IN THE DEEP END OF THE NADA POOL

IN THE DEEP END OF THE NADA POOL

 

In the deep end of the nada pool

everyone drowns in their own eyes.

The summer triangle goes down in the west

and there’s a first snow on the last day of November.

How many dirty windows

must the light pass through

before it can see clearly?

And what’s the point of asking

the mirror and the mask

that suffuses creation with intelligence

if all it ever does is reflect you

on all sides of the question

as if you were all rivers

in a single drop of water at once

looking for the sea?

I uphold the integrity of my mystic specificity

like the Higgs boson particle

that gives everything its mass

but I can only imagine myself as far as I am

and it’s as impossible for me to fly out of myself

as it is to measure the wingspan of water.

You can’t pour the universe out of the universe

like a snake out of its skin again and again like the moon

and move on forever with your tail in your mouth

as if you were trying to catch up to yourself

by swallowing your head.

I have hung on.

I have given up.

And I have let go.

But even enlightenment

is the aspiration of a firefly

to illuminate the darkness like a lightning bolt.

And when you burn like a black hole beyond the light

for a deeper insight into your life

and why you’re walking around on the earth

doing what you are

because you were born to enquire

there is no star to guide the lost mountain down

these dangerous goatpaths

into the valley you heard call your name.

And what’s to seek

when everything speaks to you

in your own voice?

And is it better to flow along with things as you do in a dream 

like autumn leaves on the nightstream

that writes all the books

that you read like lifelines on the palm of your hand

to understand not just how the story ends

but why it began in the first place.

In the beginning was the word,

and God said, kun fia kun. Be. And it was.

And the rest is the afterlife of the Big Bang

that came of the foreplay

of branes kissing in hyperspace

to give the inconceivable a human face.

But let the fools of light

keeping rubbing the new lamps

of their impersonal cosmologies as they will

hoping some geni will appear like smoke in a mirror

like the affable familiar that gulled Faustus with intelligence

in the form of Mephistopheles.

Ah, Faustus, why this is hell.

Nor are we out of it.

And the world is full of sound magicians

yearning to be demi-gods

who have forgotten

blazing too is a kind of blindness.

But nur wa nur, light upon light,

when you turn the darkness around

there is more seeing in anyone’s eyes

than there are stars without bound above you.

How can you ever get anywhere you haven’t been before

if you keep knocking on your own door

to let yourself out with the cat?

And have you ever in all these years

of living on the precipice

of your fear of falling

ever stepped out into

the open inner spaces of yourself

without a parachute or straitjacket?

Have you ever walked on stars

or suddenly felt yourself feathered with fire

in that urn full of ashes

that bears your heart in a skull

like a geriatric embryo

that’s given up hope

and madly ecstatic at taking flight

pour yourself out on the wind

like the phoenix of a loveletter that’s long overdue?

 

PATRICK WHITE