INNOCENT AS GRAVITY AND IT'S RAINING

INNOCENT AS GRAVITY AND IT’S RAINING

Innocent as gravity and it’s raining.

Trying to paint a Monarch butterfly into a starscape

where all the wavelengths have been woven

by a third eye into a spider web. This morning

the left and right hemispheres of my brain

are separated like an hourglass undergoing

the meiosis of galaxies whose lustre’s greyed

by the senile pearl of the sky. I want to play

aspirationally like fireflies among the stars,

but a gust of shadows has snuffed all the candles

and if I’m seeing stars at all, it’s like a rainbow

wearing a Joseph’s coat of colours

at the bottom of a well that hasn’t granted a wish in awhile.

My heart’s a loom of dissonant wavelengths

trying to weave my bloodstream like a carpet

it can fly away on braiding all these weak threads

and the light of all these images they carry

like the genomes of the souls of the dead

into the d.n.a. of a stronger spinal cord

I can use like a rope to climb up to the sky and beyond.

All my gravitational lensing has turned into bells of glass

and I’m walking on the splinters and plinths

of things that have come and passed, bearing these urns

transmigrationally like amphorae on a shipwreck

to the bottom of a subconscious watershed.

More sad than depressed, but dark just the same

as if all the dazzling suns and lapidary moons

with stars in their eyes that went into the wine

had just closed them in eclipse. Gone back to sleep

as it seems so many flowers to dream a better dream.

What need of my acceptance of what comes or doesn’t

when my denial or assent are absorbed in its presence?

As if I had a say in my own solitude. Or the birds

could get in the way of their own singing. Or the rain

could choose the window pane it wanted to look through.

However I labour to refute it, my awareness

is as spontaneously inclusive as time and space,

or closer to home, the sea its own weather, foul or fair.

I can’t extinguish the desert that burns within me

in a mirage of water, nor drown the stars in my tears

like the tiny insects that sometimes fly into my eyes

that wash their wings out like sodden punctuation marks

uprooted like sprouting seeds in a sudden flashflood of insight.

I can’t catch up to the light. And I can’t run from it.

Whether it stings like a nettle or soothes like an aloe

it’s always the muse, the mysterium of here and now, as it is,

firefly, or dragon that brings the rain, that I follow

in this discipline of disobedience to what I know and let go of

so that it rains just as often from below as it does from above.

PATRICK WHITE