WHEN RAGE BROKE DOWN INTO TEARS

WHEN RAGE BROKE DOWN INTO TEARS

When rage broke down into tears

over the shattered chandeliers of stars

that crashed against your windowpane

before they thawed in the furnace

of a Promethean thief of fire

human enough to burn,

and you cried, yes you did, I was there,

I took the splinter of light out of your eye

with the corner of the sky where Venus

goes down in the west like the crumb

of a radiant dream that wanted to break

loaves and fishes with the masses

only to find you were swimming through glass;

you cried as if all the birds in the world

had died under your windowsill

like the words to the song

you were dancing to at the time.

And you picked them up one by one

and cradled them in your hand

like a midwife with a manger

and stroked their soft bodies with your finger

as if you would give their lives back to them again

by way of apology for being human

in an ice age of rain

that had lost its purpose in life

like the seeds of flowers on the moon.

And that’s when the wind, that’s always

the moment when the wind cools your eyes

like a glassblower dipping crystal blue birds

in the fountains and watersheds of the moon

and strews your path with the flight feathers

of a nightbird that can see beyond a starmap

fireflies shining in the distance.

And you suddenly realize

a thousand and one ways home ahead of you

like a Nazca landing strip

for alien artists blown off course

into the third eye of a spiritual hurricane.

And you can’t help but fly through it

like an open window into your soul

seeking repose and shelter

among the human totems

of more habitable emotions

scratching fish, birds, monkeys, spiders

jaguars, flowers, trees, fallible people out

in the desert plains of coastal Peru.

Zoomorphic geoglyphs of greeting and return

in every conceivable sign of life

as if the whole planet came out

all at the same time to say hello

and welcome back

like a vow they kept for you

until your myth of origin

returned to its fulfilment,

a nightbird singing

in a rootless tree on the moon,

as if love, rage, life, joy,

death, separation and sorrow

were all pilgrims of one voice.

A pageant of medieval notes

bearing the banners of knights

the hoods and habits of monks,

unholy vocables of middle English

on the tip of your tongue

like the wicks

of holy candles at a black mass

where a young girl dances naked

around a pale fire on the moon

as a flower blooms in the flames,

or sparrows on a stave of power lines,

when the music makes its return journey

like Canada geese in the spring

bearing the souls of the underworld back

like the eyes and stars

and new moons of the dead

to the night of the living

making love in the dark.

Pelvis to pelvis,

heart to heart,

crescent to crescent,

two halves of a broken wishbone

conjoined again into one harp,

one cithara, one guitar

in the ashes of a blue moon,

the second harvest of loaves and fishes

at the spring and autumn equinox.

Every year a new zodiac,

the growth rings in a tree.

Something protean about memory.

The dark matrix of the muse.

A wavelength with its tail in its mouth

that doesn’t ricochet off anything else.

Lamentations, bewitchment, rapture,

time in the hold of the abyss

for not mastering your own powers.

You either cast the spell for yourself

or you wind up gilled

in your own sidereal nets,

a firefly in spider webs of dark matter,

and it’s not likely

you’re being hauled into a life boat.

There are realities, there are windows,

some broken, some whole

even the moon won’t dare look through.

And there are rooms in a palace of water

that move like fish on the moon,

and starmaps that are used to start a fire.

Birds that are the sacred syllables of the sky

that nest in chimneys like hash pipes,

every one of them the Rosetta Stone

to a language of your own

only you can learn for yourself

even if you’re the only one

who was ever born to speak it.

Most people sip spit

from other people’s wishing wells

but they’re always two echos shy of an original

and it’s enough if they put a seashell up to their ears

like a hearing aid to listen to the ocean,

a tidal pool dying like a starfish

out of water and sky,

a shore-hugger that’s afraid

to go along with the ebb and neap

of the dream that gives a pulse to the moon,

your own mindstream

returning to its homeless source

to realize that life and death are both redundant.

That whatever passes away, stays.

And that which doesn’t, goes.

And there are places so deeply secret

that everybody thinks they know

what’s happening to them as it unfolds.

But this is just a way of using knowledge

to keep your eyes closed to the world.

Only a fool would build a gate

and live in a guardhouse

of sword swallowers and fire-eaters

to keep the birds out of the garden.

Or a refugee camp for turtles.

True clarity doesn’t know the light

for what it is.

Reality is as blind to its own translucency

as a painted window.

Two blades of stargrass in a hurricane.

But if you were to take them away

like the long and short straws

of something to win or loose

like the luck of the draw

and chew on them like cud

to get to the deeper meaning

you might get a gesture of it,

you might get the flavour of it

like a dry wad of gum

stuck to the bottom

of a school room desk,

but you wouldn’t get the use of it,

for any reason at all

that should or should not concern anyone.

Have you ever noticed

that time might be

an hourglass full to the brim on top

but it always begins at the peak

of an inverted pyramid

stuck like an arrowhead

in a flesh wound of sand that’s bleeding out?

What’s the point of trying

to claw your way up the heap

to the top of the bottom

when even Sisyphus knows

enough about absurdity

to realize the mountain

climbs its own reflection

all the way down like an avalanche

of all those little rocks

you used to roll up a hill

convinced you were getting somewhere.

And it’s true there’s a different universe

in every grain of sand

and every grain of sand is us.

So why go looking

for what’s already been found?

In any universe there’s no up or down.

And everywhere anywhere you are

from the smallest pebble on the beach

to the most radiant star beyond reach

the gates of the lost

are the end of the search.

PATRICK WHITE