ACOUSTIC SHADOW

Acoustic shadow.

Gravitational eye of a galactic hurricane.

Ship going down

I’m clinging to a plank

in the great nightsea of my awareness

as if the last great threshold of chaos

were the lone oar of a lost lifeboat.

The moon is weeping jellyfish like willows.

There’s more isolation

in one human emotion

than there is in the whole of the universe.

The abyss draws near

blurs the mirror

obliterates all thoughts from my mind

and pushs my feelings

on crutches and wheelchairs

off the Peripeteian cliff

down to the Periclean rocks below

just outside Athens

where they expressed their democratic distaste

for baby girls

and condemned criminals.

My skull shakes with sudden headquakes

like a cosmic egg that fell out of the nest

and smashed on the earth below.

The sun haemmorages a bright yellow

like the dusky blood of embryonic dragons.

I can hear music in the distance

like windchimes made of shattered windows

and my nerves are running their fingernails down a blackboard

that’s scribbling my name over and over and over again

like the writing on the wall

in runes of chalk

and quicksand hieroglyphs

and then rubbing it out

like an afterschool punishment

for saying what I meant

when I said I had nothing to say.

Since when has an empty mouth

been a sin of omission

or silence a confession of guilt?

The void’s got a voice of its own

and can speak to itself

in Etruscan linear A

but everything else in its grasp

is a word that was left as speechless

as the rubbished first draft of a tongue-tied play.

Sometimes I look into the future

send my eyes off into the night

like a crow and a dove

from the stern of my rudderless ark

to see if there’s anywhere to land

and they come back wounded

by the slings and arrows

of what they’ve seen.

Worse than losing your faith

is losing your sense of humour

when you’re a cosmic jester

in the tragic court of King Lear.

You can act as if life were a joke

but the gods aren’t laughing.

And all my best insights

have turned into Higgs-boson God-particles

that bend space with sticky grids

and take on mass like spiders.

And here comes Rilke like a gust of stars

to remind me that sometimes

the heaviness of life

is heavier than the weight of things.

For every angel that jumps from heaven

a demon rises from hell

and then there are those

who fall between the cracks

like cherubs with stone feathers.

I’m a Medusan snake-bird

with the eyes of a dragon

congealed like tears of glass

in a blast furnace

from lightyears of broken mirrors.

One moment I’m enlightened

and the next

it’s hard to know if what I’m looking at

is poetic vision

or the death throes of a violent exorcism.

And even when I’m dispossessed of myself

I still can’t tell

if the road I’m on

is the return of the prodigal son

or just another homeless demon on the street again.

So much pain.

Black mold in the walls.

A radioactive muse

abusing the watershed I drink from

until I glow in the dark

at all hours of the clock

like a nightlight in a morgue

for the dead who like to get up and walk.

Anti-matter universe.

I’m an unsychronized happening

in a discharged particle field.

I jump orbitals

like trains and thresholds

and coldwar wine-bottles

in a game of Russian roulette

with the empties

but all my photonic insights

are scattered like fleas on a hotplate

and even my tears hiss like scalded vipers of acid rain.

Worse than losing faith

in the candlepower of your imagination

like a canary in a coalmine

to enter a blackhole

and come out the other side

into a whole new universe

like the key that makes it true

is losing faith in your eyes to follow you.

But the only religion I’ve ever adhered to

is my next inspiration

and I owe my origin

as much to what hasn’t happened yet

as I do to the morphological past

reading the I Ching

like the Burgess Shales

while referring to Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

Nine in the fifth place.

Dissonant yin.

Blue herons fishing like pens

in the starless eclipse of an inkwell.

Sometimes the light goes insane

and starts stabbing at mad shadows

that sit for their portraits like windowpanes.

Pain without reason.

Without explanation or alibi.

Time without transformation.

The bigger the space

the deeper the isolation.

Insight lost in a labyrinth of cul-de-sacs.

Imperatives without creation.

I break the crescents of the moon like a wishbone.

Soon the starving dogs

will gnaw at it like a fortune-cookie

to get at its mineral marrow.

