SEEDS OF FIRE IN A NIGHTSKY

SEEDS OF FIRE IN A NIGHTSKY

Seeds of fire in a nightsky root like flowers

in the ashes of my eyes I scattered on the wind

like the dust of stars I followed even into oblivion

to remain faithful to the life of the light

whatever transformations within me grew

into the starless darkness of the unknown heart

I’ve carried in my chest for years like the empty shrine

of a dead lantern to the last firefly to go out.

And this is a seeing without the eyes of the stranger

I no longer recognize as who I thought I was

when I could read the constellations like the Linear B

of the lost civilization that was elaborated out of me

to perish in the mountainous silence of what was abandoned

when I burned my starmaps and entered chaos

like the blackhole of the singularity

that could rejuvenate me out of nothing like a grail

I was seeking at the bottom of the deepest grave

I ever descended into, a spider at the end of its silk,

or a caterpillar like the distant rumour of a butterfly

on a tranformational pilgrimage to an unknown shrine

that crawled with it all the way back to the beginning

of the radical innocence of an radiant world,

before time overran it with arrivals and departures

as if it never meant anything in the first place

to aspire to the light in the hope of a deeper intimacy with life.

And in this darkness, there is no letting go,

or hanging on to what cannot be grasped by understanding

until you realize that understanding only ever finds itself

and the vastness of what’s expanding before it

into the unknown, is not a journey with a destination

or a threshold that can be crossed into illumination

like a voice meditating in the silence of its mother-tongue.

I was looking for the light by the light

I was given to go by when the wind blew it out

like a candle I no longer needed

to make my way deeper into this homeless darkness

that does not cast a shadow of time on enlightened extinction.

How can you divine what isn’t missing within yourself?

The seeker dies by the side of the road

like a cry for help in the dangerous distance

pleading to be rescued by its own echo, and it comes

but not in a language of its own, not

as the event of anything that could have been anticipated,

not as something you can bring back with you

like the taste of water to the lips of a delirious mirage

to prove there’s a reality beyond delusion

where everyone drinks from the same well

the muses of wisdom summon them to without a mouth.

As unsentimental as an overnight frost on the garden,

the larkspur rimed by billions of cold stars,

as if my seeing condensed out of the air

and every insight were a sign of farewell to the mystery

that urged me to risk everything like a tribute

to the divinity of nothing that had seized upon my heart

like a sacred clown faithful to the folly of experience.

Like the footprints of space and time that stretched behind him

for lightyears like the forced smile and phony tear

of the painted lifemask that convinced him he was not dead

to the ordeals of the journey he was leading nowhere

but to where he was every moment of the way

trusting in the crazy wisdom of the laughter

that regaled him every step of the way

like the cornerstone of the absurdity

that kept looking for new hills of prophetic skulls

to roll over like dice in a bone-box.

To wander like a rogue planet on an aberrant wavelength

of dark matter that doesn’t express itself like moonlight

talking to itself like the open-mouthed seed syllables

of the waterlilies at night on the Fall river

writing love poems back to the stars that inspired them.

You want to overhear what the universe

is whispering to itself like a madman in his sleep

in the unbreachable silence of a fathomless dream

of random atoms engendering the forms of awareness

like a grammar of chaos out of its own unattainability

trying to make some sense of what it’s saying,

an asylum of paradigms that undermines it own existence

in the arraying of a conditioned universe?

You have to learn to learn to hear it in a language

no one has ever spoken before you, as if

you’d never heard your own voice before

from somewhere deep within you saying

let it be as the stars broke into light

like the distant echo of an unknown wonder

that perceives the source of its own extinction

in the birth of everything, in the slightest conception

of the inconceivable rooting in its own ashes on the wind.

We all listen to the eloquence of things we don’t understand

like a secret we’re forbidden to tell anyone,

that keeps giving us away death after death,

birth after birth to our imperceptible selves.

Imagination seeds the mind of our uninhibited potential

to flower into worlds where the fruit comes before the blossom

as the harvest precedes the seed, or the darkness

wakes the nightbird up to its longing for love and light

and all our deaths are already achieved behind us

long before anyone was born to suffer them.

And yet we suffer them like a truce with the absurdity of the act

that establishes peace like a third-eye

in the middle of a hurricane that gives meaning

to the dark abundance of our extinction gathering into light

by sacrificing our emptiness like gods to our own creations

over and over and over again, as we surrender to ourselves

like candles returning themselves like fire

to the the light that inspired them

like water to the river it was taken from.

The distance of the journey of life is a wingspan

that cannot be estimated in shadows.

And though you master all the meanings in the world

and learn to love their subtleties like the taste

of mystic wine, or enlightened tea,

you’re still the guest that’s never met its host face to face

because everything you say is always behind you

like the light of a star whose immediate life

is always ahead of it hidden in the darkness like a jewel

that has yet to know the light of a direct encounter.

If you want to see deeply into the shining

you have to grow your own eyes to accommodate

the perennial insight into the restive vision at hand.

And you must learn to live without knowing

what it is you’ve come to understand

about the ashes of the dragons in the afterlives of the stars.

Don’t let the scars intimidate the innocence of your wounds

as if you could never be hurt again by what

you cherished the most in your search to find yourself

in the absence of anything you could be attached to.

Look at the fireflies emerging from the valley fog

of a passing storm like a shapeshifting constellation

dancing at its own wake like a blissed-out drunk at a funeral.

You can taste the whole history of life

like a wandering myth of origin in every sip of water

flavoured with the reflection of things that changed along the way.

Don’t mourn the transformations that enabled you to stay awhile

like snow on the mountaintops, dew on the tongues

of the new leaves of the apple-tree that emerge

like the sacred syllables of lovepoems

to the unknown windfalls of the mystery they facilitate

out of the urgency of their own becoming.

Here, where we speak for awhile, in the diction of things

arranged in the mystic grammars and paradigms

of our own likeness reflected like starmaps

to the shining that ripened our eyes from within

as if the whole world were turned inside out

and you had to descend into yourself to see the stars

like an arrangement of chaos expressed in metaphors,

the liars speak clearly in the language of other men’s mouths

that can be easily understood, as the tongue-tied sages

blunder like an ineffable silence into the deepening mystery

of the creative eloquence of the unsayable things

that life speaks through them like the facts of a dream

that trues their wisdom to the disparate harmonies

of the illuminated chaos deep within the heart of life

that keeps contradicting itself like a pulse among the dead.

PATRICK WHITE