ELEVEN SEAS OF AWARENESS IN EVERY DROP

ELEVEN SEAS OF AWARENESS IN EVERY DROP

Eleven seas of awareness in every drop.

Eleven doors in a see-through water palace

that doesn’t cast stones at the first glance

at the mirror, but flows around them,

the airfoil of a waterbird, the radiant wake,

the long coma of a prophetic skull

plunging into the sun like the dead

waking up in a parabolic orbit once

every seventy-six years. Eleven dimensions.

Seven of them deaf, dumb, blind and mute.

Vertiginous mind at the crossroads

of interpenetrating worlds that pass

right through each other like galactic ghosts

at the intersection of a seance in all directions of prayer.

Mind watching like a cat on an upstairs windowsill.

Alert as still water. Eye of the needle in my gaze.

Jupiter startling over the garish windows

of the eerie, closed shops in wedding dresses

that try too hard, through no fault of the light,

to wash the greater brilliance out with a paint rag

of suspect colours. Alive. The big contention.

How hard everybody strives to establish that

as the one indisputable fact they’ve accepted

by convention. When you can look upon life and death

in the same breath, as two eyes of the one seeing

your indifference might have finally amounted

to something sacred I’d advise you to immediately transcend.

I’ve looked deeply into sanity long enough

to have gone creatively mad three wolf gates ago.

Freedom and bliss have amalgamated like Egyptian gods

on the pschent of the pharaoh. Upper and Lower

traffic in Nubian gold mines and salmon.

I’m standing in the doorway of the new moon

when she opens her eyes in the dark like an eclipse.

When I’m not encumbered like a hill

Sisyphus keeps rolling his stone over like a tomb,

as if it were up to him the sun came up each day,

I like to let my mind wander like a stray thread

of the Milky Way. I strum on my spine

like a bruised guitar in the corner, trying

to come up with a bridge to the chorus

of a new string theory that might help explain

why I act so much like a cosmic membrane

with a broken ear drum. Creatively playing in agony.

Can you give an existential basis to a delusion

like the foundation stone of the moon

to the reflection of the Black Taj Mahal?

The only precedent I know of for the meaning of life

is to make your own. Paint a masterpiece of fire

with your little spark of life. Let it go off

like the collateral damage of the Big Bang

when two membranes kissed in hyperspace

and no one had any idea of how far the light

of all that dark energy was willing to go

just to shine like stars in the indigo nebula

of the wild irises with cool petals as soft

as the skin of an old woman’s eyelids

being woken up from the dead like a dream

she just can’t get out of her heart for the rest of her life.

It’s the becoming, the unfolding, the transforming,

the changing, the burning of the starmaps

like industrial secrets so you can reach out

for what you see in the dark like unattainable fireflies

and by touching them, burn your fingertips

so you can refer to your scars as proof that they’re real.

Think the vision’s ever complete. You’re as dead

as a fly up against a pane of glass. The cat

will push you around like a comma that couldn’t

find its place in the foodchain of a long, ongoing

periodic sentence as incommensurate as pi

in every ripple of rain that falls like a God particle

on your oceanic grave. See how the moon

when you turn your eyes away shape shifts into

the wavelength of a radiant watersnake on the lake

playing picture music on its scales like a crazy keyboard

trying to keep its eighty-eights straight?

See how lovers assume there are no strangers?

PATRICK WHITE