I wish tomorrow wasn’t already too late

or fate preferred joy to sorrow

but when there’s only

two kinds of people in the world

toys and tools

you’re bound to end up

with a lot of deconstruction sites

like nuclear disasters

in a sandbox

manned by fools and ingenues.

When I used to ask life

what life was all about

the Buddha would always hand me a flower

or point to the morning star

and whenever I needed a heart-transplant

the government didn’t oppose

I’d wake up from a trance in intensive care

grateful to the organ donor

who gave me a new lease on life

with a previously used rose.

Now I sip tragic elixirs

from the breasts

of a morphine-drip

in the poetic snakepit

of a Medusan phase of the moon.

One tit heals.

The other kills.

But you can only know

which is compassion

and which is death

by the way it feels

when it’s way too late for appeals.

My spine is a ribbed skeleton of serpent fire.

A kundalini ghost walks over my grave

without recognizing its old name.

One of the great unspoken skills of a poet

is knowing

how to go down on the Medusa

without turning into stone.

Staring the dragon down like the razorblade

that first slashed its eyes open

like the birth-sac of an enlightened eclipse

without being blown away

like spun glass

by the intensity of the exchange.

You can’t grope around in the dark

like a piece of coal

looking for black holes

like star-nosed moles

in the tunnels of your mudmind

and expect to see like a diamond

on the cutting edge of the void.

Pure acetylene.

Not even so much

as the blue petal of hydrogen

in the immaculate heat of perfect combustion.

Nothing left unconsumed

in the fire-womb

of this creative crematorium.

Effusions of freak particles

and rogue elements

with radioactive halflives

converting to black energy

in a total liberation of the light.

All attachments go as cold as a murder case

some lonely corpse bears witness to

as if she were picking waterbirds

that don’t leave the trace of a clue

out of a line-up in a one-way mirror

that keeps one eye on the way things appear

and disappear like evidence

and the other on an artist’s sketch

of what she must have looked like once

before everybody tried to identify her.

Algol decapitated by a drug cartel

in the constellation Perseus.

Medusa’s severed head

hung from a bridge

as a warning to the snakepit

not to get stoned on your own product

or believe everyone who shows you a shield is a cop.

Some people reach for the top.

Others dive to the bottom

when the seas get rough

and some try to hide

in the corner of their eye

and play I spy with a storm-front.

Let the shore-huggers examine the local rocks

for the dna of sirens.

Let the sly ones tie themselves

like the sails of Luna moths

to the mastheads of their matchstick ships

to hear the candles crying

without the risk of flying to their rescue.

Even when you know how the trick is done

it’s ungracious in a poet

whether he’s listening to a siren a muse a lamia

Andromeda on the rocks

or a cashier in a fastfood mall

to resist the magic of a beautiful woman

as if you were a bandaid

and she were a bloodless wound.

The black widow times love

with the hourglass on her back

as if she were cooking an egg.

After that she’s a cannibal

and if you’re late

at making a getaway

you’re food on the plate

of your own children.

No one ever looks

for the motivation

behind their happiness

but everyone needs

a reason for their sorrows.

Who X-rays their joy

or seeks a second opinion

on the prognosis of their bliss?

But just look at the library of alibis

that have borne false witness

to human suffering.

And the snake-oil salesman

who have shed their skins

like the shirts off their back

to bind them.

But one answer doesn’t fit all

like a unified field theory

doesn’t do much

to cure the weak nuclear force

of a kid with cancer.

And yet there’s more inspiration

in the black muses of the negative

than there is in any number of positive prints

I would imagine in the same proportion

of occult matter in the universe to white.

Of darkness to light.

I’m being keel-hauled on the corals of the moon

in a seabed of shadows

cast by the flowerless light

like Roman salt into my Carthaginian wounds.

I’m the photographic negative of a galactic starmap

that swarms with brighter worlds.

And though there might not be any colour

or iris in my eyes

in the clear light of the void

that can’t be stained by seeing

the primordial atom

that grew up to be arboreal Adam

knows enough about creation

to remember that the world began

from a period at the end

of the previous sentence.

