CLOUD-BUFFED SUNLIGHT ON THE SNOW

CLOUD-BUFFED SUNLIGHT ON THE SNOW

 

Cloud-buffed sunlight on the snow.

Violet shadows streaming from the trunks of the trees.

The air edgy as a knife that’s trying to clear things up.

A crow caws like a nasty guru

that I’m up to my knees in myself

and mocks the slow lonely path I’ve taken

to find my own way through the snow.

I seemed to have become a bigger mystery to myself

the more I grow

but I’m not asking anything

that life can’t answer

or that I couldn’t possibly understand.

If God wants to reveal herself by lifting her veils she will

and there’s no doubt I’ll be attracted by her eyes

looking through me as if I wasn’t there.

Or the moon will come down to the river

to be baptized like a descending dove

in her own rites

and discover there’s no water anywhere that isn’t ice.

But right now looking for God

is like trying to find the right context

for the absurdity of everything I know of life.

Ergo.

The knife.

My fang.

My Damascene crescent of the moon

folded more ways than an origami loveletter 

just in case I change my mind

and want to gut myself like a deer

or an honourable suicide

that couldn’t find a face to lose.

I make my way uphill against the throngs

of snow-winged cedars  

that feather me in down

as if I had already died

and were trying to learn to fly like them.

But the snow doesn’t make angels of everything

and every star that shines above Bethlehem

isn’t the sign of a messiah

on a home-made Christmas card.

What’s soft is soft.

What’s hard is hard.

My hands burn on the cold rocks

like the stigmatic skin of a demon.

For every crucifixion that is witnessed

there are inacessible billions

that are completely missed.

Blood at the base of the grail

of the blue-green juniper

some fox chased a field mouse to

testifies to the truth of this

like a hot poppy in the snow

or the virgin religion of the rose.

But I’m not trying to make sealing wax

of the bloodlust of heaven

out of banished candles.

I’m just trying to make it up to that old oak

rooted on that high hilltop

like a Druid overlooking a beavermarsh

waiting for a lightning strike

like a blasting cap in a backwoods dam

to get things flowing again.

There are two small gravestones

with the names of two children

who died when they were sixteen months and seven

of scarlet fever in the eighteen-nineties

and were buried up there

under the younger boughs of that oak

because their parents liked the view

and the only safe place to be

if you’re looking for answers

that make peace with the mystery

of why we evaporate like ghosts

from the mirrors that once silvered our lives

with light love and breath

is out in the open

where your death is as far behind you

as your birth is up ahead.

I want to sit with that monstrous tree

and the bones of two children

well into nightfall

like four expressive gestures of life

and wait for the winter stars to rise

like music to the mother-tongue

of the common voice we all share

like the silence of Orion returning over the treetops.

I want to sit with them in a space

that’s never known a window

until it doesn’t matter

the tree doesn’t know it’s a Druid

or the children that they’re dead.

I don’t want to show up like everything they’re missing

or scare them with the incomprehensibility

of this last dream on my deathbed

that keeps recurring like an afterlife

that’s given up waiting for me to live it.

I want to sit down with them in such a way

that if they feel me there at all

it’s as a slight intensification of the darkness

that made the stars seem brighter for a little while.

Inching my way through the prehistoric skeletons of the sumac

by the time I get up there

I don’t want to be angry.

I don’t want to be full of sorrow and despair.

I don’t want to be a featherless phoenix that’s lost its fire.

I don’t want November for a soul.

I don’t want to be carrying this heavy heart around

like the urn-mouth of a crematorium

that keeps receiving the bodies of my dead friends and lovers

as if they were the ashes of the words on my tongue

they once answered to like names. 

I don’t want to remember how most of the people I grew up with

died young

trying to get away from life

believing there was always somewhere else to run.

I’m tired of talking to death as if only death knew what I was talking about.

I’m sick of feeling like an inferiority complex

that will never live up to the expectations of my vanity.

I’m weary of my excruciating humanity.

I’m done with dying for things that other people won’t.

My murderous indignation at the lack of justice in the world

has grown as cold as the dulled senses of a serial killer

who’s lost the Hammurabic thrill

of a life for a life.

I’m bored with the holy wars I’ve fought

for the equality of joy

with the sadness of an assassin

attending his own funeral.

Once I could see in the dark

but now I’m as snowblind

as the crazy wisdom

of a mad Buddha

lamplighting in the deer park for Venus

under a Bodhi tree at dawn.

She knows I’m not attached.

But there’s nothing between us.

And the rest is best left to the void.

I break through the frost on the snow

like a gun-butt through a windowpane

but no one’s hiding inside

except the usual refugees of winter in the world

as the sun goes down

disappointed in itself behind the hills.

I don’t mistake the pebble that’s bruising my heel

for the road I’m on

nor this emptiness of heart without an echo

for the voice I’m not listening to

because it’s always got more to say about things

than I do.

And words are just the negative space.

The dark part that shades in

the imageless silence

of what can’t be seen or heard.

The universe is its own container.

It makes a body

and embraces it

and everything in the whole wide wondering world

is just the shadow cast

by the clarity of that dark radiance

that burns what it illuminates

as if space had eyes

and time had seeing

and life had a mind of its own.

Be that as it may

I don’t say

I’m just a human being

as if that were some kind of an excuse.

Most people are two percent themselves

and ninety-eight percent

what other people wanted them to be.

Though it’s never a good imitation.

And if that’s true of teacher and student alike

then who are we trying to mime?

It’s like the subtlety in the auroral veils of Isis.

The moment you reach out to lift them.

