HE DOESN'T REALLY KNOW WHAT IT ALL MEANS

HE DOESN’T REALLY KNOW WHAT IT ALL MEANS

He doesn’t really know what it all means,

but he gives it access to his heart, free-range of his mind.

Not expecting an answer to the mystery of life

because it isn’t petty enough to have one,

he explores its horrors and wonders along the way

making small discoveries like rings and keys in the grass.

He doesn’t look at things darkly through a glass anymore

since his binoculars turned into the third eye

of a mandalic kaleidoscope that has a way

of turning his chromatic aberrations into enlightenment.

And if he does it’s usually a nightsky squandering stars

on those with the eyes to see them in the starmud

of their flesh and blood, in everyone of their insights,

an intimacy with billions of midnight suns all shining at once.

Mind includes the brain but the brain doesn’t include the mind.

Just the way love includes the heart, but the heart

is a mere nugget of love, compared to what there is of love

it takes more than the measure of a universe to contain.

This is the cruising altitude of a submarine

that has spiritual aspirations of becoming a flying fish,

forgetting that love and mind are formless and without images

that can be grasped or rejected like stained glass windows,

totem poles or icons. If love were as brittle as that

it would surely break. You could lose it. You’d

need to defend it. It could be wounded like a rose

that suffered haemophilia for the rest of its fragile life.

You’d have to look for it down on your hands and knees

late at night when the grass is wet, with a lantern of fireflies.

You’d have to put the pieces back together with the binding energies

of the strong and weak nuclear forces if you ever

stepped on it accidentally like a nesting English skylark’s egg.

And if you ever ran out of it when the water palace

of the black Taj Mahal turned back into a hovel in a slum,

you’d have to beg, and that would either empower your inferiors

or open a window of opportunity as big as the nightsky

for the indefinable to be merciful to the unattainable.

But take it from the experienced astroalchemist he is

if you mix a little starmud with a splash of moonwater,

and stir it in your heart, and let it sit awhile,

then drink a great draft of it from your skull

as if you could swallow a whole river in a single gulp,

down to the last drop, this feeling will overwhelm you

and halfway between midnight and the new moon

love will lend its eyes to your mind,

like the nightsky does starlight to a mirror,

and both will disappear into the longest, clearest light year of their lives.

If not, he tells himself, it’s binary galaxies with binoculars

passing through each other like the ghosts of two starfish

trying to find a dynamic equilibrium to their maculate lucidity

like a gyroscope in a space where you don’t really need one

but for the optics of what you can see

with your naked third eye, is probably tender and wise.

PATRICK WHITE