IT ISN'T AS FAR AS YOU MIGHT THINK

IT ISN’T AS FAR AS YOU MIGHT THINK

It isn’t as far as you might think

from this spiritual lost and found

coiled like a labyrinth of cul de sacs

or a snake of time spiralling down

the seven degenerative metals of man

through the rib gates in the belly of a dragon

that’s flamed out like a red-tailed hawk riding

the last of its cooling thermals down with the sun,

not as far as you might think, according to the moss

that grows all over your north side

from this circuitous blossoming into knots

in the hardwood of a rootless tree

to the threshold of where your heart belongs.

Dig yourself out of that old National Geographic

like an explorer that never got to go

and unfold that free starmap someone included

like a flag of protocol awarded a dead celestial sailor

and start connecting the dots like ports of call

in the eyes on the dice of a long shot against the odds

that nobody believed could be made until you took it.

Where was it ever suggested that the return journey

would be any less dangerous than the first time

you left yourself like a stranger in the doorway

of this house of life, waving farewell in the rain

as you carefully put the chain back on the gate behind you?

The object of the grailquest isn’t so much

a matter of finding it as it is learning how

to lose yourself wisely in the search. You can

orient your mindscape to the direction of your shining

like a circumpolar constellation, but to sip

from the Little Dipper isn’t going to green

that dead branch of a divining rod in your hand.

The journey isn’t lost upon you because

you’re out there on the road alone

with nothing but departures behind you

and the only arrival on your horizon

more of the unknown without a return address.

What if the stars you take your bearings from

set out to find the source of their shining

and turned their light back on themselves

like solar flares to see where they were going? Do you think

you could see them from here on this hillside,

to assign them names and myths of origin

they whisper to your eyes at night like fairytales

and lullabies to help you get to sleep

when you lay your head down like moonset

on the cold stone of the world by the roadside?

The moment you go looking for yourself

do you leave the part that’s beating the bushes for you at home?

Have you ever checked out who’s in the search party?

Go ask the diamond sages. They aren’t the masters

of an enlightenment no one can attain. They sit

like stars in the throne rooms of dark matter,

lords of the darkness, confusion and chaos

that have mastered them spontaneously like ore

to the indirections of an undisciplined way of shining

so the dark mirror you wander in looking

for a lifemask you can recognize as a face of your own,

is brighter than the white one of insight

you’ve had so much trouble adjusting your eyes to

like a telescope to the weather of a habitable planet.

No ray of the light you’re looking for

ever started out with a sense of direction.

No star, no beacon, no lantern, no insight,

no firefly, lightning bolt or lighthouse

ever plotted a straight path through the abyss

that wasn’t omnidirectionally bent

by the gravitational eyes of space it passed

on its journey to nowhere in particular

though it bumped into a few planets and wildflowers

along the way it was exactly meaningless to take.

No one’s ever really lost. They’re just

not very adept at reading their own starmaps.

They look for what shines though the eyes of a crow

remembering how white its feathers were

before it found the continent it was sent out

before the dove to look for. And Noah cursed it black

for not coming back. Lost innocence longing for light.

Long wavelengths on the night sea of awareness

looking for land like particles and cornerstones

they can found their spiritual temples upon

like aviaries for the wrens and sparrows

buffeted back by the winds they’re flying against

like the ashes of disinterred aspirations in their own face.

Lost in the woods, everyone looks at the constellations

like light in the windows of a distant farmhouse.

But no one ever consults all the darkness beyond

the blazing midways of the zodiac like deer paths

off the ecliptic or wolf packs above the timberlines

of their celestial equators. Aldebaran

is sixty-five lightyears from here as we’re

eight light-minutes from the nearest sun.

But how far does a human who is the measure of all things,

have to go before he or she realizes the darkness

was always the truest sense of direction for anyone

trying to shine a light on where the light has gone

without them, so they can see in the dark

how their eyes emerge out of the search for themselves

and the night whispers like a homecoming embrace

in the ear of the prodigal do you finally recognize

who I am? Even when you most deeply eclipsed

the shining of the black mirror of awareness,

blinded by the candle of your own lantern

there’s never been a son or daughter of a star

that was ever lost in me since the light began.

PATRICK WHITE