I IMAGINE SPACE AND TIME

I IMAGINE SPACE AND TIME

 

I imagine space and time and light

not saturated with a pervasive intelligence

that wanders through the multiverse like a mind

musing upon itself

like a hidden secret that wished to be known

and is

but as wavelengths of thought as they are

toying themselves into matter

almost as the afterlife of a darker issue

that hasn’t quite come to peace with itself yet

that used to go by the name of God

but has recently started to call herself

a Unified Field Theory.

But however you wash

the old simulacra off like soot

on the inside of a lamp

or refurbish the Sistine Chapel Roof

with colours for proof

that things weren’t always this dull

everywhere people continue to look

for symbols and signs memes and similies

as if they were still one of the main themes of evolution

if not the prime mover.

The mind transcends thought

like a bird the sky

or a fish the water it’s swimming in

or a painter her creation

and though you can’t say what it is

because in everything it speaks for itself

and to seek your mind with your mind

is to mount your horse

to look for your horse

is to reach out with one hand

to pull the other up over a precipice

in the hope of saving yourself

like a godsend from a bad fall,

you can sit still and let your mind know you

like something delightfully new about itself

it’s just come upon

like an unknown world

that’s been growing

inauspiciously under its eyelids all this time.

And you can dress it up anyway you like

like a mirror that’s trying to stand on its own

just before it goes out into the world

to see for itself what it’s all about

and you can call it a world view in the making

as the branes break in hyperspace

like a profusion of cosmic bubbles

but you’re just seeing double

through your hydra-headed mind

what it means to dream when you’re blind.

The age of nothing is now

and the place where you find it is here.

The moment you add a past and a future to it

like a head and a tail

the Titanic’s set sail

and you’re making constant course corrections

in your wake

like the path of a glass snake through the night grass.

Things don’t come.

And things don’t pass.

The Japanese plum blossoms in autumn

and its leaves fall in the spring.

The morning doves lose their voices

and the crows start to sing.

When has it ever been

any other way?

The lucky day is when you discover

it’s all one day.

Meaning the eternal specious irreproachable present

of this Bergsonian moment now

where there is no death or birth

and whatever you’re becoming

is the way you change to stay the way you are.

The star looks past its own light

into the vast bipolar night

that includes it in its darkness

like love at first sight.

And God knows her own mind

in everything and everyone one of us

like the moon reflected

in myriad drops of water

like eyes she looks through for a sign

she can see again and again and again

what’s she’s made of herself in her solitude

wasn’t in vain.

The answers call for questions

and the questions explain.

 

PATRICK WHITE