NO WHERE TO GO

NO WHERE TO GO

 

No where to go.

Nothing to do.

No one to be.

I’m not lost

so I’m not looking for me

anywhere.

Gentle commotion of wind

in the leaves of the black walnut trees

and a riot of shadows and light

that uses my eyes

to play music

I can hear from far away.

One moment I am the medium

of a new world to come

and the next

I’m older than a starless night

and time lies fallow in my heart

and I take a bemused delight

in the vast emptiness

that makes the sublime slight

and everything that’s ordinary

the mystically specific form

of an enlightened insight.

I am the unminding of things.

Well-versed in my own presence

who needs to know

there’s nothing to compare yourself to

that isn’t already you?

How many universes does it take

to fill the black hole

in the heart of a single human?

All those worlds

and still no end of space.

I dreamed I was a god

until I woke up one morning

and took a look in the mirror

and had a good laugh at my own face

and sat down on the earth

like a man

who was tired of standing up

like a cornerstone

on the trap doors

of lost ground

just to prove

he’s indefensibly human.

From here I can see

unknown constellations

from the first time

before we began to write

creation myths

on the blind side of our tombs

blooming like stars

along a road of ghosts

that doesn’t lead anywhere

it hasn’t already been.

Jebb’s Creek is clogged with waterlilies.

The Milky Way streams

through Cygnus and the Lyre.

The logic of metaphor

is the logic of grammar

and grammar

is the logic of magic

and magic is the logic of dream

and dream is what you wake up to

to forget what you’ve seen

by trying to make it all mean something

you can never know for sure.

What a wild oxymoronic conundrum!

Theseus in the labyrinth with the lunar bull.

Better to let things express you

the way the water says flowers

on the bright side

or space says stars to the nightsky.

Even a black sail

can give you pause to wonder

and what can you possibly say when a white one

shows up on your event horizon

like Venus in the eye of a peacock at dusk?

Stop trying to use words

like the dead branches

of witching wands

to find things you haven’t lost.

Can’t you see

how the green bough reaches out

and opens its leaves like hands

and it rains?

Let the watershed

you’re walking on

make you up spontaneously

as it goes along

like fish in the flowing

like waterlilies along the shore

like birds in the lyrical air

like the empty mangers of the herons’ nests

impaled like crowns of thorn

on the enraptured crucifixes

that stand like the broken bones 

of dead trees in the killing fields of the marsh.

You’ve got a voice.

It’s like a guitar in the corner.

It’s got no choice.

When the music kicks in

and picks it up like a bird that can sing

and gives it wings to escape the barnyard

by turning a chicken into Icarus

even for one brief moment in the sun

before it comes undone

in the intense immensity of it all

it isn’t anyone’s decision to make

what you can’t help singing

for your own sake.

The highest and the lowest notes

feather the snake

like a mystic oxymoron of mutually engendered opposites

and the blue-eyed blond-haired plumed serpent prophecies

the calendars may run out of time

but not the moon

that extinguishes itself in its dark beginning

by dying in its own womb like the Aztecs

to pre-empt their approaching doom.

The serpent takes its head in its mouth for eternity

and the coincidence of the contradictories

is a dragon of snake-fire

that grows

as it flows along the spine

from the base of your coccyx

up through the top of your skull and out

like an earthly desire for the divine

that leaves no doubt

your mind is an unfinished loveletter

that God forgot to sign.

Fire dances on the water

and the water turns to wine.

Whose wedding is this

that blooms like bliss on the vine?

And there’s a corpse on a funeral pyre

down by the river.

But it isn’t mine.

 

PATRICK WHITE