BARED OF ITS LEAVES LIKE NATIVE PEACE TREATIES

BARED OF ITS LEAVES LIKE NATIVE PEACE TREATIES

Bared of its leaves like native peace treaties

with the westerlies who never kept them,

the last red planet of the chokecherry falls

into the claws of a black squirrel eyeing it

like a space rover looking for life on Mars.

O the myriad worlds you can see in a single mystic detail.

Bring me a hair of God and I’ll pass through it

like a wormhole into the dark matter of the mind

going on behind the light like vital events

that are deeper than skin and blood on stage.

Just count the number of pathways through the woods

compared to the roads to know whether

you’re in a good space or not. If people

wander to work in their own good time

or rush from one abyss to another

trying to get ahead of an ion waterclock.

Take the solitude out of society

and there’s not much left worth talking about.

So I enjoin the silence to keep the acuity of my wonder

sharp as the thorns of a heart with nothing left to guard

after the wild rose ran off in one of her phases with the moon.

I have long conversations with the stars

without a word or a gesture of grammar being said

in either of our mother-tongues that can’t be understood

immediately, without the intermediary of a metaphor

or a dictionary that gets to the roots of things

like a star-nosed mole with no flowers in its soul.

No end of the distance between us when you measure it in miles

but insight travels faster than the speed of light

and both of us are shining in the same dark space

like an eye looking back at itself from a long way off.

The night is lonely, cold, and ageing but there’s a fire

blazing in my heartwood the trees huddle around

as the shadows of the flames dart from trunk to trunk

with the alacrity and cunning of a wolf

that knows it’s the last of its kind in these darkening hills

to embody the magic of its elders in its way of life.

Fear is the mind-killer. So I stay enthroned

by the stone navel of my firepit flowering

all around me like the corona of the sun at midnight

just to say I know the protocols of being as well as the rocks

when I rise to embrace strangers in my solitude

as the new spiritual familiars that will accompany me

on my long firewalk to the stars that are never

any further away than my future is from my past

or now is from here to there every step of the path

The stars spin their webs in the crowns of the trees

into dreamcatchers with mythically inflated origins

that answer the paradigms of the constellations

by connecting the dots like wild grape vines

to the shapeshifting starmaps of the mind

I keep shedding like leaves and feathers and scales

to understand the underlying scaffoldings and skeletons

I climb up on like monkey bars

to repaint creation in everybody’s image

but my own. My fire. My heart. I’m the host

of an expansive space that’s generous enough

to embody it all without standing in jubilation

like an angel in the doorway as if there were

somebody home no one could account for.

A stranger in the thirteenth house of a misbegotten zodiac

of birthmarks driven out into the wilderness

like maniacs, prophets, poets and astronomical wise men

as scapegoats for the fate of upper class tattoos

that don’t wash off any easier than the wind

teaching the stars that have just learned how to print

this cursive script I’m writing in like a mindstream

punctuating its passage with toadstools and pine-cones,

chokecherries, black walnuts, wild crab apples

and shepherd moons in decaying orbits around

the black hole at the center of the universe

we’re all attached to like hinges to a gate

that only has to swing open once to everything

and it’s good for as many lifetimes as you want to go through

like a labyrinth of exits leading into a clearing

deep within your heart where nothing exists

and yet inconceivably everything insists upon shining.

PATRICK WHITE