YOUR FACE AMONG MANY, A BLOSSOM

YOUR FACE AMONG MANY, A BLOSSOM

Your face among many, a blossom.

Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.

The sun can’t understand why it can’t

open the buds of the parking meters.

Some people worry they don’t have talent.

Given a name, who isn’t a masterpiece?

A perfect self-portrait of what they’re becoming?

Talent, the worst superstition of all.

That lullaby you sing to your voodoo doll

at bedtime, to let her know she’s special

when, in fact, she’s blind. Talent.

That estranged mix of an eclipse and an oilslick

that isn’t sure of its standing in life.

Sensible shoes wishing they had wings on their heels.

The redundant navigator of mountain streams

that would have found their own way to the river

all by themselves. You ask if I think you have talent.

To me that’s like a flower asking

if I think it will ever come to bloom,

a star wondering if it’s shining or not,

a sea uncertain of its own waves and weather.

And I say, your eyes do, your ears do, your mouth has,

these birch-trees, those starlings, that tree, those rocks,

these rags of last year’s flowers do, but not you.

On the day of creation when God exhausted herself

using up the leftovers of her inspiration

so as not to let anything go to waste, she pinched the noses

of a few sacred clowns and instead of

breathing life into their lungs, she opened their throats

and poured a special esoteric elixir of talent,

the mother of all oceanic love potions

that ever played favourites with a select few

among everyone she’d ever given birth to,

out of her mouth into theirs, such that like her

all they had to do, they were so talented,

was give the word. Say be. And it was.

Because the moment you ask if you have something,

you’ve already lost it. Like space or time or mind,

talent isn’t possessed. It’s made manifest spontaneously.

Do you see the ruby throated hummingbirds

in a last duel with the thorns

of the locust trees in blossom,

one drawing blood, the other, first honey?

Behind every river making its way to the sea

stands the cornerstone of a mountain

buried under an avalanche

it brought down upon itself

like the winter solstice

between the dolmens of Stonehenge,

just as every drop of water is a lost key,

the Rosetta stone of a nameless grave in the rain

that can still speak fluently

the mother-tongue of the dead language

that buried oviparous metaphors

like oxymoronic dragons in cosmic eggs,

a coincidence of contradictory birds and snakes

the highs and the lows, made whole again.

Asking me if you’ve got talent is like

a nebula light years across asking me if it’s got stars.

Do the candles wish they were fireflies?

Do you write with your eyes or your ears?

And if you’re asking me if you’ve got

the bit, the spit, the spurs, the stirrups

to ride a wild, white-winged horse in a rodeo

without being thrown off, I’d say

the most seasoned saddle of all

is to ride bareback along the Milky Way in summer

and see for yourself if you can make it as far

as Altair in Aquila or the Deneb in the Swan.

And then realize, if you can’t, the real star

of the show all along was the rodeo clown

who rescues the riders when they’re down and out

by living dangerously on the horns of a dilemma

he had to make his own to spare the hero

from any further injury that might come

from taking anything too seriously.

And don’t canter as if you had talent

you can put your trust in like a reliable lie.

Risk everything on one leap of the fence.

Assume you’re a genius and fly.

You sweep the stars under your prayer rug

and then come and ask me if you’re a good housekeeper.

You want to know if your third eye is glass

or real crystal, something from the depression era,

and I turn it circumspectly in the light

and focus it on the sun and the moon

and few oddball stars nearby,

and I can see where you’ve being crying a lot

and missed a spot that makes things perfectly clear.

Talent might polish the mirror of the Hubble Telescope

to get rid of the smear of the Andromeda Galaxy,

to rub a hundred billion stars out

for the sake of appearances, but genius

sees through every drop of rain that falls

like an eye of its own through a broken windowpane

it’s just thrown the moon through like a lunatic

at the reflection of its own face

on the waterless pond of its own seeing

to make waves just to see itself as it is

warped like space and time

by the crazy wisdom of the circus mirrors

that are always in tears of laughter.

And this by the merest of inclinations

to have a good chuckle at the expense

of the straight-faced paradigms

trying to get a fix on their shining as if

they were measuring the nearest distance

the fireflies approach earth at apogee by parallax.

Talent may well be the architectural blueprint

of the underlying infrastructure of the chrysalis,

but it’s the worm that crawls

into whatever house of transformation,

whatever zodiac squatting on the outskirts

of whatever shantytown gerry-mandered out of scraps,

salvage, cast offs, discarded parts of mechanical experience

looking for a new purpose in life,

and flies out the other end with mandalas

not starmaps on its wings.

