TRYING TO INTERPRET THE SILENCE LIKE GLYPHS IN A JUNGLE RUIN

TRYING TO INTERPRET THE SILENCE LIKE GLYPHS IN A JUNGLE RUIN

Trying to interpret the silence like glyphs in a jungle ruin.

Afraid of what they might say if I cut the vines away

like a Medusa’s head of spinal cords connected to my brain,

or this octopus of major blood vessels plugged into my heart.

My dna is the long molecule of a Zen cowboy,

with the Mongolian genes of a shaman practising

hunting magic that ensnares what he loves

in the nets of constellations that do no harm

to the wavelengths of the prey. You’ve got

to keep on dying every day if you want

to be born again in the dream tree of a shaman.

This is the way you avoid taking possession of your transcendence.

This is the way you break out of a cosmic egg

like a dragon without making an aviary of your solitude.

So many voices all at once in my head,

trying to say something in the living languages of the dead

about annihilation in a time urgent with the mystery of need.

When space isn’t expanding the potential of its own medium

into the available dimensions of a future

that’s already behind us by the time it gets here

like a delinquent s.o.s. from a star we were hoping

had got a fix on us like the maidenhead of a lifeboat,

it breeds. It proliferates like punctuation. It bonds

disparate elements into oxymoronic metaphors

that leave you as elated as a vertiginous Sufi at a crossroads

knowing that ultimate union doesn’t have to be

about one or the other of infinite ways to make it through life,

you can shine like a star emerging from its own ancestral ashes

and take them all at once. Or as Dogen Zenji

said to himself one night when the moon was clear:

The place is here. The path leads everywhere.

I emerge from my own flame like a genie of fire

without smoke, and burn invisibly in my own art

like a crucible of the heart. Hermes Trismegistus,

the Thrice-Blessed, in a biochemical retort

bubbling over like the multiverse getting out of the bathtub

without leaving a ring around the womb of hyperspace.

I’ve washed so many lives off like the moon

it’s a wonder I’m not a virgin again, but the return journey

of the second innocence is better than the first

because it’s been sweetly seasoned by a universe

looping in reverse through all the stations

and excruciating transformations of my life

that don’t have the same sting in their glands

when they first struck out at me like mystic acetylene

and scaled flashes of insight into the psyche of lightning.

I’m a big boy. The acquiescent khan of millions,

the Golden Horde who would rather make love than war any day

of the Great Tectonic Year, trying to read the fault-lines

in my own skull, volcanic fissures between continental plates

and the surrealistic empires crowding my stargates.

I can take the pain. I was born for it. Raised in it.

Even if I’m deciphering my own gravestone,

brushing away the stardust like a patina of mirages

with my eyelashes for a broom, my tongue for a dustpan,

ripping away the roots like the nervous systems

of the things that cling to it like the cornerstone of a ghost.

Been alone so long in the company of stars,

raising this hourglass of time to the beauty of their eyes,

even quicksand can look like the oasis of a distant galaxy to me.

And this skull of a headstone, crumbling like bread for the birds,

not a ruin, but just another phase of the moon I’m living through.

PATRICK WHITE