EVERY INSIGHT, THE BIG BANG, AND THE THOUGHT THAT FOLLOWS, A UNIVERSE

EVERY INSIGHT, THE BIG BANG, AND THE THOUGHT THAT FOLLOWS, A UNIVERSE

Every insight, the Big Bang, and the thought that follows, a universe.

Every image that flashes across the moonscape like a silhouette

in reverse of the dark matter and starmud that surrounds it,

a black swan among the white when there’s snow on the river.

Worlds bubbling out of the mouth of a fish through a hole in the ice

that looks like the third eye of a glacier taking a long, hard look

at whether it was worth opening all those lakes

and then filling them like eyes with the runoff of its own tears

as it disappears into a more fertile approach to letting go of itself.

I could always see a human shape hidden in the landscape

and I wanted to free it so I scraped and gouged

and dug my way into it like a dog unearthing the fossil

of a distant ancestor that ran with the wolves.

Even now when their ghosts howl it’s a sad ballad

of the lyrical hills going mad by themselves

and sometimes it breaks my heart like water

in the cleft of a pseudomorphic rock to write picture-music

in striated cuneiform on the cliff faces to sing to themselves

like a lost people with more legend than life in its veins.

I can take a single thread and weave it into a flying carpet.

I can take a string theory and make it resonate with membranes

that occasionally break their eardrums like water from a womb.

There are protocols of the imagination that have been imposed

by iconic means like straitjackets fitted to the inside of your psyche.

Cuckoos in your nest, memes in your mind,

nudging your cosmic eggs out to smash on the rocks below

like the stillborn of the sun. Embryos and fractals,

astronomical forensics sweeping the night sky for fetal stars,

hidden paradigms ferreted out like secrets

that will bloom each in their own good time

like the mysteries of life unravelling

the sequel of a waterclock that keeps on outliving itself

by transcending its own emptiness by pouring itself out

like a serpent that’s always shedding its own skin

or a zodiac confabulating a false dawn

of mythically deflated metaphors, red giants

burnt out into black dwarfs and sink holes

where the stars plunge like butterflies into

the gaping maw of the dragon that consumes them like krill,

knowing its destiny, too, is just a provisional scaffolding of quicksand.

Yes, but how many make it all the way through

like wild salmon responding to the death call

of the spawning ground on the far side of the white hole

when the hourglass gets turned around like a fountain

instead of leaking out of a mortal wound in the side of the universe?

The morphology of knowledge is the history of shapeshifters.

Cosmology is an aesthetic expression of enculturated preferences.

Zero among the Hindus the form of the abundance of their emptiness.

Among the Greeks, a political exile. And for a Westerner

far sighted enough to see in aerial perspective,

the bluing of a way of life that’s always over the next hill.

Sight is a kind of love I once read on a poster the sixties.

So astronomy for poets. And poets for astronomy.

Observatories on forbidden mountain tops

opening their eyes like blind prophets to the visions

engendered by a seven year eclipse of their visuals.

Who hasn’t stepped out of their own well lit doorway

and walked up to the high field on a cold winter night

and watched their breath mingle with the Milky Way

like a tributary of a river on intimate terms with the mindstream

we’re all flowing into like red-tailed hawks

riding our own thermals for the sheer joy of it

down the helical stairwells of our own polished bannisters of dna.

Twenty years a Druid in a vatic college learning

to speak to trees in the demotic of their own alphabet,

poetry isn’t the calling of a clown or a gleeman

amusing the whimsical caprice of the king’s court,

it’s a summons to risk your life exploring the mystery

of every facet of what you’re doing here turning jewels

like stars in the translucency of your own light

reflected in a brainstorm of parabolic mirrors that bloom at night.

Haul yourself up out of your tidal pool of awareness

into the rarefied bliss of a whole new medium that exceeds

the planetary boundary stones of the space time continuum

you’ve been so far, by devoting your disobedience

by bringing back enlightened serpent fire

from the hearths and the middens in the starfields

of the gods who first domesticated it like a selective ordeal of birth

in the imagination of a hungry human thief enough

to root a new kind of lightning in the earth that bears

all the birthmarks of the compassionate fruits of insight

into the nature of a mind that embodies all this

as if one moment the crescents of the moon were scars on its eyes

and the next, the talons of an owl flying out of the abyss in the grip

of a nocturnal imagination that’s as wise as it is dangerous.

All my thoughts have fingertips. Blood your abstractions.

Lavish your mindstream on the available dimensions of the future

as if what you wanted to achieve were already behind you

like a star in pursuit of an earthly excellence.

Humanize the uninhabitable as if it were just

another room in a spatially enchanted palace

you haven’t finished yet like Thomas Jefferson.

If you look for the cure in the heart of the disease,

by corollary, look for the disease in the heart of the cure

like the lesser vehicle in a pathology of grails.

Safer to drink from your own skull to an eclipse

that patched the eye of the moon with the crossbones

of its colours, than sip rainbows from the goblets

of lilaceous irises blooming like an effulgent halo

around the pupil of a black hole on a starless night

anticipating a cadaverous moonrise

like the dark beginning of death breaking into

the unimaginable radiance of another side to all this

that makes the light seem a mere carbon copy

of the shining that can be emanated by an enlightened mind

that never hesitates to contaminate the purity

of its numinous ignorance for the sake

of opening the gate like an exile to a secret garden

everybody must enter at the crossroads of a threshold

without the screening myth of a backdoor to duck out of.

PATRICK WHITE