SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, LYRICAL, TENDERLY HEART-FELT

Something beautiful, lyrical, tenderly heart-felt

like a child reaching out of its innocence

to test a bruise that used to hurt

but now has mellowed into a wild flower

with just a touch of local colour.

Wild irises among the breathless willows

along the shores of the Tay River

adjusting the catfish to its flow

like underwater weathervanes

and it’s summer on earth

and the sun ripens like a tomato

on the inside of your eyelids

and the hum of the dragonflies

buzzing your ear like a flight control tower

lulls you into a narcosis of physical well-being

when even an hour of being so at peace with life

as it is, was, appears, ought to be or not,

the distinctions are as unreal

as water consulting a nautical chart,

and even time stops judging things by its first impressions.

Something easy, inclusive, and true as it needs to be

without going to any special efforts.

Just to lie back in the fresh summer grass

and wish you were a white horse

with a black star under your forelock

that could graze upon the young blades

that smell so much like cool green peas

and stare into the endless cerulean blue of a sky

with an eye for antique clouds

the burgundy-tipped brushes of the birches

are scumbling a little alizarin crimson into

just to warm things up a bit.

I want to see wet mammals

gleaming with water and light

sliding down a mud bank back into the river

otters, muskrats, beavers,

and forget all about evolution

like any other corporate utility

that can wait to be paid.

The turkey-vultures and the red-tailed hawk

circling high overhead without disturbing

a feather on their wings

when they’re riding their thermals for the sheer joy of it,

like kids sliding down a bannister

that find the most fun in what

there’s the least purpose in

and even less reason to question.

I want to look upon life

as if its only secret agenda

is as it always has been

hidden out in the open

for everyone’s eyes only.

I want to let my mind

sprawl and cluster as it will

like the waterlilies in lieu of stars

giving illustrious astronomy lessons

inside the dark planetarium

of the abandoned beaver hut

on the far shore

that’s just as big a mystery

as the disappearance of the Mayans.

For the moment I don’t

want to go anywhere a maple tree

wouldn’t grow of its own accord

whether it made it through

the first few winters or not.

Listen to the leaves on the aspens

lapping like the small waves

of an incoming tide of shadows

as the afternoon slowly withdraws its assent

like a hand from the hand of a sleeping lover

to reveal your sacred absence when she wakes up

like the best gift you had to give her

though she’d never dream

of asking for so much.

Powder-blue eyeshadow on the damselflies.

My spiritual dakini dancing voluptuously

making Hindi hand gestures of light

that flash off the backs of black watersnakes

that roll with the waves

like a melody to music

your whole body hears

like serpent-fire roaring through a chimney

to clear its throat of birds.

Enlightenment might be akin

to galloping on a horse through a busy market

without bumping into anyone.

There are enough fools who doubt it

to convince you there must be some truth to it,

but here where the red-winged blackbird

sings from the dead branch

as often as the green bough,

the deathless insight is effortless

and ignorance and enlightenment

are just the front and back doors of bliss

in this house of life that takes a worm

and turns it into a Monarch butterfly

or takes a landscape

and turns it into a state of mind,

a dynamic equilibrium among opposites

that stand before each other

like a man before a mirror

without one asking the other

which of them is real.

Not as I am but as it is

is true of everything in creation

from the atoms in a lost osprey feather

on up to the superclustering of black holes

like voodoo dolls in the hearts of the starfish

who gather in covens to sacrifice their light

to the darkness, making a ritual

of the natural order of events

emerging from the chaos of a random universe

like a school of fish

or the flight of birds

or even the improbable concourse of these words

when they all swerve the same way.

Reeds in the river.

The hair of the willows.

A human who seeks peace in a low place

down by the water

and lets his thoughts go along

with the flow of things

like the main theme of a waterclock

with a heart and a bloodstream

discrete enough to ignore me for a while

as I drift like an empty lifeboat down the Tay River

like one of my unmoored poems

whenever I am whatever it is

standing in the shadows of the answer

that’s been liberated from the slavery

of responding to the question that belabours it.

We are consummate nothingness.

The metaphoric vapours of a drug we inhale

like the fragrance of white sweet clover,

distillations and elixirs of the moon

we drink from our own skulls,

semaphoric fireflies waiting for the stars

to answer back, shapeshifters

bending space to the shape

of our momentary cosmic minds

to have everything fall into place prophetically

like wild grapevines into bottles of dated wine.

Go ask the water if a reflection

standing on its own two feet

like a mirage of stars in the desert cold

of the upper atmosphere

waiting for someone at a wishing well

is any less real than one that’s lying down

to look up at the passing clouds

until it disappears like a mirror

that doesn’t inhibit them

into whatever they’re the image of

in a fraction of sunlight

on the wing of a blue heron

startled into flight by something

on the far side of the river.

Mesmerized by the mystic specificity

of the extraordinarily ordinary,

one dandelion in a wild raspberry patch

overwhelming it like a tsunami,

the fate that must have befallen

the one-legged gull

I gave bread to here last summer

favouring him above all

to humanize the radical impersonality

of the randomly accidental

that did this to a bird

without purpose, will, or meaning,

I sit here among these,

my senses attuned

to the vagaries of consciousness

as they’re beaten off like crows

by nesting sparrows

or keep a journal like a leaf

that set out young to explore the river

like a water god that went looking for water

and found it when he came upon

what remained of himself and cried

when things went oceanic

as if it had happened to someone else.

Something beautiful, lyrical, tenderly heart-felt.

Two ruby-throated hummingbirds

hovering over a bouquet of daylilies

like single quotes.

PATRICK WHITE