THERE'S A BLACK LOTUS IN MY HEART

THERE’S A BLACK LOTUS IN MY HEART

There’s a black lotus in my heart, black hole

of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.

Nothing worth attaining that isn’t unattainable.

And all the gates are upside down and backwards.

Albino starmaps with black dots shining

on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs

of black matter looping back on themselves

like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.

I don’t know what all this means. I may have gone

too far into exile and actually managed to get

to the dark side of the moon. Or I’m a warehouse

of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time

like blind sundials that feel they’re being followed.

The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.

I’ve got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.

I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation

busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,

forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I’ve gathered over the years.

A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.

Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I’m envious

of creative immolations I know I’ll never attain.

Though my left brain is in full communication with the right

and I’m a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance

of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I’m always

a star ahead of my light, so I don’t end up

like a dead school furnace in the basement

writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.

Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom

and I promise you, if that’s all I’ve got to work with

like one stem cell to another at the beginning

of a matrix of causes and conditions into which

we’ll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi

of which direction our eyes should face, and how many

degrees of separation there should be between our ears,

I promise you, I’ll still burn with the fireflies

and the supernovas like a blind prophet

who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes

and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,

an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony

like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird

burning in visionary serpent fire ever since

for the sake of a muse that always comes

in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.

When it’s night in the diamond of my third eye

is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,

more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?

The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers

the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system

can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.

The black mirror, brighter than the white,

shows you your reflection on the inside

where you’re arrayed like a faceless world

that’s given up trying to second guess

who’s the unerring witness under the lifemask

of the surreal cosmology that doesn’t recognize

it’s not a self, at first glance, and that all physics

is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion

you can, even if you’re riding a flying carpet

out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away

like mirages that have been throwing bad meat

down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.

Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance

or turn on a flashlight to see what’s in the dark

as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light

even though it’s as abundantly clear as your eyes it’s night out,

and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,

Messier 31, at eleven o’clock above the middle star

in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years

of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss

and disappear from your field of view subliminally

knowing, because the timing’s yours, you’re a daylily

covering your insight with the petals of your own hands

because you don’t know how to open them sidereally yet

from the outside in, where your darkness shines

and the night you turn your face away from

like the bright side of the moon blinds you

by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins

of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins

emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.

PATRICK WHITE