LOOKING FOR A LITTLE BLACK WATER AFTER THE FURY OF THE WHITE

LOOKING FOR A LITTLE BLACK WATER AFTER THE FURY OF THE WHITE

Looking for a little blackwater after the fury of the white.

Dark energy after the light as peace

settles down gently upon me,

the sediment of the eras and rivers of my life.

And this cool night in early autumn,

a woman in a dark cloak and hood

I could almost caress if I could just breathe

a little more deeply than the abyss

I’ve been dogpaddling in because

there’s nowhere else among all these stars

I can swim from the shallow end of myself

into the watersheds of my last drowning.

And there’s an unprescribed silence,

a herb of the moon that’s salving the wound

of the lunar thorn I just pulled out of my heart

delicately with my teeth. I’m trying

to tune my spinal cord to the guitar string

of the Tay River, so I can resonate in harmony

with the flow of things. Starfire walking

on the water of the mindstream without

the crutch of a miracle to help bear me up.

It’s not so much a matter of power or self-discipline

as it is well within the spontaneous capacity

of everyone’s emptiness to do so because,

labour exhaustively as we do just to find the path

let alone stay on it, all we’ve had to do

right from the start, is to let life

give us a narrative of our own we can be true to

as it makes you up going along with it

like a lonely survivor singing to himself in a lifeboat

at the last watch of the night. Arcturus

at the tip of our eyelashes, enmeshed

as it sinks in a western treeline of beached shipwrecks.

Reach out, but don’t grasp. Accept and let go.

Scatter your blossoms, even when you’re

down on your luck, like ripped up lottery tickets

whether they end up in the gutter

or on an impressionist table cloth somewhere

playing checkers with a patient still life.

I’ve seen whole Japanese plum trees in blossom

be brushed aside like perfect haikus

by a street sweeper at three in the morning

when no one else was watching but me and Basho.

My blood is saturated by an overdose of stars

and I can feel a light from deep within

rooting in my limbs like nightfall

as my awareness is enhanced

by how much unknown compassion

there is the silence, love in a dark time.

Blue moons on the wild grape vines,

approaching the autumn equinox in Virgo

as if they could read my mind like a purple passage

intoxicated on the wine that can be pressed out of its own decay.

The waterlilies are gone with the fireflies,

and the reupholstered cattails are beginning

to show signs of wear already. And soon

the Canada geese will be flying high overhead

bearing the souls of the dead to new latitudes of seeing

where the starmaps fall from their hands

like the feathers and leaves of being

flowing along with the mindstream

like the wiverns, wavelengths, and water sylphs

playing on the shores of the Milky Way

with as many burning bridges,

as there are flames on the phoenix

in the immolated sumac, as there are eyes

to see across these circuitous waters

to the other side of where we’ve always been going

alone together with everyone who’s ever come aboard.

PATRICK WHITE