AND IT COMES AND IT TAKES, IT LEVELS
AND IT DEFIES
And it comes and it takes, it levels
and it defies.
And not all the sorrow in the world
is enough to cool the burn. Will death
make
as big a splash as birth did when it
jumped in the pond?
How will you die? At home in bed
with your kids banked around you
like a zodiac of grieving signs, head
on
at seventeen into a drunk ambulance
like a suicide you backed into like a
ventriloquist
afraid to call your own bluff? Heart
attack, cancer,
eating the Angel of Death like the
wrong mushroom
in a rainy spring, your extinction, one
of seven
horrible oddities of random selection
to make the news
like a public health warning not to
take the chance?
And you, having just finished medical
school?
The wise man dies, the fool, the lover,
the glutton and baby.
Death plays solitaire by opening and
closing doors.
Death is not amused by the meaning of
our lives.
Death doesn’t read the menu
of what we’ve avoided and cherished.
It comes and it takes, it levels and it
defies.
Are you going to die like an old woman
evaporating in her sleep like a dream
lingering on a lake
until the dawn mistakes her for a ghost
and brushes her aside like a
spider-web?
Pity the poor body’s infantile
helplessness at the end.
Pity the terror in the eyes of the
imprisoned one
who could feel his chains slipping away
like a spinal cord
into an immaculate freedom ungoverned
by circumstance.
Even the stars, chalk on a blackboard,
and death,
the brush that wipes them away before
the next class.
As it is with the flowers, the jewel of
life is slowly
pried out of our hands with soft
crowbars of sunlight.
God, how we labour to leave something
behind
like a fragrance of our having been
here once
like a human on a hillside deeply in
love with the clouds.
Death panics us into believing we’re
achieving
something enduring and benign, but
truth is,
given that one good can adumbrate
another that’s tragic,
we’re just setting our heads on fire
like matches
to add our blazing to the darkness of
the blind.
We strike, we ignite, we flare, we fade
like a daylily
into an abyss of stars we’re all
apprenticed to
and the light goes out like a firefly
in a black hole.
Or we’re as indelible as a menage a
trois of water.
The triune identity of existence, three
phases of the moon.
No onceness to our being here forever.
Persist in beginning and you condemn
yourself to death.
The jewel turns you in the light of
your infinite facets.
Your eyes turn to you and ask what
they’re looking at.
Death wants an explanation for what
you’re up to.
And life couldn’t care less whether
you had one or not.
A dead child can lead you to
enlightenment
and a live one to despair. Two hinges
of the same gate,
putting their hands together in prayer
like birds on the wing.
We live in pain. We live in unexpected
bliss. But what we are
is imaginations beyond this. We embrace
life. We dis death.
We separate. We hold lanterns up to the
fog
like empty lifeboats far out at sea at
night but what if
everyone swam safely ashore as they did
in their mothers’ wombs? We aren’t
drowned out
like the cosmic hiss of negligible
wavelengths
that once accomplished mighty things.
The senses
don’t age into old colours and old
sounds.
Whatever you reach out to touch is as
new and forever as now.
Has it ever been this day before you
woke up to it?
Did yellow die overnight? Did red have
a heart attack?
Inside. Outside. There are no walls in
this palace of space.
No doors you have to enter seriatum. No
locks to undo.
No ordeals to endure. No sod to turn
over like a gravedigger
to lay a foundation stone that’s the
whole of the building
as if you buried a turtle under its own
shell.
A song bird under an iron bell. The
sacred syllable
of a black pearl under the tongue of an
oyster. To no avail.
The wave rides you like a flying
carpet, not a sail
that has to wait for the wind to arise
again or the tide to crest.
It’s just like a photon of insight.
When you look at it
trying to grasp it as something fixed
in your mind,
it acts just like the particle you were
expecting to see,
but as soon as you turn your eye away
from it,
it slips away from you like the cosine
of a snake
back into its own chameleonic medium of
water and light.
Everywhere is the centre of your
boundlessness
like the nave of a wheel on a hearse
that doesn’t equate once around the
sun on its axis
with the distance of the journey in
time and space and mind
it takes to realize, whatever size of
the circumference you make
like the ripples of interlocking
bracelets of rain
or tree rings in the heartwood of a
black walnut
that all fixed points in the wheeling
world turn on zero.
That there’s not a wavelength of
difference between
what is and is not, that you’ve been
attributing an identity
to things that emerged with you from
the polymorphous perverse
in order to recognize a self distinct
from the universe
that mothered it into existence out of
nothing
but the dark nature of life to fuel the
mind
with the radiance of diamonds burning
in the light
without anyone or anything ever being
consumed
or the night diminished like an ageing
constellation
by even so much as a single vital sign
of unending exploration carrying forth
of its own accord
The lamp bears the flame that lends the
lamp its eyes.
When the flame goes out, everything
it’s every seen
and been and tried to mean goes with it
into
worlds within worlds that keep adapting
themselves to you
like stars to the eyes of those who
keep looking back at them
as the source of their own shining by a
river
that’s constantly changing shapes in
its flowing
to reflect the mind’s protean
approach to the inconceivable.
And it comes and it takes, it levels
and it defies,
but you can look upon it with the
luminous eyes
of enlightened mirrors that can see
whole worlds
abounding in every piece it breaks to
improve the view.
PATRICK WHITE
No comments:
Post a Comment