THE DEMONICALLY ENLIGHTENED SEE FURTHER INTO HELL

THE DEMONICALLY ENLIGHTENED SEE FURTHER INTO HELL

The demonically enlightened see further into hell

than the light the angel eyes see by. Who knows

a woman better than when you’ve lost her?

So I know the bliss of heaven as I know

the depth of the regrets of Pandemonium.

Both ends of the telescope. The vapour of the rose

and the smoke of oil fires throwing snakes

and black feathers on the pyres of the wildflowers

that shed their petals like scales. A white star

in the arms of a black hole it’s dancing around binarily.

The via positiva coiled around the via negativa

like the copulative way of day and night,

helical theta waves killing and healing,

changing their spin contemporaneously

in synchronicity with the charged starfields

in every creative moment we live here to shine

a light out of the darkness of awareness

we haven’t seen before. And I say,

prophetically hooded in snake skin,

this interim in the late fall, this fateful pause

in the roseate third eye of a galactic hurricane

bearing down upon us like diamond-edge blades

in a threshing field full of scarecrows

that incorporated the crop into the strawdogs

of their bodies, is the Age of Disappointment,

the bursting of the myriad balloons of the multiverse

blooded like roses hemorrhaging on their own thorns.

We grow older faster than we used to

trying to keep up with the pace of our longevity

fleeing from the light of the way things are,

one jump ahead of our youth, as if the ship

were abandoning the plague rat of time

by scuttling itself on the reefs of a foreign eternity

wearing the deathmask of the moon

that gapes down upon us all in shock

at what we’ve done to ourselves in the green room

like an atlas of shattered mirrors slashing out at us

in a frenzy of reflections that make things clear as blood.

Disappointment is the prelude to desecration.

And though we all hype our optimistic overviews

of the text to come, we haven’t seen anything yet

like the wind that will knock us out of our words

like the empty nests of the birds that had heard enough

to stop singing before us. The terrible stillness

of the first sign of a red alert in heaven

and the great silence that overwhelms

the air raid sirens of hell. And all

the opinionated lighthouses and foghorns

that made a career out of not taking their warnings

seriously enough, snuffed out and blinded

like the mouths and eye-sockets of prophetic skulls

in the decaying orbits of an avalanche of asteroids

taking their lead from the insurgent cells of shepherd moons.

A ravening species of life that eats itself

out of house and home like a cannibalistic planet

that lives off its own, gone antibiotically insane.

But even a total eclipse doesn’t cover the sun wholly

and the corona gleams through the valleys

of the lunar mountains like Bailey’s Beads.

And there’s even a dim halo around the rim of a black hole.

And among the condemned you can sometimes see

a begrudging kind of merit that shines out

of the slag and slurry of the excruciating transformations

of the ore that’s being refined by suffering and experience,

a black jewel that radiates dark energy

even in the false dawn of an unworthy afterlife.

Just below the scar tissue of the earth’s crust,

seven kilometers down in a diamond mine

blind on the coal road to the light,

thermophilic bacteria have regenerated life on the planet

after near annihilation three times.

So if any of us survive ourselves in this empire

of mineralized cells and exotic metals

out of our exuberant neurons what photons

of our bioluminescence might jump orbitals

and spread like foxfire across the scorched earth again,

casting the ashes of stars in the urns of the rose-hips

on the roots trying to cling in the cold

to some notion of spring that keeps their bloodstream

blooming in their underground hearts

like one of the more graceful arts of survival?

PATRICK WHITE