AVERAGING OUT THE CRUCIALS

AVERAGING OUT THE CRUCIALS

Averaging out the crucials, rolling against the odds,

I’ve worn my bones down like dragon’s teeth

grinding starwheat into luminous loaves of bread

that break just like the heart you share with a stranger.

Or a fortune-cookie of fate. Gray seagull of a day,

a deserted beach on Vancouver Island in the morning,

as I recall it from five thousand miles away,

the windows still numb and hungover

from last night’s sunset dispensing with protocol

and letting it all hang out oceanically.

Dying flowers mishandled by the wind like old manuscripts

too wet and esoteric to start a fire with.

Sodden mystics expiring like blueweed in the broken grass.

Fifty years I’ve run before circumstances like a blue fox

being hunted down by crows in the deep snow

but they haven’t dipped their nibs

in the inkwells of my eyes yet and I’m

an excellent broken field street runner with the wiles

of someone who’s good at who they don’t want to be.

Being no one has always been my highest poetic ideal.

Not empty, but full of the world, because

you’ve got space for it. And ageless,

so there’s as much time for everyone as they want.

It’s the remnants of self, the rags of blood you tore

on the thorns of the last eclipse hoping to leave a trail

some other lost soul might be able to follow

taking heart from the fact that a stranger’s suffering

has already humanized this dark space before his

was called upon for a sacrifice to prove he knows how to give

not just take. I gave my emptiness back to the abyss

that hadn’t noticed it was missing, and made

a peaceful transition like a lifeboat drifting in the moonlight

to the other side where the fragrance of the spirit

that still lingers about you, evaporates like a cheap cologne

into the infinite boundlessness of the starless void

that awakens you by an optical sleight of awareness

to the fact that you’re the only one that’s shining here

by contrast. And for the sake of a greater harmony,

you blow the candle out. You shine without eyes

like the blind prophet of your own demise

and all your foundation stones turn to skulls

and the long journey back isn’t strewn

with thorns or rose-petals, but flows intuitively

upstream from the sea against the current creatively

wise as a battered salmon that’s frustrated a gauntlet of grizzlies.

Mythologem 1a. for a gray day washed up

on the coasts of my abdicated solitude

like the displaced Polaris of a dead starfish

misguided by its followers into believing

it got lost along the way it meant to guide them.

The lion can lie down with the lamb

but who fears the eagle being

led around on a leash by a jackass?

The light of the spirit is dangerously real

not benignly blind and harmlessly amenable.

You take the edge off the sword

so no one can get hurt;

you take the risk out of the dance

you want to ask it for.

PATRICK WHITE