ANY DARK DEEP PLACE
Any dark deep place will reveal the
shining.
Membranes in hyperspace.
Big Bangs from cosmic kisses.
The oak is in the acorn.
The dragon’s in its egg.
A hundred rooms in your mansion
and you’ve only turned the lights on
in the one you’re sitting in.
The fireflies will show you
as well as any starmap.
The lightning will put you in the
picture.
Ten thousand security cameras
as you walk to the grocery store
but you still don’t know where you
are.
Where you are is Who you are.
Lead me to the sidereal capital
of your mindscape
your shining city on the hill
and still you haven’t left home.
Take one step outside.
The threshold’s infinitely wide
and even the stars haven’t managed
to cross it yet.
And though you walk for light years
down the Road of Ghosts
through Cygnus and Aquila
back to a quiet place as dawn
approaches
and lie down in your grave
is this in or is this out?
Have you left your chair by the lamp?
Not just one
but infinite universes in a grain of
sand.
Why do you let them slip through your
fingers
like an hourglass?
Everybody has their limits.
That’s why it’s an expanding
universe.
Almost broken.
Almost dismembered.
You can feel your limbs being quartered
by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Your spirit stretched like the hide of
a ten point buck
beat on like a drum in a rain dance.
Like the membrane of the next universe.
Like a heart in a trance
brow-beaten by its own pulse
into emptying its medicine bag
like the trinkets of an old magic
that no longer has any use for the
world.
The snake sheds its skin.
One day abruptly something just splits
like a bean sprout out of its
cotyledons
like a virgin out of her maidenhead
like the sky in a sudden gust of a
tailwind
and you’re out in the open of the new
you.
The old skin feels empty and
disembodied
like the ghost of someone you used to
know
like the last backwards look
at the apartment you’re moving out of
as you slowly close the door and return
the key.
But your latest incarnation
comes with its own atmosphere.
Strange constellations
that have outgrown their myths of
origin
and moved on to deeper enlightenments.
Darker nights and more radiant
insights.
In this clear state this tabla rasa
beyond words conceptions
where nothing’s been named yet
and the stars splash like rain on a
windowpane
as wide as your seeing
and run down the glass like tears of
light
to see if it’s safe for the birds
to fly through your translucency yet
or if you’re still obstructing them
with mirrors
the first thing you realize
is that ignorance is as unattainable as
wisdom
that there are no more moon rises and
sunsets to the shining
and things as they appear
are no longer just warm-up acts for
reality.
The lies are just as revealing as the
truths
in every doorway
in every window
in every room of the house you open
to the blessings and the risks of who
you might be now.
Is it so different for a worm to inch
its way
through its house of transformation
and come out holding its wings up
like the graduation diploma of a
butterfly?
How long are you going to hug the womb
like a cave painting
without ever stepping outside
to witness the creative fertility
of your own imagination
playing witchdoctor to the throngs of
stars
grazing on the grasslands of climate
change?
Clinging to your last white-knuckled
ice age
in the midst of effortless
transformation
is the sole root of your agony
as if growing were any less scary than
being born.
Leave your frosty prophets in the past
trying to read the dead leaves
of a frozen garden better left to the
sun.
Yesterday mammoths.
Today gazelles.
Yesterday the Book of Kells.
But today nothing begins with a
capital.
Today wherever you stand in a boundless
universe
you’re at the centre
like a black hole
summoning galaxies into existence
out of the old ghosts
you cast out of your last seance
like a wardrobe
you can never wear more than once
because it no longer fits the medium
you’ve grown into
like a wavelength of light
that’s just shed its skin
to wind its way deeper into the night.
PATRICK WHITE
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