TRYING TO GET CENTERED IN THE MIDDLE OF CHAOS

TRYING TO GET CENTERED IN THE MIDDLE OF CHAOS

Trying to get centered in the middle of chaos

isn’t going to turn me into the third of eye

of a hurricane rose, or square the circle

with the clarity of a lens with a seeing-eye dog.

The rags of the clouds are teaching the dandelion seeds

how to drift with a good conscience,

just let things go awhile. What’s done, what’s not.

Why labour at either when together they’re just

the human way of walking away from things

one moment after another? Chaos has a way

of conditioning itself into people like me

who relax because they know it’s all out of control.

Been feeling like a dead branch, a maple witching wand,

these past few days, because I’ve given up

divining water with a snake’s tongue,

and I thought I was blossoming again

when I saw the first bud of the moonrise

but now it seems to have gone down

behind a screening myth of eyelashes and trees

and my heart is so disappointed in me

there’s no help for it, it’s crying in my bloodstream,

and when all my childhood insecurities

come mocking me like a fox in my sacred hole,

I don’t even bother licking my wounds anymore.

Hope. But it’s dogpaddling just beneath an airhole

in the middle of a seal hunt on a bloody ice floe

that’s grinding its molars in its sleep like sheet ice.

Always hope. A crack in the door left ajar

for the light to get in and the darkness out.

Only a fool would make the exceptional a rule of thumb,

and hope is a palace of water with so many windows

even the best thieves of moonlight

don’t know whether they’re breaking in or out.

Just the same, my blessings on everyone’s head and house.

The wingspans of two birds hinged to a gate

that doesn’t need a guru to teach it to open,

where I’m a stranger who stopped to talk

on the roadside of the fence, and on the other,

I’m a nocturnal wildflower in a secret garden of bliss

that doesn’t notice the difference in the way I bloom.

Anyway, who’s got the eyes to see any further

into their fate than a pair of dice do, and if things

don’t break your way, you’re not washed up

on Circe’s island like a love affair with the moon,

the manuscript of your first loveletter doesn’t

regrettably meet anyone’s needs at the time

but feel free to submit again if you’re a masochist,

so what, there a more mirages of fish in the desert,

and the star you wished upon digs its spur into your eye,

Giddy up. After you get over a little death,

an emotional stone age when Perseus meets Medusa

on his way to rescue Andromeda from a killer whale,

rejection can be the burr under the saddle of Pegasus

and there’s nothing in the way of these high, wide open starfields,

that have never known a fence or a gate, to obstruct you

from burning a little dark energy off

by taking to the air like a mythically deflated weather balloon

in an expanding universe that’s just taken

its thumb and forefinger off your throat to let you breathe out

as if you’d managed somehow again

to exorcise yourself from your own self-possession.

A lot of gurus have to like that. But I’m sick of the sound

of one hand clapping like an overly-disciplined seal

with one flipper left while Orca eats its trainer.

I want to take a leap of faith, not death, like the rain

through a circle of my own making whether

it amuses the crowd or not. Or meets the approval of rainbows.

Attachment too is a buddha activity once you get back

from the sad, cold, desolated shore of enlightenment

and the spell has unsilvered the back of the mirror

like flakes of moonlight, and effaced it with a clarity

that lets you see right through yourself

like the stars in an autumn sky into nothing.

What is it Dogen Zenji said in medieval Japan?

When the truth doesn’t fill your body and mind

you feel you’ve had enough. But when it does

you always feel as if something were missing?

God, what a lot of empty truth I must embody

to be so hungry for the taste of all my lost illusions.

PATRICK WHITE