They turn to iron.

Only fools sit at the feet of teacherless knowledge

thinking there’s something to master.

Knowing there’s nothing to learn

is enlightenment.

You know what it’s like

to wake up like Adam in the garden of Eden alone

with an incomprehensible sense of emptiness

and nothing but your imagination on. 

Almost there.

Almost to the top.

Nothing between me and the stars

but this vast intimacy

that can’t be measured in lightyears

or concealed by the dark.

Even from here

I can see for miles

two seasons of stars going down

and coming up

and feel my lungs begin

to give up breathing air

and start to breathe time

and feel their light glowing in my blood

like random fireflies

that are trying to make a constellation out of me from the inside out.

And there’s Jupiter presiding like the paterfamilias of planets

over Alcyone and her sisters in the Pleiades

as deep in the valley the shadows run into

with the same abandon as rivers

I can hear the savage clarity

in the scream of something being killed

to sustain life

without sentimentalizing the mystery

with the personal history of my solitude.

In an expanding universe

accelerated by dark energy

anywhere you try to get a grip on things

you’re cast out immediately

by the true nature of creation.

Only someone without a direction

moving off into oblivion

like this old tree

these two dead children

me

like the light of these stars

is in a position to give one.

When one mile to the east

is one mile to the west

and far enough up

is deep enough down

and the hill you climb up to see the stars better

is not the same one you will climb down

even if you follow your own footsteps

in this matter of finding your way around

like a compass looking for true north

as if it were the sole purpose in life

then show me any path

that anyone follows

even those who are most certain of where they’re going

and how to get there

that wasn’t first made

by someone who was lost or cast out

with the light always behind them

like a star darkyears ahead of itself.

The moon’s a plough behind the cow in the starmud of your spirit

labouring in the same fields of body and mind

as do these dead children left by the pioneers.

It’s irrelevant to the dead

how many hours months or years they lived.

In this moment that lasts forever there is no birth or death.

The old man of the moment is the child of now

and the old woman who is the midwife of time

manages to give birth to herself somehow

without knowing which came first

yesterday or tomorrow.

You climb a hill to say hi to some old friends.

You sit down in the snow

under a magnificent tree

that doesn’t know when to call it quits

and you brush the stars off two tiny gravestones

like the hair out of the eyes of a baby brother

by his older sister.

You sit and you look out at Perseus and the Pleiades

Aldebaran in Taurus

and chromatically angry Sirius on the horizon

snapping at the heels of Orion

like a ferocious chandelier of fangs

in the mouth of a showboat hunting dog.

It seems rude to ask if there’s a god

in the face of your own intelligence

or what purpose

beyond just being here

keeps driving an evolving universe

to the edge of extinction

with every breath you take and let out

to mingle with the stars.

No more than snow does when it turns to water

have I ever really lost my grip on life

and though I don’t know what it is

I’m actually holding onto

out of fear

by the neck like a two-headed snake

out of love

like the gesture of a flower

out of pure spite

like revenge on the assholes of earth

or the hope that if I sit here long enough

one night all by itself

the eleven mysteries will make themselves

as small and naked and clear as the stars

and I will feel them as intimately

as these snowflakes

landing like kisses on my eyelids

and melting like the cold lips of two dead children

who haven’t cried for years.

Their sorrows.

My tears.

I have a mad talent for hanging on

but I’m a genius

when it comes to letting go.

That’s what comes from having lived for so long in the snow

I’ve learned to melt ice in its own fire

when there’s nothing else to burn

just to keep some feeling in my heart warm enough

to make it through another night.

And I sit here

with this tree these children these valleys and hills

and the incredible silence of the light-footed woods 

until the whole of my being disappears into everything

and all my emotions are the transitory shadows

of Canada geese crossing the moon.

My way of touching the world

through my eyes

when I realize

like a Druid struck by lightning

like two children come back to life

to know the shining again

like me when I’m blinded by the pain

of a wound that isn’t healing

under these glacial scars

that my seeing is the stars.

The way they see me

is the way I see them

and it’s the same with everything.

And even when death comes

it comes not knowing what it is

except for two dead kids

an aging tree

all these stars 

and me

to give it an identity

that corresponds to a thought moment

in the intimate starfields

of this incomprehensible volume of space

that wears time on its face like the silence of a deathmask.

Like any one of these random mystically-specific snowflakes

no two alike

like the lives of humans

or the living intelligence of inanimate things

that write their names in water and gravestones

in the unsayable hearts of aging poets

that bear the loss of everyone else’s children

as if they were their own

and there was nothing that could be said

to atone for suffering in the world

for the infinite sadness and solitude

of being alone here together with everything

for the stillborn pain

of not knowing who it is

we’re giving birth to

or what we’re dying for

as all these umbilicords

we’ve been following like rivers uphill for years

start to make their way back to the sea

with a taste of life in their tears.

Like the one in the all

of a growing universe.

Like a muse of fire

in a womb of ice.

Like the Milky Way

the Via Galactica

pouring its voice

into the siren-song of the Lyre

descending in the west

that might delight in leading my breath astray

like a flying carpet of thought

above a snowbound desert of moonlit mirages

but always wins

the whole of the heart of a wounded human

like life itself

when she takes me

with the beauty of the pain

I recognize as my own in her voice

for her abandoned lover

like a night

she whispers secretly

like light into her own ear

so that I can hear with my eyes

what she’s left unsaid

like the quickening silence of the dead

on this amazing starwalk

down a Road of Ghosts

that can’t be lived twice.

 

PATRICK WHITE