SPIDERS IN BUBBLES PUMBING THE DEPTHS

SPIDERS IN BUBBLES PLUMBING THE DEPTHS

Spiders in bubbles plumbing the depths

of a new medium. Looking up from the bottom

the stars aren’t stars, they’re water-striders.

And me? I’m walking on the surface of my mind

like a very light-footed telescope. An antelope

who’s just woken up from a dream

of a touring ballet company run by lions.

I’m sitting on a skull of rock close to the river

like some bare-footed prophecy

eating locusts and honey in the wilderness

that doesn’t know whether to make heads or tails of me.

Anxieties of surviving the way I am mingle

with lyrics of longing to change

like the metamorphic passage of the river

flowing by me like the not so Milky Way

of my mindstream trying to clarify itself

in the course of its own running. But it’s

as hard to part the waters with the wind

as it is with a sword, and I’m not looking

for any anomaly of nature to lead me to the Promised Land.

And I’ve been to PsychoBabylon and back.

And I had no eyes, I was blind, and I had to

follow my own Orphic skull up out of hell

like a song someone was whistling in the dark.

You live too long with ghosts, you start

asserting your wilfulness for all of them

and pretty soon the seance turns into an exorcism.

The fire that burned of its own accord,

stops crying like a candle and begins scrying

which way it’s going on any one of these Roads of Smoke.

I’m a pilgrimage of one to a shrine I’ve never heard of

who would like to walk part way with you,

heart to heart until you couldn’t tell

the new moon apart from the full

and like the snaking of this river

around these islands of birch groves

falling like pencils the beavers have chewed through

down to their stubs, we realize inseparably

it was always the right door to enter by, the entrance,

not this inseparable exit that keeps

stuffing the mouth of the oracle

like the three bells and all’s well of a seashell

with oceanic starmaps as to where

we’ve buried the lost treasures of our hearts and minds

that we’ve been looking for as if they weren’t

hiding out in the open where they’ve always been.

The hidden harmony of deep love is the dark bond

that ensures there can be no discontinuity

anywhere in the bubble-blowing multiverse

whether there are spiders on the moon in diving bells

that look like Schiaparelli’s canali on Mars,

or the peculiar scars on a third eye with a detached retina,

or a neuronic crossroads in the roots of a nervous system

waiting for the wind to show up whirling like a Sufi

to tell it which way to go to transcend its spiritual vertigo

like a computer message from earth to a space rover

exploring the possibility of finding love and life

like mirages gathered around the house wells of a deserted planet

witnessing the return journey of life like a prodigal

to the first threshold it ever crossed over with a smile into exile.

PATRICK WHITE