I DRAG ON MY CIGARETTE

I DRAG ON MY CIGARETTE

I drag on my cigarette

and pull the coffee up to my mouth

as if I were officiating at a sacrament

and it were some holy bell

extolling the black wine of the bean.

I am always more in the morning

than I will be again all day

and the light is creative until precisely noon

and I am at peace in the impersonal intimacy

of flowing along like a star or a man or a leaf

in this great dynamic that never goes anywhere outside itself

like a bloodstream, a mindstream, the nightstream

that flashes in the woods like the eyes of a beautiful woman,

and yet all these worlds within worlds move with it

as fluently as thought and feeling

in a mind that is not divided by decisions

or trying to locate itself like a constellation

on a starmap in the rain,

insanely fitting every drop

with the axis of a pin

to divine the source of the shining.

And it’s always been a mystery to me

how I can be so ignorant and all-seeing simultaneously

but what keeps me alive, breathing, beating, baffled and alert,

a gust of awareness, of wheeling air and images

in a moment of joy and dispersal

where the light touches the dirt like a lover

and the dirt rises,

is this infinite instance

of an inconceivable intelligence so intimately close

the flame leaps from the fire,

and the moon falls from its flower

like the petal of an hour that overslept

and the birds are swimming in the shadow-waters of the trees

like elegant, inexhaustible pens in ink

that leave no trace on the sky of anything

beyond what the mind can think

until it stops turning the days like the pages

of a journal only the wind keeps

like autumn leaves and mindless sages

and learns from the seed-mouth how to sing

of the abundance that flows from its undoing.

Stop trying to prune the rose with its own thorns.

You can’t put serpent fire out with water

or grasp a question by the neck

to milk the crescents of the moon for an antidote.

Would you put a bit in the mouth of the wave?

Would you uncoil your cravings like flypaper

to catch a star

then green it through the glass of a canning-jar?

Is the you of what you do

the you of who you are

or deep inside is there a blind jewel

that’s waiting for you to turn the light around

and give it eyes

so you can see through yourself

and stop trying to net fish with the moon’s reflection?

But if you think the answers will put the matter to rest,

get the world off your chest

like the shadow of the stone twin

that mimicked you into self-consciousness

and stalks you even now unseen

like a dog or the moon or eclipse of the blood

closing the mouths of the lilies that speak for the starmud,

you have not followed the questions

far enough into your life

where you have never been

to understand how little the answers really mean

when the ant moves the mountain

and the grass is green.

I stand in the furnace of the worlds like wax

and know the fury of the fire is everywhere at peace with itself,

and the only holy wars are lonely and creative.

As I am, as I am, as I am,

my singular appeal and pulse,

my homely simulacrum for the event I call me

when I knock like waves on my own door

to ask whose footprints line the shore

and only the moon’s face on a threshold of water

rises like the gentile coast of a skull

to say I don’t live here anymore.

You can’t wash the night off

by taking a bath in an eclipse

and there are darknesses so intensely clear

that colours would only pollute the brutal purity

of the eye that dispossessed them,

poured them out like a delirium of words and wine

that could no longer dumbfound the emptiness

with the enlightened delusion of being forsakenly me.

And to say whatever this is before me now is nothing

is wrong

and to say this darkness myriads into form

and lucidly fills the world with things

is wrong,

and it is not mind or death or dark matter

nor me nor you nor God nor the devil

and yet its utter stillness mountains into mushrooms and fountains

and the whole issue is apparent in every event

like the taste of salt and stars

in the mouth of an open wound.

Is your skull honoured by what it must contain,

is the stone you lay your head upon

appalled by what it props up

when its metals reveal

the swords and crowns

you’ve poppied with blood,

or is your head still cooling

like mystic bread on a windowsill

like the universe

straight from the ovens of hell

in a purgatorial breeze

your goodness defanged like a whip?

Or maybe you’re writing love poems

on the sails of a boney ghost ship

to a lifeboat on the moon

bobbing in a sea of shadows?

Or the leaves at your door

who show up with maps to save you

don’t know what autumn is anymore

or how to follow the wind to the far shore

where the straw keeps faith with the grain

and the scarecrow is feathered with fire

and there is no distinction between joy and pain

and the stone dances as fleetly as moonlight

silvers the vein of the garden snail

that smears the slow stream of its going

across my radiant path

like the enlightened thought of a tiny brain?

Have we not already come again and again

to a place we have never existed,

is this not the effusive locus of every moment,

the inceptive finish of every breath we give back

to the sustaining intimacy of the unconceived

who nourish conception with their emptiness

and confide themselves like seeing to the seen

and shape space like water into eyes

deeper than a full eclipse of the moon?

You cannot fathom the strangeness of this moment you are,

you cannot assess the span of your being with wings

or appeal to a god like a bloodstream

you can pour yourself back into like wine

seeking tomorrow’s delirium with yesterday’s vine,

when the whole of creation is the merest suggestion of you

out to the furthest star

that puts itself out like a torch

in its own reflection of who you are.

You don’t have to study your eyes to see

or cultivate your features like a holy book to be.

Because there is no intention in the emptiness

there is no karma to redress

and nothing to bind or separate

and no witness to affirm or deny

and nothing to diminish or enlarge

and no wisdom in the waterlily

nor ignorance in the swamp,

and the clouds let go

and the chains lay hold

and the lead doesn’t taste of gold

but the union doesn’t differentiate

among its exquisite distinctions

and the old woman is not old

and the cripples run

and the road outpaces the racers

like a long finish line

and there are no fractures when everything is whole

and no god when everything is.

PATRICK WHITE