AMAZING AS THE STARS IN THE DARKNESS, MY EYES

AMAZING AS THE STARS IN THE DARKNESS, MY EYES

Amazing as the stars in the darkness, my eyes,

though I’ve never seen them directly, only

as a reflection I take at its word they’re blue.

And when I look a little deeper, there’s

no part of me that isn’t eventually invisible.

Everything’s like that, the seer and the seen,

so wholly absorbed in each other,

there’s no sign of either of them, just the seeing,

the heart and its feeling, the mind and its thought,

the flower and the eye, crocus, turk’s cap, tiger lily, lilac

all one spontaneous happening without distinction,

one infinitely collaborative creative event flashing

out of the dark resources of the plenum-void

to give it a name for the sake of rendering experience

communicable through a delirium of form.

If you’ve ever walked by a mirror and the mirror’s disappeared,

mercury into mercury, water into water, fire into fire,

a mother into her child, an unsuccessful lover into his longing,

that’s something like it. You’re everything

and in that everything you’re nothing, you’re selfless

to the point of not even knowing what that means anymore

except it’s of no significance whatsoever. There’s just

this star flashing out of a night it’s surrounded by,

just these dark hills where the dead buried themselves

as they did their children, as they had lived, secretly

under the leaves that covered their gravestones,

lichens, moss, growing hundreds of wild columbine

on a modest rock of ages with the sensibilities of a butterfly.

If you stand by a gate that doesn’t latch by itself anymore,

and the garden’s been left to its own inner resources,

because no one lives there any longer, as, perhaps, even you once did,

o in a dream, how long ago was that? And watch the moon rise,

as if the healer and the wound were remembering

an old love affair that’s gone well beyond the inseparable

because there never was a time, a prelude to seeing,

they were ever apart. You’ll understand passing

as a perpetually new approach to things, you’ll see birth in why

the flowers fall, and death, in why they rise again.

The simultaneity of the life and death of all things.

How present you are in the midst of your longing.

How clear in the absence of everything you’re missing.

I’ve spent much of my life preparing gardens for planting.

Shaking out roots, rocking fields. Wondering

whose house of life the bones I dig up once belonged to,

cornerstones and rafters in arrears

to the temples they once upheld to themselves.

And come nightfall, my work finished for the day,

I’ve paused and looked to see if I could identify

through the trees, the whole of a constellation

from a single star. As if gazing in wonder at it

in the mutual solitude and hugeness

of the unknown immmensities that surround us both,

and bind us to a weary body and a still heart

leaning on a shovel in a garden, as if the silence

could look up or down, either way, were made sacred

by the poignancy of a momentary insight

that penetrated both our hearts as if time and space

were mere bubbles of awareness in a dream.

And in a differentiated union of not-two,

I saw myself shining through the eyes of a star

as it laboured over what flowers it intended to grow.

Without a thought or a feeling I could call my own

I was a desert of stars without a mirage

to keep up appearances. I was a single point of light

with infinite distances in it, and even the word, one,

had gaps in it I learned to jump like a star.

And I saw with the certainty of water, that

when one was a wave, the other was an ocean

and separation was simply the blindfold we put on

at midnight in front of an imaginary firing squad,

as if our whole life depended upon it, to watch

the stars shoot flowers at the sun like blanks

I seeded the garden with like constellations

breaking ground through the tree tops like Vega in Lyra.

Astro-flowers. The Pleiades approaching

the larkspur like bees. Honey in a new hive.

Light years of perceptions in a garden of starmud

encompassing strangers only an insight away from home.

It’s an immensely intimate universe. Go out.

Get down on your knees in the soil. Plant flowers.

And when you go in look at your hands, at the stars

shining under your fingernails as a sign

of some honest cosmic work well done.

PATRICK WHITE