YOU MIGHT KNOW THE OBVIOUS ELEMENTS

YOU MIGHT KNOW THE OBVIOUS ELEMENTS

 

You might know the obvious elements

but you don’t know the jewels of dark matter,

the lightless fireflies

buried in the starless nights

that have laboured to make a constellation of you.

You’ve never listened deeply to your own hidden myths

the wind tells around a forbidden fire

and though there are worlds gathered like candles

like eyes of slow dew on the tongues of the leaves

like roads that have never been walked at your feet

waiting for the first word from you to begin

you sit at the broken window of your imagination

like a footnote to creation

and say nothing.

And all along the coasts of unnamed continents

waiting to rise again out of your sunless depths

there are blind lighthouses waiting to see things

through your eyes

and lamps without wicks

that have run down to the shore

to salvage you like the sunken moonboat

that shatters its light

on the hard shales of your night tides

like a mirror that was never christened

by looking into your eyes.

You have the answers to many things

and you’re a good window who tells the truth

but when’s the last time

you ever stood speechless

before your own mystery

and outgrew your heart like a fountain

into all these many rivers of light and blood and water

that flow out of you like the homeless roots of the wandering sea?

And which among all these many threads and ribbons of life,

unspooled and spooling like eyes in the nightstreams of our seeing,

in the vastness of this shoreless mindscape

of time and space and dark matter

where even the mirrors are waves

that will eventually discover

they were always the God particle they were looking for

is flowing the wrong way

when the flowing itself is our destination?

What, where, why and how

are the elemental memes of a man

who takes the measure of the world in hand

to understand how far he is from knowing

his place at the table

but who is older than hydrogen

and mother of more beginnings

than there are shadows cast

by the light of the first word

into this dark-hearted world of radiant things

that are strung like the skulls of prayer beads on a rosary of planets

by an unsevered thread of light

that leads everyone out of the labyrinth of the moon

like the spinal cord of a waterclock in the womb.

There are those whose eyes are drops of water

and those whose eyes are seas,

but both are elixirs of clarity

in the immeasurable depths of the seeing

in which all things take their being

like fish that glow in the darkness by their own light.

The true whole and simple history

of all that has come of that first summons into the unknown

to let there be

is the creative mystery

that answers the echoless valley back

with the indirect imperative of I am

that stands everywhere enraptured

in a matrix of wonder

at the birth of God whose eyes

are the particulate forms and indelible colours

that run like chameleons in the infinite mirrors of time

looking back at you

like worlds within worlds without end.

But if you need to know where you’re going

and one star isn’t enough to show you the way

and you want to see as much in the dark

as you do in the light

put love in your eyes

like the sun at midnight

or a lamp in a broken window and look.

 

PATRICK WHITE