THEY’RE TRYING TO MAKE ROSARIES OF MY MOLECULES
They’re trying to make rosaries of my molecules
but the way I see it
Jesus was nailed to a cross
and then the cross was nailed to Jesus.
Morality is the degeneration of wisdom
and wisdom shows up like a streetsign
that confirms you’ve lost your way.
But I don’t want to be lined up
all in one direction
like magnetons and weathervanes
or Canada geese making waves in the wake of airplanes.
I don’t need a Jerusalem a Vatican a Kaaba or a magnetic north
to tell me the direction of prayer
because I’m not asking for anything more
than here and now
and that’s more than enough
of an afterlife for me
and I’ve already got that
because there’s no birth or death in the moment
and as for the rest
if there’s anything more to feel with
I’ll get through it as I always do
creatively.
I’m already drinking
from the ginger fountain of Salsabil
in jana with houris
whose lips are roses
and skin is pearl
who never seem to bore me.
And in seventh heaven among angelic swans
idling in the stillness on the rivers of joy
like Cygnus in a summer sky
streaming down the Milky Way
or the Road of Ghosts if you’re Ojibway
or Rhea’s milk down her breast
in a cave in Crete if you’re Greek
I’m already floating like an origami paper boat poem
I made from an apple blossom
full of moonlight
down the mindstream
of my own dream
of where I might be going.
And though I’ve been known
to climb mountains like a B.C. salmon
summoned from the depths of the sea
to procreate in the siren pools
and inspired wellsprings of the muses
that soma sema kill me into life like a seed
over and over again
through many lives
I’m not the kind of paddlewheel that abuses the flowing
by entrusting my fate to a lifeboat
when I already know how to swim
through my own medium
by letting things come
and letting things go.
Or if you like
more deciduously
I harvest my life like a windfall
that will keep me dead drunk
through the long winter before me
in a goosedown bed
with a woman who’s got my head
on her shoulders
like the Atlas Mountains
that no one’s ever conquered.
The way I see it
we’re all irridescent supersensible soapbubbles
everyone a unique universe in hyperspace
smeared in a covenant of rainbows
floating above the birth muck
of our own starmud
with a lethal vulnerability
so I drift well clear of the thorns and horns
of those who want to gore me into damnation
or the humbler modes of mythic deflation
that come like science and salvation to my door.
I adore the radiant lightness of being
in this parachute of skin
I’ve worn thin as a flying carpet
jumping from higher and higher heights
toward a paradise
that looks like the earth from the air.
And if I have any say in the matter
I’ll free-fall this way forever
as I have for certain women
who were forged
like swords on the moon
for a noble death
in the name of a mystic passion
that will romanticize my ruin
into a myth of origin.
I’ll sit on the banks of the Ruknabad with Hafiz
that flows through Shiraz in medieval Persia
and discuss the roses and moles and ghazals
on the cheeks of all the slavegirls
who didn’t take our hands
for all the gold in India
or the new capitol
of the Mongols in Samarkand.
I’ll wait with the Buddha
under the Bodhi Tree
for Venus to get up
like the morning angel of light
who’s just lain with Lucifer
as she once did with Mars
and before him Vulcan
the bitch
like absolute perfect enlightenment
with a smile on her face
that disarms space
like real water in an oasis
deep in a Martian landscape
without a trace of delusion.
Or I’ll just live my everyday confusion
while I’m alive to know it
as that element of unpredictability
that ignores the standard model of the universe
and ascends to chaos spontaneously
like mist off the mirror I’m walking on.
And it’s not hard to imagine
madness as a kind of religion
that gives asylum to the lightning
from packs of hunting weathervanes
with their noses to the wind
when you see what the sane ones are doing.
The strong rope that binds
has been unwoven
into a million weak threads
just as Muhammad said it would
and the moon undoes at night
what she wove by day
and no one among the righteous hypocrites
knows who the faithful are among the heretics.
When the shepherds of the black camel
build tall buildings in the desert.
When a tree shall be planted in Israel
in which no birds sing.
When men dress like women
and women dress like men
and sex degenerates into impotent promiscuity
and then the day of the red-haired one-eyed liar A Dajal
who will sway many with his miracles
for a thousand years
and then the day when his day is done
and then a day
when the last man on earth will be Chinese
and he will grovel in the dust at his sister’s feet
and consummatum est. It’s done.
Histrionic stage directions
for our dramatic exit from existence.
For all the talk of peace
things always end
like a bad party in religion
but how easy it is to imagine one
where prophecies aren’t always
the fossils of things to come
and heaven isn’t a kingdom
and babies aren’t cursed at birth
and a garden doesn’t grow treacherous apples
and the jihads and the crusades
the genocides and pogroms
the Darfurs the Auschwitzs,
the Sabra and Shatilas
the Sawettos and ghettos and gulags
the Bosnias and Gazas and Warsaws of the world
aren’t nails driven through
the heartwood of compassion
to save the chainsaw from the tree.
Only slavers think that freedom isn’t free.
I don’t want to cut out God’s tongue
and call it a creed.
I don’t want to smear
my own shit on the mirror
and claim I’ve corrected perfection
with my anal infallibility.
I don’t want to molest the minds of children
with a Republican spin on creation.
I’m pro-life when it comes to imagination.
I don’t want to vote on the way things began.
And if you’re looking for a unified field theory
or a God-particle in a hadron collider
or the unimprovised explosive device
behind the Big Bang
circling like a drone
to see what terrorist group
is going to claim credit for it
I’ll show you one
that’s not a religion.
I call it a human.
And it explains everything.
PATRICK WHITE
