FROM THE TREE TO THE GROUND THE SEED IS UNBOUND

FROM THE TREE TO THE GROUND THE SEED IS UNBOUND

From the tree to the ground the seed is unbound

as a bird in a space capsule re-entering the earth’s atmosphere

like an apple at splash down withering like a parachute.

Or the wind uplifts you like a lion with the mane

of a solar corona, and you roar in the abyss awhile

and then it lets you down like a dandelion

in a windfall of paratroopers crossing the Rhine.

Rags of the flags of last year’s nation of leaves

stuck together like the pages of a wet history book

made sacred by the earth I’m walking on bathed in blood.

Nature red in tooth and claw as if the hot passionate colours

that advance to the foreground were more violent

than the more distantly passive violets, viridians, and blues.

Chill out means stop aiming at everything as if

you were a sniper in a belfry with a machine-gun

looking for God with your third eye laminated to the lens

of a high-powered telescope that’s got you in its digital crosshairs.

I’m not seeking freedom to not have to look for anything.

I’m not turning over every stone to see where the angels

keep their ancient places as a junkie-poet once said

in the gutters of Victorian London, or peeking under every leaf

to see where I left my eyes like reading glasses

under a sheaf of poems packed on my desk

like the layers of the Burgess Shale after the first good snowfall.

Things come of their own accord out of a time-zone

that’s unique to them, and delight in their reception

like strangers in the doorway of an open heart,

every step of the way the threshold of a journey

that would never depart like the bloodstream of a ghost

evaporating from the palace it built in the salt flats

if you didn’t give the flowing a purpose, a destination,

the drift of your circuitous blossoming something to find

when you arrive at the place you lost it like an exit

at the front entrance of your mind. Peace isn’t

the consolation prize of a new pair of eyes

trying to make up for the loss of your happiness.

It’s the only cornerstone of the stars

in a desert of quicksand saturated with the mirages

of the tears you keep sinking in like the delusional oceans

of the moon, in a tidal pool of unsalvaged shadows.

Black walnuts all over the ground this year

like incinerated solar systems from a Rumi poem

lying at my feet like unracked cue balls that didn’t break

but I don’t take them as signs of things to come

because things to come come quietly in the night

without making the grand entrance of a moonrise

or heralding their farewell with the garish sunset

of a trumpeter swan. They come on small feet

that barely make a whisper through the grass.

And then they’re gone like a bubble in a mirror

that breaks into ripples on the surface of the mind

once it makes contact with an atmosphere vast enough

to contain it like an enlightened vision of the wind it rides

to ends of the earth like the breath of life within us all

from birth to death, the mysterious door left ajar ahead of us

and the one behind, opening even wider in our wake.

PATRICK WHITE