MAD OR ENLIGHTENED

MAD OR ENLIGHTENED

Mad or enlightened the same, the universe

is an embryo of darkness born in upon itself, everywhere

its own womb breaking into the pulse of stars within stars,

and everywhere, the shining before the light, the dark mirror

showing the light its own face for the first time,

how in an eventually that is always now

it would attain flowers and eyes along the way

and become the skin of the rain as it falls to earth in April.

If I change to fire, these letters burn, blow away as ash

on the tongue of the wind; if water, then the stars put themselves out

in their own weeping like candles drowning in tears.

Every step of the journey around ourselves

is another world, another garden to plant the seed-names

we’ve shaken from autumns in other realms

and carried around like sacred jewels

we forgot in the corners of our pockets and hearts. Believe it;

when I am all stars; you are all the listening darkness

I pour myself into like a drunkard into a bottomless glass

and you raise me to your lips and drink yourself up

until you’re blinded into clarity

by all the open cages of the light.

Why lie in your own coffin, night after starless night,

if you’re not empowered by your long obedience?

Better to open your eyes on the other side

of your horizontal door, better to come knocking from the outside,

deluded vertically, than suffer this poverty of blood within

the hushed precincts of your skyless realm,

the skull-bone basilicas of your private Vaticans and law libraries.

When it wakes up in the morning

there’s no book-dust in the eyes of the light.

Before you now, in your endless beginning, the dream

you thought you had rubbed from your eyes, you

waking up like a key inside the heart of the dream.

There’s nothing you can’t unlock, even

gardens on the moon or the ancient futures of past lives

death only pruned back with shears to bloom again

in the efflorescence of your eyes, early dawns in the new arraying.

Who you are flows into who you are, all one river of seeing,

dizzy and composed in its own running, all

your own eddies and currents, swamps and white-water,

auroral maids of the mist when you fall in separate drops,

weeping’s just a waterfall, and frenzied tides of being

when you crash ashore out of your own wholeness into buddhas and bums.

In the fire, everyone’s crazy with passion and intelligence,

everyone’s smashed on the wine of an unknown guest

trying to be remembered by his friends.

What visions abound in the orchards of the blessing,

What hearts are torn out and thrown upon the fire

like planets called home by the longing of the sun? We are the white shadows

of the someone else who is walking up ahead

like the moon on the path of its own reflection.

Catch up to yourself and drown in the luminosity of your own being.

Who needs a map to the road they’re walking

or sages pointing all along the way, grey as barnboard signs,

or luminaries at night

pointing to the darkness. The pivot of the worlds points to itself.

True north is not a direction. Haven’t you guessed by now; the stars

all circle you like stormbirds drawn to a lighthouse on the coast of heaven,

too in love with your light to heed your warning about

the deep dragon grief that opens the mouth of the wound

that killed it into life, a one-edged sword of light

in the hands of a holy assassin darker than the silence

of the sun at midnight. If you listen with your eyes,

you can hear in that mournful emptiness

God calling out to God, lover and beloved,

through the echoless valley, across the waveless sea,

yours the name on the prow of the ship that breaks through the veils of the storm,

and yours the name of the storm. You are the bird

that answers the green bough; the lightning in the rigging.

You are the sigh of the silence

and the mystic pen in the hand of the saying.

Whatever worlds you dress for, fields and flowers,

or stars and hourglass elsewhere zones, you are the body of being,

and yours the gowns and robes of creation you draw from the abyss

like clothes from a private closet, dignified in your scriptures,

intimate in your jewels. And everywhere you coyly let yourself fall

like earrings of rain, scarves of fire, fragrances of light,

and watch to see who of the many lovers that are you

bends down like the sky to pick them up at your feet

and return them to you like the first crescent of the moon

rising like an eyelid out of sleep

to greet itself reflected in your face.

PATRICK WHITE