I'M NOT LOOKING FOR SOMETHING HOLY

I’M NOT LOOKING FOR SOMETHING HOLY

 

I’m not looking for something holy in my indifference

that could pass for an absent angel.

And I don’t imagine a heaven that’s waiting for me

because of anything I’ve done or didn’t do.

I don’t draw inferences out of the shadows

of the white hyacinth’s

mantled tower of blossoming nuns

and I’m as tolerant as the new bees

trying to break in the pulse of the sun

flower by flower

like an unknown power

that seeks them out like gold-dust in a river

that flows from a secret watershed

obsessed with fountains.

I’m fireflies in the valley.

I’m stars in the mountains.

And whether I’m at peace with my existence or not

or I’m just the eye of a passing storm the sky forgot

like a last look over the shoulders of the hills

with selective memories

my brain cells are jammed 

like cradles of warm milk and honey

that know nothing of paradise in the womb

or the original home we kill each other over

like poppies on an ancestral tomb

that makes death holier than life.

I sit here like a bench

that hasn’t been upended

in the temples of the money-changers

who fear that every stranger they meet

is another mad messiah

about to knock them off their feet

for selling doves like sacrificial meat

to a god that doesn’t eat.

And I watch the hearses being washed

in the parking lot across the way

like the funeral horses of yesterday

being plumed like waves

to draw another deathcart

like a labour of love to our graves.

And it occurs to me

that the great sea of awareness

may well be an orchard with angels for sails

perched like birds on the powerlines

of our musical event horizons

worn out like old thresholds of the tide

with our comings and goings

and the arcane originality of thought

is already a dead species among the Burgess Shales

that evolution quotes from profusely

like a double-feature of what’s to come

but even this oceanic vision of life

the angels haven’t learned to sail well yet

is still just one blossom among many others

that lay their swords down on the water like the moon

surrendering for everyone.

I watch the worlds within worlds within me

pass through spaces

where they’re as true everywhere

as birds are here.

And I’m alive in everyone of them somehow

as if they were all aspects of a single mind

that lives me as it lives the flower and the rock

as it lives everyone and everything

like a star that only appears where it isn’t.

Life is like that.

Knowledge is like that.

The whole of sentient existence is like that

from the carbon-hearted sun down

to the silicon-brained grain of sand

that wears the moon like a pearl through its tongue.

Created in the image of ineffable life

means there’s nothing within or without

whether you’re full of doubt

trying to break yourself open like a koan

or dreaming you’re awake

that isn’t you’re own simulacrum.

But it’s not like a mirror

reflecting the likeness of everything

that comes before it like a dumb show

or a shadowy pantomime.

The mirror looks through your eyes creatively

and divines a simile for itself

in everything it sees

as if existence were mysteriously human

in the way it imagines a world that isn’t.

 

PATRICK WHITE