CRAZY MAN DANCING WITH FIREFLIES

CRAZY MAN DANCING WITH FIREFLIES

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

Another one trying to shoot out the stars.

I hear the woman next door weeping again tonight.

I don’t know what for.

Desire’s a phoenix in love with water

if that’s what it is.

The torch is plunged into the wound

to stop the bleeding

and the ashes get carried away.

I’ve loved nine women for years

and they’ve all buried me in a different place.

Or saved my skull to consult the dead

about a future that wasn’t living up to the moment.

The white poppy of the moon

bats her eyelashs through the pines.

I’ve never been as innocent as a cynic

nor quite as susceptible

but I remember the pain of separation

like the mirror of the lake remembers lightning

as the most brutal of all its revelations.

And how you can walk in and out of some doors

all your life like faces

without ever opening them

or knowing whose they are.

Everybody longs for the threshold they haven’t crossed.

Poor stars trying to live up to their radiance.

Wondering why it’s always behind them.

Why the dreamcatchers never get finished

and love ends up like some kind of cold fish

swimming through endless windows.

Music from far across town

this late at night

like a ghost answering a seance.

It rises above the trees like smoke

and disappears into the moonlight.

Someone’s trying to bloom in fire.

It happens but it’s rare.

I take a firewalk down memory lane

but all my cremations seem no more to me now

than the shadows of candles

and though I feel intimately removed

this afterlife of mine is not scar tissue

whether things got over me

or I got over them

no matter.

Attachment too is a Buddha activity

and though passions that once

made even the trivial sacred

and the impossible slight

have transformed

the hot blue flame of their hydrogen

into the carbon and oxygen

of more sustainable intensities

the selflessness of my impersonality

is not aloofness or indifference or exemption

or the consolation of wisdom won by acclamation.

Time distills the spirit out of all things human

and you can delight in your past

as if it were the future of someone else

who lives it like the unfolding

of leaves in the spring

that shadow the ripening apple

until it tastes like the tears of the autumn sun.

Joy and compassion

and the lucid spontaneity

of staying improbably ageless

again and again and again and again

as the years rejoice in the young and old alike

climbing the ladder of the tree

from so far down in the dark earth

they’re beyond the reach of its ancient roots

and the utmost of its aspirant branchs

scratching at the windows of heaven.

And then most amazing of all

someone comes to the window

and parts the veils

and like the last line of the last act

just before the curtain call

you fall.

You fall toward paradise

as if you’d failed

and had to do it all over again.

But if your heart needs healing

offer your love up like a transplant

to anyone who can use it

and your mystic eyes to the stars

that want to see through them

what their light looks like

from deep inside

the expanding vastness within you

that can hold all that shining

like the sky or the sea embraces

all kinds of its own weather

without ever overflowing the brim.

The skull you drink from

like a wishing well

in the desert watersheds of the dead

is a cup without a horizon.

A real mirage with imaginary water.

A seabed of shadows on the moon.

Low-tide at noon.

Providential midnights when it’s full.

But if you don’t like

what you’ve been hearing about yourself lately

when you stop to listen

to what your saying

and don’t recognize the voice

you’re speaking in as your own

hold your ears up like conch shells to the oceans

that have never heard a recording of themselves

and carefully watch their faces.

And if you make the same stupid mistake

you swore not to make again

learn to recycle your ignorance

so you can save a bit of wisdom

for the rest of the world

to remember what it was like once

to be alone in Eden

with no one else to rely upon

and all you had to add

to the conversation of the rivers

that flowed out of it

all you had to share with your solitude

and boundless emptiness

was your unanswerable longing

even as it was being shaped

by their waters

into the form of the unimaginable.

Into the form of a woman

who tasted then

and tastes forever now

of the original light

of spontaneous creation

however many worlds

and lives and years and nights had to pass

before you first saw her

and felt your afterlife condense into a star.

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

And it doesn’t matter

there’s no one here

to understand my delight.

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

It’s hard to read me in so little light

but when you fall asleep

it’s the world that dreams

and though I feather the wind

with fire birds of desire

and write loveletters

long into the night

that grow like the graceful tendrils

of ink dissolving in water

whatever the sign of the season

there’s no bitterness in the vine

and no departure in the reason.

Though I’m a leaf with the wingspan of autumn

even in the dead of winter

the phoenix is green

and by late summer

there’s a crazy man out dancing with fireflies

down by the Tay River

who is too carried away

by the picture-music

of what he hears with his eyes

and sees with his ears

of all that he’s been and will be

alone together with everyone forever

in love and out

full cup and empty

eclipsed and forgotten

or charged with the radiant urgency

of fireflies after the rain

to care what any of it might mean

when they fire the valley up for a moment

like blasting caps in a beaver dam

that’s flooded the road.

And everything’s so nimble with light

so vital and effusive with joy

so mysteriously near and always

all darkness all pain all sorrow

all that’s lost and weary

and fearful of ever being found again

of being loved or despised

is absorbed blameless into bliss

like a tender intimacy

into a great vastness

that lives within us all

even as we disappear into it

like the sky in the heart of a bird.

Or just before the soft flare of moonrise

through the leafless veils

of the glowing birch groves

on that far hilltop

where the pioneers

used to bury their boys with a view

a night just like this

as illusory as it is real

suffused with a spirit of water

that heals the wounded swords

the bruised flowers

the fevered promises

that are offered to it from the bridge

between this shoreless delirium

and the next.

A presence that’s always flowing away

like a mindstream among the stars and fireflies

with the power of time

and the effortless wisdom of change

that makes the going stay

and the perishing persist.

A night just like this.

A momentary kiss

that keeps faith

with the eternal flames of the fireflies

that adorn the darkness and waters of life

with indefinable joy

in the exuberance of the mystery

and unspeakable trust in the onceness of forever

and an abiding intuition

that even the fiercest thorns of pain

that have tasted first blood

and greyed the hearts of their lovers

can never be estranged

from the beauty of the rose.

A night like this

in the great abyss

lucidly alive with its own shining

and a woman’s eyes

and a crazy man dancing with fireflies.

PATRICK WHITE