NO ENTRANCE TO THE MIND

NO ENTRANCE TO THE MIND

No entrance to the mind.

No entrance to space.

What needs to open

when you’re the gateless gate?

Don’t think of yourself as a thing.

Don’t attribute form to the formless.

Don’t assume there’s a little person

the size of your thumb

mired in your brainmud

like an understudy of you

that you can consult like a script

when you forget your lines.

Reality isn’t impersonating you.

There may be a play going on

but there’s no actor

and everything is making itself up

as it goes along,

spontaneously improvising itself

out of circumstances and events.

But you’re not the play, the player,

or the expletive audience.

Not the theatre of the abyss

in which all this occurs

nor the confluent weaving of themes

into a recognizable resolution.

And there’s nothing wrong

with making constellations out of fireflies

and following them

as if they were reliable guides.

Anyone of them will lead you home

as long as you realize you’ve never left

and every step of the way

is the long road of a narrow threshold

that can’t be crossed.

Right now, you’re like a mirage,

supple palms and undulant water

trying to get down to its roots,

trying to discover the truth of yourself

in broken pots and noseless statuettes,

and the skulls of those whose thirst for life

believed in you until they discovered

that you were rooted in the air.

Have you ever considered

what you owe to the desert

that sustains the illusion?

And when you get right down to it

why pretend you’re the child

of clarity and confusion

when you know in your depthless depths

that no one’s there

to be confused or clarified?

You don’t need to sweep

dead stars off

your stairs and windowsills,

or mirages from the desert,

illusions and truths from your mind,

the northern lights from the sky,

or stand under a tree

collecting bird feathers

to learn how to fly

when you’re already the freedom

they fly through.

And in or out of the egg,

it’s the same, vast, tranformative view

and when you remember to realize

that no one’s there to see it,

that what’s left

is not what’s left of you,

that you have no origin or end

there’s nothing to wound,

nothing to mend.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU CAN'T ORPHAN THE WIND

YOU CAN’T ORPHAN THE WIND

anymore than you can abandon space

or pry the universe out of the universe like an eye

from a skull or a ring

to save it from seeing itself

as it runs everywhere away in all directions

fleeing what’s centred in you.

You’re not the residue,

the lees of the Big Bang

trying to scry your fate

out of your own detritus,

chemical compliance

with a spiked alliance

in an area of local cooling.

Whether you think

you’re getting a little too much ahead of yourself

or falling far behind,

you’re still the Primordial Atom

before and after time

flashing out of the void

and returning to yourself

like a thief coming and going

through your own window.

And there isn’t a now

that yesterday and tomorrow

could ever track down like today

that isn’t eternal,

that isn’t an undefineable field

where there is no birth or death

or labour of stars on the nightshift

pouring you out like metal from a stone

that isn’t as intimate as oxygen

with every breath you take

to construe the world before you.

What have you seen or been or smelt or felt and thought

that wasn’t your own mind?

And if you were no one

before you were you

how can there be two,

let alone one?

What could outside and inside

mean or be

except the distance

between a wave and the sea?

How could any sword, word, world that arises

slay the water or wound the sky

when you’re the deep, dark watershed mother

of the original fountain

pouring yourself into your own mouth like the moon?

You parse your wholeness

into the things of the world

to define yourself

to the imperial rhetoric of a chatty brain

in a language of forms

who can’t know who you are

until you know with or without a doubt

what you are not.

You’re all of these things.

You’re none of these things.

Listen. The moon’s wearing earrings

that play like rain on the wind

and everywhere she catches the trees’ attention

like water longing to spill

into the empty seas she sails alone.

And her deserts are not the urns of the stars.

PATRICK WHITE