t any effort to evolution
or floral agenda to the rain
because everything is utterly keyless
when the water guitar strings its own ripples
over the great abyss
and thumbs sad music
for all the missing links along the way,
all the starring parts I never got to play
that undo me like a food chain.
But in a world so elegantly free
even the rain is a mere gesture
of the eye-growing sea I bubbled up from
to explore the terrain like a wheel
until it turned from solid to real
living with purpose
is just a shortcut
to living in vain.
Go ask the rain
falling like tears
from these visions of being
back into its own eyes.
Even the hardest crystal ball
you’ve ever huddled around like north
convinced you could find a passage through like light
will eventually ride its own melting
like an icecube back into the seeing
and you will be the journey
that puts on your body like a shoe
and walks you out to clarify the view
of your own transformative mysteries
until you’re as free and as expansive as the skies
that attach themselves like wings
to the emergent exclamations of the dragonflies
and washing yourself off
like the stain of an indelible eclipse
in billions upon billions of eyes
you will taste the light like honey
in the flower-mouths of all your metamorphoses
and gathering yourself up
like the gods of roots and rivers
who enshrined their passage in everything
as if we were all survivors
of the mysterious gifts of the life-givers,
you will give yourself away to everything alike
without distinction for the demons and the divas,
and the warm compost
of all those undernourished divinities
that distemper your lucidities,
and like a god
among the shining myriads
without anything on your mind
you will bead like light
on the branches of the autumn trees
and falling to the root
like jewels and fruit
you will see what the rain sees.
PATRICK WHITE