Talent takes note of the traffic signs

long before it’s walked the road.

Until you realize through the eyes in your blood

with a passion that won’t go back the way it came,

like the fish hook of the moon

torn out of the fleshy part of your heart the wrong way,

or revoke the names of the things you’ve given birth to

crossbreeding with a fertile imagination

when things get dark and narrow

in a black hole where the shadows of sacred fires

dance to the picture-music of hallowed cave paintings,

until you realize how meaningless and futile

the most significant things in life are

you’ll never know the playful intensity

of being so wholly absorbed into your own creation

there’s no afterbirth of inspiration to cast off

like a shadow of the mind upon the light.

If you’re still looking for your own face

behind the veils you lift

like the mirages of mediocrity

in the breathless splendour

of the restless mirrors of reality

where you drink from your own reflection

like the false idol of an image

you’ve kissed the feet of before.

Be assured. If you’re still down on your knees

before this simulacrum of seeing

you’re just peeking through the keyhole

of a little door into a bigger world

that isn’t sleepwalking through the same dream you are.

If you’ve got talent. And why not?

When everything else including you does,

except when you’re a fish out of water

dying of thirst beside a fresh water lake

asking the stars if you can swim as well as they do.

If so. Why do you keep it to yourself

like some secret contagious disease

you haven’t had time to spread around yet?

If you’ve got talent, don’t judge

the quality of the wine by asking someone

to appraise the worth of the jewels

that open like the eyes of rubies and rhinestones,

like fierce Venutian diamonds in the twilight

of empty, golden goblets mortally wounded

by the going down of the sun

striking its colours like pennants of surrender.

But if you’ve ever known the delirious oblivion

of the protean genius or juno of a child

then your cup runneth over like the moon at full.

You drink from the cups

of the wild gypsy poppies

with the crazy lunar slips of the tongue

they keep whispering like the sacred syllable

of a cataba worm at the bottom of a bottle

like an unforgiving message for help in your ear.

And it’s perfectly clear

from the either/or lens of your orbiting telescope

the stars aren’t waiting for an answer

to all their big first magnitude questions,

but if you were to say anything, say it

like the ghost of a breath from the past,

a shadow in passing

that makes the candle flames tremble

at a seance of sensitive souls and murky mediums

in a delirium of stars giving rise

to a dancer in a dream riding her own thermals

in the cooling of an August afternoon like a red-tailed hawk

winging it on the fly for the euphoric high of it,

for the pure joy and solitude

in the miscreant freedom of it

from the wounded wild rose in her heart

like blood and wine and the miracle of mirages

in a bottled hourglass of quicksand.

Down to the lees of moonset

in your own bottomless skull

where you can read the black tea leaves for yourself

like the spinal vertebrae of books on a library shelf

to see if you’re ever going to make it into print or not

like a fossil in the Burgess Shale

of a lonely species of heart and mind

that was one of a kind from beginning to end.

Of course, you’re talented. Show me a star

or a stagestruck flower in the green room that isn’t.

But talent isn’t just another antidotal snake serum

you pour like iodine onto to the burn

of a lightning strike you can’t mend any other way.

And genius, what can anybody say?

You won’t find it out trying to stake a claim

to the insights it’s been panning for

like nuggets of harvest gold

from the blue ore of the new moon’s dark potential.

from the mindstreams that have been turning over

the reflections of the green mountains

they’ve been walking beside all day

like stones in the flow of an ongoing conversation

that might have something hidden under them

like stars that size of misfit diamonds

that ring the craters of the meteor impacts

that don’t enlighten anything

that’s bigger than your eyes

could ever dream of seeing.

And what new species of intensely creative visual life

might have come of them in the aftermath

by adapting that poem you’re holding in your hand

like the neck of a dying swan song

to a whole new biosphere of picture-music

where merely to breathe the stars in and out

even at these lower altitudes

in these valleys of the fireflies

the storm passed over out of consideration

for their blood ties to the lightning,

were to sign your name in the first edition

of a cosmic guest book with the wingspan

of an immensely talented constellation

working on the first draft of a brilliant myth of origin

that says as it will be at the end,

so it was in the beginning

and is now in the coming of nightfall to a stranger.

PATRICK WHITE

TO BE ALIVE HERE

TO BE ALIVE HERE

To be alive here

is to suffer the godspear of light

that enflames your breath with life

through the heart, the night

of its knapped shale

embedded in every part

like a mystic jewel in a wound that never heals

or a hidden nightbird in the far fields

when only the stars are listening.

To be alive here is to know

your only here and now

is to be alive.

Born into the lifeboat,

who needs to be rescued?

