YOU LOOK AHEAD TO THE SLICE OF LIGHT AT THE OPENING DOOR

YOU LOOK AHEAD TO THE SLICE OF LIGHT AT THE OPENING DOOR

You look ahead to the slice of light at the opening door

and you’re tempted to look back at what

you’re not going to be anymore once you walk through it

without knowing whether it’s an entrance or an exit.

A station of change. A bardo state that slipped between the lines

of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead you’re karmically

sowing your way through to synchronize your seed to the harvest.

Dawn soon. False or otherwise blanching the nightblue

like any other day of life upon earth, into the starless hue

of waking up from the mystery of being alone in the dark

shining into a vast solitude of hidden insights

like the eyes of shy animals warily observing you walk

through the woods like a nightwatchman without a lantern

looking for a light to go by like lightning and fireflies.

In vino veritas, mystically speaking, I’ve been intoxicated

by the grails and skulls of life like a drunk for so long

I speak in the oracular voices of my own exhausted honesty.

I squandered my potential on the actual, applying

my imagination to the surrealistic factual aspects of life

like an oyster bed on the moon pearling whole new worlds

out of a grain of starmud. If work is a form of worship

as the Upanishads say, I’ve laboured long and hard creatively

like a heretic at play in the flames of the staked-out starfields.

And the shadows I’ve cast upon the earth like scarecrows

to look after things in my absence have never depended

upon a light source that wasn’t sublimely human.

I’ve reflexively responded like a shapeshifter

to any fixed image it’s been imperatively suggested

I was created in the name of to mimic like a dead metaphor

I was living like the lyric in the heart of a man

with nothing left to lose when I breached the boundary stones

of the usual taboos like a labyrinth of seawalls, locks and dams

in the liberation path of an emotional tsunami

of oceanic awareness after every earthquake that shook

my foundation stones into an avalanche of quicksand

sliding down the unstable slopes of the world mountain

like an otter down the mudbanks of my own mindstream.

Compassion’s a ruby. Innocence, an emerald. Insight,

a star sapphire. And I wore those like the corona

of an eclipsed crown on the head of a pauper prince,

but it was the diamonds that intensified out of the darkness

like coal in the furnaces of the star clusters I beheld

like luminaries in the black mirrors on the far side of my eyes

that intrigued me the most as an adamantine example

of how to live my life in the midst of decay

with feet of clay and my head among the stars

like the catalytic agent of my own transformations,

the mercury and sulphur of the royal quaternion

of the philosopher’s stone I was enthroned upon

like a beggar king with a dynastic history of self-abdications.

I got down in the dirt under my fingernails

where Neruda says the poetry is. I planted

the withered crescent moons of zinnia seeds

in the furrows of my brow like terraced gardens

I ploughed with the needle of a boustrophic lp

like a palindrome that sang the same

whether you were coming or going either way.

A Satanic message from the angel in the mirror

trying to play both sides of the fence in reverse.

Like the moon, I’ve never lingered in the window

of enlightenment for long, without looking

for an unlocked, backdoor I could enter with effortless ease

like a thief returning what had been taken from me.

PATRICK WHITE