A full stop at the end of the road.

A supermassive blackhole

that warps space

into the nucleus of a galactic cell

to protect the contents

like a flash in the pan

that came out of nowhere

until it could replicate its luck

like white braille in a dark room

playing with loaded dice.

Sometimes it’s fireflies on hot August nights

lingering in the valley

like the leftover cloud of a thunderstorm.

Sometimes it’s snake-eyes in the light sockets of a skull.

Sometimes everything in existence

all events and forms

wake up from being the stuff of dreams

and begin to factualize the acts

of its creative memory

as if everything

everyone in the universe

could suddenly see

in the saddest wavelengths

on the darkest nights

of their longest shadows

what inspired the stars.

Demonically confessed as I am

under the truce

of this white phosphorus halo

of horned snakes and black laurel

I might suggest

to the true few among you

still seeking the truth

without knowing what you’re asking for

to watch your step

on the threshold of an event horizon

that can have prolific effects

throughout the mirroring multiverse

of your cosmic consciousness.

Two dimensional holographic picture-music

of everything I could have been or not

projected on the cave womb wall

opposite the black hole that’s casting them

like the infinite paradigms

of everything I am.

Worlds within worlds

procreating at the slightest touch of the wind

each one the afterlife of the other

like waterclocks that don’t keep time

like a dynasty

with a line of succession

but let their mindstreams flow freely

like the vast nirvanic ethers of hyperspace

breathing on the waters of life

like light mirrored through a blackhole

into infinitely expansive bubbles of inconceivable insight.

The mind puts the whole of itself into every thought

and what feeling was ever denied access

to any part of the heart?

And show me the redacted passages

in the conservation of information principle

that never burns its tats off

never shreds the enigma of its limestone frescoes

in the cave of Les Trois Freres

would rather live half-mad sad and lonely

with what it knows

than please a blind lover

by putting its eyes out

to prove that all it knows and will ever know

is for her eyes only.

The present may be well married to the past

but it longs for the future like a mistress.

And light’s just the dove

that carries messages

back and forth between them

in the first rush of enlightenment

that comes like a loveletter in the mail

addressed to everyone.

From the very first word

to the last

that leaves even the silence speechless

from the alpha and omega

of one flightfeather of a prehistoric alphabet

to the wingtip of another

lifespans across

from the snakepits in the deserted saltmines

of Sodom and Gomorrah

to the unearthly wellsprings

in the sacred grottoes of the stars

afraid you’re going to be upstaged

by your own suicide

or uncharacteristically vigorous

for a woman of your years

written indelibly

like the equals sign

between Einstein’s energy-mass equation

like a peace treaty between chameleons

like Monet’s Japanese footbridge

giving its blessing to the waterlilies

written where everyone can see it

smeared on mirrors in desperate lipstick

like the death lyric of haemmoraging snails

or written with a slow finger

in warm breath on a cold windowpane

like the nickname of a god

that’s late getting home.

Whether you meet God or the Buddha

Jesus working on his dovejoints

Blue Krishna dancing down the road with his Gopi girls

or surrender all the battleflags

of your holy wars

to the dark imageless beauty of Allah

or you’re working hard

on a Theory of Everything

to explain the unlocality of quantum events

like synchronous happenings

in a charged particle field

to explain how the message can get here

before it’s sent

like a future memory

of something that hasn’t been done yet

because reality is a singularity with personality

that takes the shape of the way you see it

like the pixellated skin of a space time continuum

with its tail in its mouth for eternity

stringing theories of picture music

over the supermassive blackhole

at the heart of a guitar-shaped universe

just to be

in this resonant medium

of interdependent awareness

means

you are that

when you’re looking at a starmap

impersonally

but closer to home

where things are more

qualifiably human

from a more intimate point of view

than quantifiably true

there’s no doubt in the world

that doesn’t affirm

by reversing the spin

of the definition

I am you

multiplied by the velocity of thought squared.

A boundless circle

with infinite points of origin

where the tail isn’t at the end

of where the head begins.

PATRICK WHITE