Is the fish afraid of drowning,

does a bird implore the sky;

is there not enough room in your eyes for stars?

Images, thought, symbols, feelings, words,

we live behind billboards illuminated

by artificial daffodils of light,

and walk our own midways alone

from tent to tent of sensation,

from mutant perversity to mystic elation,

blind in the blazing: come in, come in,

to the darkness under a flap of your skin.

How much has not changed for how long

inside the cocoon that diapers your reluctance

not to hump out of yourself with wings,

not to jewel the maggot with stars,

not to let the swamp hold up its waterlily,

not in overcoming or advancement,

not a white diploma of moonlit skin,

but a symbol and a celebration of what became of you

elaborating the world generation after generation

until, not enough just to see it,

your eyes immersed in the sea like rain

that has known the roots of the flowers

and opened the golden mouths of the grain

and washed the stars out of the hair of the fool,

and rinsed the age like a bloodstain off the stage,

you can finally be it.

You are empty.

Blood unspools like a thread

drawn out like a river unravelling the oceans of you

that used to lap these flesh bound shores

and flaunt this palace of bone on loan

from an absentee owner.

There is no face under your name

that isn’t looking away from itself

like light from the sun.

Utterly subjectivized, the imagination

reverses its spin

and things come undone,

and the skies that have dropped like petals from their eyes

to see without seeing the unseeable

are neither many nor one

nor the ineffable sum of the unbeable

because all things have already been achieved

and the world returned like water to the mindstream

it was taken from

like a snake that startles the stillness

before it flows away into the silence

or the light of a star that shines within

that doesn’t trouble the day.

But to live here in irrefutable bliss

you mustn’t confess to anyone

you were born knowing this.

To live here truly is to live

as if you had never existed,

though there are lifetimes behind you

like footprints on the road of ghosts

to say where you’ve been,

and every breathless glimpse is the eye

of someone you’ve never seen.

Here is the everywhere of is

and there is no shadow of another,

no map of blood to follow you like a pilgrim,

no sister, no father, no mother, no brother

you could possibly mean

to the photo-album of an ageing gene

that doesn’t remember you

except as someone who was passing through

who didn’t know what things could lead to

when the stranger in the dangerous valley

took the highroad out of the mountains like an echo.

To be alive here

is to suffer one day, and dance the next,

to pass by rooms within yourself you never open

like tiny lockets of rain you weep alone in the shadows,

among so many furious stars,

trying to seed the pain with flowers

or patch new skin, a cool herb of light

over the burnt face of the moon like waterlilies

so the black mirrors will reverse themselves in the night

and turn your eyes away

from the things you can’t shatter with looking.

To be alive here

is to know you are dying,

the whole breath of the moment in every death

baling like overwhelmed boats to stop your crying.

Where do we go? Does anyone know?

Are we cinders and crows in the eyes of this shoreless sea

that watches us like a dream

no one can wake up from alive,

is this disproportionate night the jewel in the hive

that eclipses this rapture of honey

with more space than the flowers and stars can face?

Is a dead thing the king of its own skull-throne

or a toy of the ants lugging dismembered butterflies through its eyes

like sails crushed in the ice of a northwest passage

to be reassembled like moonboats on the other side?

We are islands and waves

and we close our eyes like the sea

in the imageless depths of our own inconceivability.

We are humans, worlds within worlds, and each

with a light of their own to know them by.

We are stars circling the lighthouse of our own knowing

like words off the coast of consciousness

that all mean, like birds, the same boundless sea

that slowly wound its aeons up like alarm clocks

to set us off like an insurgency of thought.

We are humans, bells and hells of blood and water that walk

upright like lightning rods wired to a brain

that the sea panned like a nugget of light

freaked with night, from the ore of a lunar vein

and everywhere we fall upon our own roots

and wash our own skulls clean of ourselves

like rain that was once alive

to raise them again like the moon to our lips, and thrive.

Long-winded brevity; brief longevity,

to be alive here is to be constantly giving

without knowing what your true gifts are,

like rain and rocks or the light of a star,

because even to share

is to set us apart divisively,

to break the plough like a wishbone.

There’s silver in the voice of the rock when it speaks of change

and though the rain doesn’t really know what it seeks to be

it gives itself everywhere inexhaustibly like a hinge

to the turning of everything,

and how could the night have guessed

the enlightened fury of a star

under the scars of its own elements

would lead to us in all our radiant intelligence

like something it got off its chest?

To be alive here is to know

that a single drop of water is enough

for the moon to swim in her own seas again,

and there are tides in the windowpane she transits

flashing with life, tiny glass fish

that make a turmoil of devotion

by seeding the ocean with eyes.

