SLOWLY OVER THE YEARS

SLOWLY OVER THE YEARS

Slowly over the years

like a queen cobra that didn’t like

the music she was dancing to,

the right song but the wrong flute,

life has made a big impression on me

by showing me what it can do

to the magnanimous equanimity

of all those who went looking for the Buddha

to explain what they’d just done to themselves

in the late sixties by straightening out their wavelengths

like the curls in their long bucolated hair,

or the creases under the eyes in the mirror

that weren’t there yesterday

or the day before whenever I last cried.

I used to tattoo starmaps like blackholes

on the bad moon rising of my skull

like the eye sockets on one roll of the dice.

I put an emergency exit sign over one ear

and over the other. Enter here.

Like the back and front covers of a hardbound book.

Emotional butterflies caught in the passions of a forest-fire

like broadsheets in a revolution,

spiritual gazelles like slim first volumes of poetry

martyred in the eternal flames

of the solar corona with the mystical sun dog

they mistook for their third eye

before it evaporated into thin air

like the last two drops of bloodshed on the savannah.

It rained vipers. It rained manna.

Authority struck my crystal skull

with an iron billy club

it carried around like an organ transplant

in case of urgent insurgencies

and where you can see all these little frayed threads

of the deltas and rivers and roads I’ve been down

like a pilgrim asking everyone I met along the way

whose holy war this was and had they seen

a dreamcatcher fractured by nervous, white lightning

walking in its sleep on the moon somewhere

uprooting the wildflowers of the stars in her eyes

to replant them like corneas in the gardens of the blind.

Right here. Where that shard of a star is missing

like the capitol of an unknown country

is where I broke out of the cosmic egg

and made a getaway like an arrow

in the opposite direction of the divine.

Not every journey ends in a shrine.

Right here is where I stepped out of the night woods

like starlight through my eyelashes

into the clearing of a vast inconceivably open space

as if I had just woken up and were rubbing

the crumbs of a dream like fireflies,

like stray asteroids with chips on their shoulders

looking to pick a fight with the planet

I was living on at the time,

and nuggets of fool’s gold

out of the corners of my iron pyrite eyes.

And I had a vision that crept up on me

like the shadow of the watcher in a dream

who’s always keeping an eye upon you

from the trees on the far side of the mindstream

And I’ll always remember this.

The orchids of bliss

were blooming in the shadow of an outhouse.

And I understood how love

that thrives on longing and emptiness

could die of starvation as soon as it was full.

And why enlightenment, the moon, love, and poetry

that come so blithely of their own accord

are so attached to letting go of everything

they ever set out to seek like someone

they were blind to who could see

but could not speak.

PATRICK WHITE