WALKING ON STARS
Walking on stars,
walking on skulls,
walking on myself, water,
giddy suspension bridges
swaying over windy river gorges
playing chicken with my heart
to see if it’s just another mini-blackhole
or a real abyss,
one foot where I’m coming from,
the other, where I’m going
it’s all the same road
my feet make with their walking.
I don’t know what impels me to keep going,
but it walks me where I will
over the quicksand and tarpits,
the improvised explosive devices,
the lunar blossoms of the tree on the moon
that keeps sprouting out of the stumps
of my clear-cut emotions.
Inside and out, I may be space
but even space sometimes get sick of its own distances
and longs for homier stars,
lamps in the window
to draw it out of the vastness
of the huge night of its crucible,
its chrysalis, its galactic cocoon,
like a moth or a dragonfly
or a man with nothing but time in his eye
to cast himself like a spell or story
into the flames of a deeper intimacy
with the voiceless fire
that listens to everything
as if the saying and the not said
were two flames of the same pyre.
You need the wisdom
of a Solomonic serpent or a river,
the intuition of a witching wand,
to know how to split your tongue oxymoronically
between the living and the dead
to speak of the unsayable
as the moon raises its sword
above your head
to cut the cord
and unbind the word
from the lesser magic of your grammar
floating like an empty boat on an infinite sea
as if that were all there were to say.
For years I’ve winnowed the stars
to sort the thistles out of the grain
like dead metaphors among the simulacra
but ultimately, likeness, like a mirror
can find no likeness in anything
though everything elaborates
its mystic affinity with everything else
because we’re all born of the same darkness,
of what was not said
on the first day of creation
when the word was already
the past tense of the beginning
and God said, Be. And nothing happened.
There’s nothing in a state of being
that can be misconstrued as an event
though we like to think of ourselves
as the children of a happy, ongoing accident
the multiverse isn’t expanding
into the hyperspace of its own extremes
or entropically cooling to the idea of a private cremation.
A compassionate pragmatist with a mystic bent
light-years of elation from home
that keeps saying hello and good-bye
on the same threshold
like the needle of a compass
pointing both ways,
with a heart that is rarely more
than a full moon away from forever,
I’m riding the tide of my own resurgency
like a wave of illumination
thriving with eyes
across the deep seabeds of my skull
toward an emptiness that is always full
of the same reverberating echo
returning like geese in the spring,
a sail to a bay,
a loveletter that went missing for years
like the prodigal word of a bloodstream
to the voice on a hill above the valley
that keeps calling out my name
without expecting an answer.
PATRICK WHITE
