GALACTIC DARKNESS

GALACTIC DARKNESS

Galactic darkness. Luna moths

drawn in by the zircon oases of

candles on the coffee-table

burning behind plate-glass

like the muses of consumer longing,

given how far it is to fly to the stars,

though nothing blocks the way,

their wings spread on the windows

like death masks and decals on a suitcase,

stamps on forlorn loveletters

that can labour over every sacred syllable

for effect, but still eat

the ashes of neglect for real.

But, then, again, how can you fail

if you’re mad, if you can feel

in your blood, how the stars

can start fires here on earth

using the fireflies for chemical fuses?

Or the moon, her moths, for proxies?

Bless the beatific insanity of crazy wisdom

pursuing an earthly excellence

in the eye of inviolate perfection

to add its petal of light to the shedding

of the unsayable rose that ignites the soul

to the dragon of longing and devotion

that dwells within like serpent fire

waiting on the wind, that’s you,

to give it wings with every breath you take.

Just because you can name all the trees

in the forest, doesn’t mean

you’ve explored a wilderness

or suffered the dangerous ordeals

of your rite of passage through it

to uninhabitable states of mind

your adaptable presence

spontaneously humanizes

with the unlikelihood of you even

being there with your mountainous outlook

and sidereal overview about

the apparent impersonality of the universe

putting its roots down in you like fruitful tree

with a windfall of sustainable planets at your feet.

O little mystic, in midnight shades

of Prussian blue, it isn’t true if you

were to look into the face of your god

your eyes would burn like an oilspill

on an ocean of of prescient wavelengths

that will turn on you like a snake

from the burning faucet of a toxic housewell.

Embrace what consumes you like fire at the stake.

In the blast furnace of the universe they peer into

like the source of the mystery that absorbs them

the astronomers have recast their eyes

into philosophically ground lenses and pyrex mirrors

silvered by a quarter ounce of their vaporous spirits

looking for clarity in a cloud of unknowing

the way the morning air cleans its stardust off with the dew.

Nothing less than everything all the time.

What does the world hold back in reserve,

or your bodymind all you need and prefer

to be as lost as a feather in the shadow of a sundial

as the nightbird you are now, afraid

of where the wind might carry you

far from the aviary of that golden cage

of a voice-box that’s trained you

what to say to strangers who ask

when was the last time you went looking

for continents in a flood, or even

went down with one like Mu or Atlantis,

the kingfisher captain of the ship?

Take a cometary approach and leap

from your black halo into the sun

as if you were jumping orbitals

from a burning bridge where

the serious arsonists come

to commit suicide by flinging themselves

like fire on the water to see if,

like the reflections of the stars,

they can get over their hydrophobia,

by realizing the pilot lights of their fever

can never wholly be put out once

they start spreading like a wildfire

through the zodiac, house by house.

But you don’t need a fire department

in the inflammable amethyst village

sequestered in the coffin of your spiritual life

like a seed afraid to come out of itself

like foxfire after a cosmic conflagration.

You don’t need to dream your totem alone

in a fire-tower in the woods,

high among the crowns of the trees

polling fireflies and meteors by the minute,

to see if you’ve got what it takes

to get something started within yourself

that isn’t just another demonic firecracker

you throw at the ghosts of your afterlives

like pebbles and beans, to scare them away.

Pinocchio runs to the pyre of his karma

in the sacred ashes of someone else’s lifemask

though the flame at the end of his nose

is a dead giveaway he’s attached too many strings

to the box kite self-immolating in the power lines

he thought he could do a quick fly over

like a transmigratory bird avoiding a snake pit

that’s trying to catch its eye like a liar’s holy book,

two minutes with a hook, then dead air

when the hits are shelved like golden ashes

in the urns of an elephant graveyard

where the poachers come to salvage

the tusks and crescent moons of their mnemonic relics.

Any fool can make a religion out of a salvationist alibi

by telling themselves that we were all no good

before we were born, and we all need to be recalled

like Toyota suvs for legally culpable emergency repairs

at mystically specific authorized garages

and shrines with forklifts for spiritual vehicles

to have their undercarriages inspected in the pits of hell

by gurus with Jiffy Lube all over their coveralls

greasing the wheel bearings of the celestial omnibus

to turn round and round and round

like the wheel of birth and death suspended in mid air

and going, as the crow flies, nowhere.

Don’t scorn the fire in the darkness of the coal

that burns on the inside when there’s nothing

but diamonds freezing at the door on the outside

or looking down in longing like the stars

at the flurries of chimney sparks rising

like intimate insights with the lifespan

of enraptured gnats at dusk, to illuminate

the fixed assumptions of the mythic shining

with impromptu constellations of their own

in a smaller darkness closer to home

that glow at night like astral plastic stars

stuck to the ceiling of a child’s bedroom

made infinitely intimate and wondrous

according to the orders of her intuitive seeing

when she walks in the starfields, following

the fragrance of whatever’s she’s dreaming

whether the road evaporates like smoke

from a fire on a cold night in the distance,

or unfolds like a starmap of wildflowers,

a bird with a library of feathers for wings,

she embraces the vast, vacant, interstellar spaces,

the sublime, empty vastness of the tabla rasa

of her imagination, the light emerging out of the void

into the eyes of the uncarved lifemasks

of the most tender and homely of things.

PATRICK WHITE