LIVING OFF THE GRID

LIVING OFF THE GRID

Living off the grid in the interstices between the threads

of the spider webs bejewelling the sky with stars

like the net of Indra in the morning dew. Mark one drop

and they’re all marked. Subtract from one

and you take from all. Same way with our eyes

when they see like crystal skulls right through

the ruse of themselves to the glassblowers

of fifteenth century Germany. Cool visuals.

The light refracting off the nuanced smear

above their left front parietal lobes as if

they had something as happy and irrational as water

to be clear about in a brittle kind of way.

And that’s ok, that’s ok, that’s ok, too,

but you’ve got to get down and dirty in the starmud

like the root of an optic nerve deep in the dark matter of the brain,

if you want to be what you see in the visionary sense of the word.

If you want to fly with the dragons that bring the rain

you can’t sip like a hummingbird collecting blood samples

from the hollyhocks. You can’t live like a tuning fork

witching for a lightning strike if you haven’t got

the circuitry for it. If your axons aren’t grounded to the earth

you’ll be blown out like the brown out of a power station

that wasn’t a fit companion for the sun

because you couldn’t handle the excruciating transformations

of your own shining, the disciplined ferocity

of a controlled burn. You’re either one of the fire wombs of life

or the ashes of a dragonfly in the furnace of a chrysalis

that breaks like the under-fired pottery of a fortune-cookie urn.

Or a stale koan. Either way you’re not a guru of the absurd

that’s been enlightened by the crazy wisdom standing

in the backlit doorways of delusion, grateful for a hand out

if you’ve never shaken your spiritualism down on the street

to feed your hungry ghosts something meaty and sweet.

If you want to build your house in the back starfields

of an off road zodiac, you’ve got to start like an incipient galaxy

with a big black hole as deep as a godhead in your heart

and the bedrock foundation of an asteroidal avalanche

that brings the mountain down on the valley like a gravestone

that’s waiting for somebody to put their name and return address on it.

Even if you’ve blooded your abstractions with soporific poppies

and you’re sleepwalking through dreamland, you’re still

not homeless enough to be in exile from yourself.

You’re still breathing in and out like a hinge on a gate in space.

And there’s a light in your face that tells me you’re

a lantern in the dark that’s never worn its own deathmask

to a ghost dance without paling like the stars

in the false dawn of the fire that consumes them.

And I’ve noticed you never take

the cranium of your begging bowl

around to the door of an entrance

from which there is no exit.

And that’s ok, that’s ok, that’s ok, too.

PATRICK WHITE