AND I LOVE IT OUT HERE

AND I LOVE IT OUT HERE

And I love it out here this far into my solitude

where the stars are as high and holy and out of reach

as they always were

and everything that is finished irrelevant or gone to waste

discovers a secret peace in its exile and desolation

that doesn’t distinguish one light in the night from another

and there isn’t a road you can take that was meant for someone else.

Even when the wind blows the leaves around

like things I should have said to myself years ago

like things I should have known

that don’t come with a Buddha or a book

heavy with bells and the blissful fruit of wiser autumns

everything takes its place

in the spaciousness of an infinite center

the dislocated cannot exit

and even those who have found themselves

to be nothing real

cannot enter.

It’s as if all things were wounded so deeply and expansively

by the wary act of their existence

the dagger of circumstance and chance

can’t find a place to strike

and so there’s nothing to heal

nothing to fear

nothing to watch out for

that could hurt you any worse

than everything already is.

The wind on the water that trembles like skin

and the scales and feathers of the tangerine moonrise

shedding its wings on the serpentine mindstream

that flows off into the distance like a dragon

someone forgot to believe in

because they thought they grew up.

And time doesn’t ask itself what night it is

or the fish the depth of the water

and the flightplan of the hunting hawk

if it has one

is merely what catches its eye.

Parsifal the mottled fool

leaves home with the grail in his saddlebag

and it makes no difference to the kingdom

whether he finds it or not.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first

and then the grass eats the grazer who ate the grass.

There’s nothing to change

that hasn’t already been brought to pass

by the leftover leaves in the birch trees

that abandon their bones like old shamans

down by the banks of the river in spring

for the fish and the birds to pick clean.

The silence is moss on the skull of a rock

sprouting elegant chandeliers of columbine

that hang their heads like streetlights

over a long road with no one in sight.

So what could it possibly mean to be a stranger

among your own feelings and thoughts

when there are no gates you can stand outside of

and the enlightened beginning of the waterlily

as five petals open

and one flower blooms advaitistically

is rooted like a deep insight into a mirror that rots?

Is the coming any less endless than the going?

Or an ignorant life any less life than knowing

you can’t know what you’re seeking

until it finds you like someone it overlooked?

The empty herons’ nests high

in the dead trees of the swamp

are full of moonlight

and everywhere I walk

frogs punctuate the sloppy grammar of the water

that unspools like one long periodic sentence that’s never complete

as if the world hasn’t finished saying me yet

like something it means.

My delusions rise like waterbirds from a moonlit lake

to go witching for water among the stars

and I let them knowing they’re

the indirections by which we find directions out.

First you go down a lot of rivers

and then you take the road.

There’s a scaffolding of dark matter

we wore on the outside like an exoskeleton

and dark energies

that exhausted themselves like slaves

so we could walk erect in our watchtowers of flesh

like the ego of a candle with a spine for a wick.

Black bones buried somewhere

that once were us.

Churches that wandered off the beaten path like gravestones.

Dark sanctities of a dead lawgiver

that entrusted the truth to a liar

as if the night had a sense of humour.

And everything is as it is without discrimination

in the eyes of the light that falls upon us

as if we didn’t exist

though as far back as I can remember

my spirit has always cast its shadow upon the earth

like Venus on a moonless night

and my body laboured

like a prophet with a whale in his belly

to spread the word.

And subtlety of subtleties

wonder of wonders

my mind got a good look at what it isn’t

and spontaneously learned

to be playfully creative

with the absurdity of being here

whispering into my own ear

like a wind that talks to flowers

descended from the stars

about how far we all are from home.

PATRICK WHITE