MY HEART SAID YES TO EVERYTHING MY MIND DENIED

MY HEART SAID YES TO EVERYTHING MY MIND DENIED

My heart said yes to everything my mind denied.

Certain women, poetry, doorways, cosmic risks,

a few back country roads that knew enough not

to ask me where I was going that late at night.

My absurd familiarity with sacred clowns

and this ghost dance of stars I see in their eyes

whenever one of them makes me cry in remembrance

of some old rag of laughter that ran before the bulls

like a rodeo clown in a whiskey barrel of fermented sorrows.

I said yes to exile. I said yes to my homelessness.

I said yes to the reflection of the kid

in the broken window of the burning orphanage

he’d just pecked his way out of like the shell of a phoenix.

I said yes to the abyss, to nothing, to emptiness

to the purr of the tides of sand in a desert

combing out the manes of lion-fire

that bloom like spiritual ferocities on the wind.

And I said yes to the rocks on the mountainside

who repeated what my secret teachers had said.

If you’re still clinging to one placard of your freedom

you still haven’t truly let go. And I said yes

and jumped like a snake at cruising altitude

without a parachute into a sudden enlargement of everything

and said yes to the dragon of that transformation

as it took to the wing like a fire in a furnace.

Yes to the altars when it was time to sacrifice the hero

to the unattainable he surrendered in the name of.

Yes to the dark niches of love

when the candles have gone blind

so much like eye-sockets in a skull beside a wishing well.

Yes was a way of sharing what no

had a tendency of hoarding for a day that never came.

Yes is doing it for everyone. No

does it for no one and can’t even make it on its own.

There’s something fundamentally revolutionary

and heretical about yes that burns in cleaner fire

than the dirty holy water no washes its hands in

to rid itself of the matter once and for all.

No takes account of every injury like a mandarin

standing off in the shadows of a rain dance of willows

to see who prefers the moonrise to the lightning.

Yes hasn’t even figured out it’s wounded yet.

Yes is the sacred syllable that all others words aspire to.

Yes opens more eyes than there are stars to look at.

More flowers and doors and hearts to the mystery

than there are keys in the spirit’s lost and found

outside the gateless gates to paradise on earth

where no throws its crutches down as things

of no use anymore, and yes, the seed

that everything shape shifts out of

plants them all over the barren mountain side

like rootless trees with a path and a voice of their own

such that every time the lightning strikes another one down,

they say yes, and drop another pine cone

on the fire that will give birth to them

like an encyclopedic fortune-cookie

whose cup runneth over with assent.

And, yes, even as the night approaches me

like an animal it no longer has to be wary of,

as the shadows of the trees lengthen into rivers

that disappear into the oceanic deltas of the night

like the leafless boughs of the trees of life

slendering into the sky like smoke from a sacred fire.

And, yes, to the crazy wisdom of this life I’m dreaming

I’m living on behalf of someone else

wholly inconceivable to me, not shallow, not deep,

neither near nor far. Not the intimate familiar

of fireflies, nor yet a perfect stranger to the stars.

PATRICK WHITE