DEEPER THAN A DREAM MY IMAGINATION HAS ALWAYS SEEN

DEEPER THAN A DREAM MY IMAGINATION HAS ALWAYS SEEN

Deeper than a dream my imagination has always seen

a pilgrimage of sacred clowns dancing against a background

of gathering storm clouds that seem to portend the end of things.

Wiser in their crazy wisdom than the insanity

of the irrational inhumans, braver than heroes

in the courage of their joy, their celebration

almost seems a protest against ineluctable fate,

but there’s a beautiful rapture in the sorrow that makes it art,

a subtle threnody in what they exalt without reservation,

gestures of a playful creativity more profound than doom.

There’s pink on the mountains of the clouds at sunset,

Naples yellow, pale tangerine, but offing to the left

the abyss of a threatening Prussian blue sweeping

like the cape of an infamous eclipse about to deliver

the coup de gras to the whole scene like the sacrificial bull

of the last moonrise trying to get up off its knees.

The grass is plump and damp green on a late summer day.

And there’s a girl with a hoop, not a halo, she’s dancing with

like tree rings jumping orbitals like ripples of rain

and she’s wearing a corny dress, but there’s a smile

on her face you’d think more of a wingspan

than an expression of ineffable bliss realizing

there was never anything more or less than this.

The whole procession is staggered along the ridge

of easy rolling hills like the longer wavelengths of time

that are going to get there just the same, but not in a hurry,

and I don’t have a clue what destination they have in mind

but I’ve always taken it as the sign of the liberated fact

they didn’t need one. No shrine waiting for them at the end.

But it doesn’t matter. The humanly divine is embodied

in the starmud of their own hearts, and it’s shining.

The apocalyptic millenarian imagination of North America

has always struck me as a kind of cosmic viciousness

that wants to call the fire down early to get even

with the people more inspired to love than they are

long before the sun has any notion of mythically inflating its lungs

with one last gasp of the earth’s evaporating atmosphere.

You ever wonder what a Puritan sees when he looks at the stars?

Meteor showers or too many flowers among the vegetables?

I’ve been qualified by love in no man’s land long enough

to wear bars like scars on my shoulder. And disappointment

never tires of telling me I’m ageing, and not to put

too much store in inspiration striking like lightning twice

in the same place on the far side of the lake

I swam across like a brain wave to get here.

Wasn’t it me who wrote life is a river with only one bank

and I’m not even standing on that? I don’t

underestimate the accuracy hidden under the deathmasks of despair

nor the translucency of hidden hopes disguised

by everyday human faces being swept out to sea

like eyelids of apple bloom that didn’t come to fruition.

I’ve bent my will like a ceremonial sword

no one else could ever pick up and use again

and offered it in tribute to the water sylphs

of my imagination like a blade of moonlight on a lake.

My insights have been disciplined in the black holes of my pain.

My whole soul’s been a dark monk in an observatory

on a cold mountaintop where I’ve lived with my solitude

cowled like an eclipse in the enormous silence of an abyss

radiant with stars as beguiling as the sky bound peers

of the earth born wildflowers in the valley down below.

Love can be a terrorist with a sense of compassion

or an angel with a flaming sword you mistook

for a spear of inexplicable ecstasy when you went looking

for someone to fill your hive with honey, but forgot

wasps don’t make honey, only the honey-bees do that.

So it’s tricky. Love isn’t the answer to everything.

Sometimes a little entomology goes a lot further.

Cocoons, chrysales, mustard seed sized eggs and trap door spiders.

Sometimes it’s wise to judge a book by its cover.

And maybe an urn is the inevitable end of the furnace of the heart

love is, and everyone is glutted by a bellyful of ashes,

but even a few chimney sparks of love are enough

to make the fire spread like a firestorm of stars

and deep underground, even in the most demonic, root-fires.

PATRICK WHITE