BRIGHT BLUE WINTER SUNDAY IN A SLOW TOWN

BRIGHT BLUE WINTER SUNDAY IN A SLOW TOWN

Bright blue winter Sunday in a slow town.

Eclipsed by the vivid contrast of light and dark,

watching the carcasse of a sabre-tooth in a tarpit,

cellphone by cellphone, being replaced, no app for it,

by younger minerals with an ice-age attitude

less flexible than water about finding their place in life.

Keep your Smilodons protean. Your fangs

deep and lunar as if you were the beginning

and end of things, and all phases in between,

parentheses around the full moon with a smiley face

if you don’t want to grow old plastering starmaps over a window

with one fixed star in the same place every night.

I’m not wallpapering space with wavelengths

of ticker tape in a blizzard of statistical genomes

falling like snow-globes on the triumphs of the past.

This slum isn’t riding a golden chariot past the bank.

But it’s impossible to be anything but confessional

in the twenty-first century, now my eyes change

the nature of anything I’m looking at, the observer,

the observed, no subject, no object, no experiment.

Just this dynamic equilibrium of creative experience

building bridges like oxymoronic metaphors flying in unison

like two wings on a waterbird, or labouring like an ox

to yoke both sides of the mindstream in a single pair

of lunar handcuffs. A new layer of skin has been added

to the bubble of the earth’s atmosphere like a mind

laying its reflection down upon the water

like a chameleonic simulacrum of the moon inseparable

from the undulance of the thought-waves that perceive it.

An inhumane aloofness can never justify

giving birth to Frankenstein ever again.

Things of the world are things of the mind.

Tat tvam asi. You are that. How can you tell me

you poured yourself out of the universe like a window

looking at the stars from the outside in

like an objectively flat goblet that’s never tasted

the flavour of the wine in the dark cellars of its own heart

as if there were an emotional life behind the shining

that can’t be ignored anymore than the mind

can be left out of a unified field theory inexplicably incomplete?

Add a little love to a little understanding

and wisdom’s back in vogue like a literary technique

of going without knowing where the road ends

with the whole universe as a travelling companion

as close to you as your seeing is to the stars

though you’re both lost in the mystery

of just happening to be here with no fixed plans.

My voice is the mother tongue of esoteric nightbirds.

The stars speak in the sacred syllables of my deepest secrets.

Even in the homelessness of the unknown, I am declared

a changeling on a threshold no one’s dared to cross yet without me.

You who think of yourselves as a dirty word

that has to be expurgated like a sunspot on the heart,

the womb scrubbed out by antiseptically surgical hands

that have yet to deliver you like the windfall

of the low hanging fruit of the earth, let me reach

deep into the matrix of your conception of yourselves

and turn you around so every moon rise isn’t a breach birth.

Let me return an eternal flame to the candle

that went so cold it stopped crying sincerely

after you left, like a wax mannequin in pursuit

of a more trustworthy clarity than the ambivalent probabilities

of your provisional humanity trying to take

the focus off itself like the studied indifference of a telescope.

Didn’t you notice its legs unfolded like an easel

so you could climb up on it like a scaffolding

to paint a yard of wet plaster a day until even you

stood in awe of your own creation myth

as an allegorical explanation of your troubled magnificence?

Unchain yourselves from the protocols

of an objective delusion and cultivate a starfield

of subjective correlatives that correspond

with the inexact science of remaining indefensibly human

in the name of deeper accuracy, a sweeter intimacy

with the Cepheid variables and creative singularities

painting haloes around the black holes of yourself

like the moondogs and moodrings of a tree in the rain.

How much you’ll miss about being alive

if you make the same assumptions as a windowpane

that clarity is necessarily sane. Your starmud

wasn’t meant to be squared with every other brick in the wall

even if you’re lacquered in lapis lazuli beside the Ishtar gate.

If the rivers are polluted on the outside

and all your aqueducts taste of the Via Cloacum,

what’s that if not plack on your own arteries?

All our passports are the democratized peers

of our own lack of identity in arrears to everyone.

No one’s asking you to burn your bridges like equal signs

between light and mass. It’s ok if things come and go

as they’ve always done in the absence of a mind

trying to befriend a camera as a more reliable way

of remembering things you can’t help being back stage.

Life isn’t a photo-op of fixed images and neither is poetry.

Adding a little humanity to what’s meteoric about your origins

doesn’t mean you’re going to end up kissing the Kaaba

like a black stone that’s been worn down by millions of lips.

It’s equally conceivable you’re as aniconic as an eclipse.

You’re lustrous with nothing inside. You’re rough as ore

with a gold girlfriend. The stone draws the sword out of you.

Vulcan walks with a limp like Jacob and Richard III

like the iambs of a waterclock, one leg shorter than the other.

It’s time you learned to celebrate your own creative absurdity

like a child playing intensely with her own imagination.

It’s time you got brave enough to risk your own creation

without asking someone for a starmap to misguide you.

Put the delight back in being a lighthouse full of fireflies

or a foghorn that doesn’t heed its own warning

at the mere sound of a voice clearing its throat

of a nightingale covered in creosote to say nothing

a decent chimney spark wouldn’t want the stars to over hear.

Start a fire the size of a big-hearted furnace

that can hold all the stars in and out of place at one time

like a space that embraces everything trivial and sublime

whether they mythically deflate or shine like a weather balloon

candling at high altitude like an emergency parachute

entangled in its own life lines as if that were the only way

you’re ever going to understand the afterlife of a dandelion

air lifting a time capsule to root sometime later in the future.

Surrealistic town, all eyes at the window as if

you were staring into a crystal ball while your ears

are listening to the blind prophetic skull of the moon

predict the return of a nocturnal atmosphere

bluer than a star sapphire in the eyes of a twilit peacock.

There’s not even so much the measure of an eyelash

in the distance between you and the next star.

You’re the nightbird perched like an arrow

singing on the green bough of the centaur.

Gap the abyss a little closer than you do your spark plugs

and not only your soul, but your body will achieve ignition

like two tines of the same tuning fork coming together

like two fingertips of what’s humanly divine

creatively collaborating with your own mind

like choirs of picture music on the Sistine Chapel ceiling

or the wind in the dry leaves clinging to the black walnut trees

while the stars rise in the east like the patriarchs of the fireflies

transcending their sobriety with the creative spontaneity

of burning their imaginary exemplars like effigies and strawdogs

in the gleeful heresy of making constellations up

out of the gusts of the stars that fly like enlightened dragons

that take you by surprise like the fires in their lucidly munificent eyes.

PATRICK WHITE