IT’S STRANGER TO CONCEIVE OF ME
It’s stranger to conceive of me as I
am
than to imagine that I’m someone
else.
There’s more largesse in the early
spring air.
You can tell by the tears that well up
in their eyes
the glacial stars are beginning to thaw
splinter by splinter
withdrawing their claws from the corpse
of the snow
like thorns from the Lion’s paw
overhead.
I can hear water in the creek tuning up
for the dance to come as soon as
the first violins of the crocuses get
here,
the trout lily, the purple passage of
the wild violet
under a leaf it took like a page from
the book of autumn,
trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel,
grape hyacinth.
I like it here because it doesn’t
matter who I am.
Things are alert and vivid with life
because
they’re not threatened by the
possession of it.
And time is a lot more honest
here where it lets its hair down
than it is back in town
where it’s always now, now, now,
and the streetlights, blinded by their
own blazing
turn their backs on the stars
like the distant fires of native
peoples
who preferred to dance to see
where they were going at night
than watch their step
like the next best real estate deal.
Even without intention, every time
I try to shape space with my mouth
and say this is who I am, this is me
whatever similitude I use I always feel
I’m exhuming a dead metaphor
from the coffin of a word
that’s been taken out of the context
of the world
and put on display in a dream museum.
It’s as if I can relate the history
of smoke
but not the flame that lived it.
As if one of these half-submerged
skulls of rock
that have been trying
to pave their way across the creek
for as long as I’ve been crossing
here
were to try and understand the
mindstream
that’s been ploughing around them for
lightyears,
not realizing what they’re rooted in
like cornerstones,
are islands on the moon, mere shadows
of water,
mirages on the tongue of those who have
never tasted it like their own blood
to know whether it was hot or cold,
blue or red, sweet or sour, real or
not.
The earth can sleep a little longer yet
under this tapestry of snow while
the dreamweaver at the loom of the moon
is unravelling the threads of a
thousand loose night creeks
the sea will gather up again into an
oceanic consciousness
of the flying carpet of wavelengths and
life themes
we’re riding on well out of reach of
ourselves
like waterlilies in winter when it’s
coldest,
and snowflakes on a furnace when it’s
hot.
It’s as fun to say it as it is to
play with hula hoops.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial
equator
at the equinoctial colure and it’s
spring
in the northern hemisphere. Canada
geese
thread their way like rosaries of snake
skulls
through the stars in the eyes of
northern lakes
peeping through the cataracts of ice
and clouds
breaking up like mirrors that can only
hold this pose of starmud for so long
before it’s time to change studios
again
to keep up with the light
that’s trying to capture your
likeness
like the whole of the sky on the skin
of a drop of the water of life
that reflects like a mirror
but sees through appearances
into the deeper darkness
like a gravitational lens of pure
insight,
the lamp in the hand of the light that
leads it
like a blind lighthouse to the perilous
reefs
of morning on the moon among the
corals.
Was I born to wonder what, who I am
or not, as is more highly probable?
Is the persistence of the question, the
way
it makes you suddenly look up
from a seemingly unrelated matter
at the moon in the black walnut trees
or a bird in passing that commands your
attention
without in the least meaning to
until everything but it feels like the
intrusion.
Is the question on the agenda of the
answer
or does it have a life of its own,
a journey that doesn’t end in a key?
I look at all these twisted forms of
life,
not cast out, but abandoned, these
deadly gray limbs of swamp wood
silking their legs in the moonlight,
these mauled pines that look more like
weather
than evergreens, the sparse, despirited
crimson
of the ground willow paintbrushes
that have lost their handles in the
snow
waiting like a newly primed canvas
for the first rose petal of blood
to fall from Virgo as a sign of
consummation.
Things, forms, things of the world,
things of the bodymind that shapes them
out of starmud, out of the outer
receptacles
of the five senses on each hand,
that conceives of a bee like a
hollyhock
calling it into being like the
fragrance
of something that was said, but wasn’t
meant to be heard by anyone else.
Animate and inanimate alike
a grammar of things, ritual magic
and we’re the diction,
we’re the verbs and nouns of the
spell
that keeps us creating the world in
tongues
so even as strangers we end up speaking
the same language as stones and stars
and birds.
Maybe the question is just an answer
that’s travelled back in time from
the future
to ask the prophetic skulls of its own
ancestors
if any of them had foreseen what was to
come?
Or the question is all and the answer
is negligible?
Or left speechless, you achieve wisdom?
Or left unanswered, you awaken
your own creative freedom
like a world you didn’t know
you had it in you to make any way you
want
in case this one doesn’t fit, you
don’t have to bear it.
Absurd as it seems to seed your dreams
and expect to harvest them when you
wake up,
and yet I’ve seen it happening all
around me
every day of my life, objects, symbols,
stars,
insights casting shadows of themselves
into the darkness as far as the light
they’ve been given to go by,
sowing the available dimensions of the
future
with a world that isn’t so much said
into being,
but arrayed lucidly before us
like eyes full of mystery that don’t
reveal a thing.
I sit on this rock and I watch the
night creek
until I can’t tell which one of us is
flowing
and it occurs to me that maybe the
question itself
is the crucial essential of my
existential dilemma
and the answer’s only the temporary
afterlife
of who I’m becoming now. Not as I
appear;
not as the psychic life of a
heart-broken mirror,
not as the mirage of a snowblind seer
who approachs the desert on my
threshold with a broom
as if I were trying to keep house in an
hourglass.
I don’t sweep the stars off my
stairs.
I don’t follow a trail of breadcrumbs
in the corners of the eyes of last
night’s dream
as if someone had been here before me.
I don’t pass myself off like
counterfeit leaves in the spring.
Honesty isn’t a fact. And clarity
isn’t a starmap.
And love’s only another religious con
if it isn’t wholly unconditional and
inclusive.
I’m not looking for asylum in the
abyss
like some petty alternative to living
this
without knowing what this is or I am
or at least trying to get my ignorance
as close as humanly possible to it as I
can
whether it’s aware of me, these
stars, this
broken thatch of wild rice, wheat, and
cattails, or not.
Then I will celebrate the creativity of
its absence
with reverence and compassion for all
that it’s left in its wake like a
sleepwalker
shaping this mindscape like a
retreating glacier.
All that abide here with me tonight
like the gateless gate of an open mind
wondering if there’s anything left to
catch up to
that embodies the dignity of the
beginning
in the dead of winter, as apparently it
does in the spring.
Or if we’re all words in a language
we’re just learning to speak on our
own
that can point to anything, say
anything
except themselves to themselves
whenever the question comes up
about whether they mean anything at all
when they’re not leaning on the world
to exist
as we all do, trying to make sense of
it
in this dumb-founded dialogue of
wonder.
PATRICK WHITE
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