NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

No lightning from my cloud of unknowing,

now that this season of storms has passed.

Occasionally tears, but a harvest of stars

shining like Spica in the hand of Virgo

and all these dazzling insights into nothing

I hang like wild grapes and chandeliers

above the dance floor where I press the wine.

Not meditative, but darkly absorbed, who knows,

maybe even void bound, drowned or lost,

I’m not trying to seek a way out of the abyss.

Whatever it is, I accept it as it is. Most of the time.

And when I don’t and I’m stuck like a wishbone

in the throat of a nightbird, even my dissonance

is included in the background cosmic hiss.

So I say you don’t have to be attuned to it

to be in harmony with it, and if you’ve gone astray

or been misdirected, maybe that’s a course correction

you didn’t have to make, because all rivers

are flowing the right way to the sea, and as

for the picture-music you hear like a hidden mindstream

talking in a dream in a dark wood, you don’t

always have to hit the right note to be a great singer.

Or name me a bird that sings its heart out off key.

I can feel the stillness moving under my feet

like a road, a mountain path, a rogue orbit,

or Curiosity like a wandering scholar on Mars,

a vagantes, a Druidic refugee intervening in the War of the Worlds

and a machine this time looking for the Garden of Eden

like an alien mirage in the desert, fossils of Dilmun,

the middens of Shangra La, microbes in the begging bowls

of a new myth of origin, where Nasa is God,

and a robot is the first of a whole new race of Martian nomads.

The silence speaks to me in thousands of estranged voices

like leaves on the silver Russian olives moved

by the spirit of the wind tampering with their sterling currency

to lament their passage at the approach of autumn,

though there are only a few flames beginning

to immolate the trees like heretics that had to

bring their own stakes to their auto da fe.

O how easy it would be when I’m down here alone

to slip into this river like an unobtrusive sacred syllable

into a long-running conversation, even if

it’s nothing but spiritual slang, and yet be satisfied

I’ve had my say, I’ve added my voice

like a bird in a birch grove, whether

anything alive tonight answers it or not.

As a holy book said once on a bus, sitting beside me,

when one jewel is marked they’re all marked

indelibly as stars and eyes and planets,

and there’s a Conservation of Data Principle

in this universe, even in the heart of a black hole,

that says once here, here forever

in this great spiritual lost and found

that can read the whole history of life

in the mustard seeds that yellow the fields around here,

or the stars that do much the same

in a commotion of atmospherically aberrated colours,

burning with the urgency of mystic details

being whispered into everyone’s ear

as if each were a hidden secret of God

that wished to be known and expressed itself flawlessly

like a master of mantric wavelengths

or a mute with an overbite pointing out constellations

and the last of the wildflowers, a signage of light

reciting the fathomless poetry that lives in a name,

ignoring all the fancy lanterns in the windows

of the houses of the zodiac, to follow the flame

of whatever light you’ve been given to go by,

wherever it leads, through the star fields or the cul de sac

of a satoric eclipse with no light at the end of the tunnel

as the only way of ever prodigally coming back.

PATRICK WHITE