To be alive here is to know the wise

know less than you on both sides of the mirror

that lies in pieces at their feet like waves

that have learned to hold their tongues.

To be alive here

is to read a book on transcendence

while you’re sitting in the sun,

to ask why the moon is crying

when you’ve already drowned in her tears.

Is it holy? Is it joy? Is it real?

And look at the way it takes the whole of itself

from beginning without end to end without beginning

to make a single eye, all the measureless aeons of the myriads

that stand behind and before the seeing

timing the shutter-release

like someone taking their own picture,

running to get in the shot

before the flash goes off like light in the abyss

to illuminate the billions upon billions of faces

shed like apple-bloom in the orchard

from the radiant tree of its rootless being.

What is this without antecedent

I so urgently need to know

that I have poured the stars into me

and the starlessness of long, autumnal nights

and slept like the eyes of the rain in the roses of hell,

and grown black pearls out of a grain of dirt

like new moons in the mouth of a funeral bell

and hurt and hurt and hurt until

I could not tell who or what

was suffering me in and out of existence

like a dream in a fire that burnt without consuming,

my eyes in space twisted like melting windowpanes,

and darkness running down the blade of my solitude

like a night dew of black blood on the tongue of the moon

as I shook in my chains like an avalanche

imprisoned in the heart of a mountain

where I wept like a metal in the cold abyss

of a horror without eyes or a name

that is everywhere this

that keeps killing me into bliss

by striking me like fire from a rock,

like the rainbow from its lock,

like a sword from the stone of the moon.

The universe pours itself out like a fountain

into its own inexhaustible mouth

like a drunk with a jewel in a bottle in a brown paper bag

up against the writing on the wall

in a dangerously infinite back alley

where Peter pretends to love Sally.

In each and every part it gives and takes

the whole of itself like a gift, like an ocean,

like an ocean breaking into eyes,

or the squirrel in the bluebells,

or me sitting here with the trees, waiting for leaves.

And everything is so eloquently

this effusion of transformation

as if fire were a music all its own

and in every flame and face,

thread, star, thorn, leaf, flower and voice,

in every feather and wave of awareness,

in every thought, feeling, and delusion,

and in what is beyond what we think,

the whole of the tapestry, the whole of the sky, the sea, the vision,

the mystic specificity of the indefinable,

the creative urgency of the uncreate

dropping worlds like pebbles in a pond

where every ripple opens its horizons like an eye

and even the rings of the tree are a slow pulse,

and the waterbirds shed their jewels in moonlight

and beyond beyond into the immaculate darkness of the thriving night

is the way their wings beat, the heart flows,

a star reaches out to touch the skin of a grape,

or a wave greets an island in a new language,

or a god drowns in himself so again and again and again

he can review his whole life flashing before his eyes

through every one of us,

through the rose and the bloodstain,

through the doorway and the window and the dream,

through everything that seems and unseems itself

like roads of light that move like snakes in the water,

like the holy paths of the unnamed ones

who return like memories of coal converted to diamonds

dancing with fools in the translucent bliss of their clarity.

One existence. Many. None. Three waves of light.

The sea. The sun. I am manifested

by everything I’ve ever been

like the running of a river

without beginning or end,

not old water behind, and new ahead,

but the whole universe, my watershed,

I am drawn from the well in this bucket of a body

enflamed by this fierce urgency of stars,

inextinguishable fire on the water,

growing eyes like ambassadors

from everything I am

to the empty throne

of the infinite bloodline

that delivers me like a message to me,

worlds within worlds like the sea in a bottle

bobbing at my feet.

And everything is always teaching;

every tree runs a school, every star

is a private tutor, every flower

a sage in a brothel, this harlot of blood

the wine of an unknown church,

and every bone in my body

the rung of a descending saint.

And what do they inexhaustibly teach

if not the youness of you to you,

if not the dark abundance

of your formlessness through forms

as if the world, and all that are in it

were your native language

and you were the ancient future of everything,

and every seed, a betrothal; and every flower, a bride?

Why suffer like a refugee at the gate

of your own estate

by refusing to let yourself in

through the open doors of the trees;

With eyes that are wider than space

where can you hide from your own being,

or wash the seeing from your face?

Does ubiquity look for a place to stand,

a place to call its own, a seat at the table,

when everywhere it’s the homeless host

of these world-bearing guests who bow like trees

on the branching thresholds of a boundless feast?

In the furthest fields of yourself

you are the star, and the flower, and the seeing,

and it’s the namelessness of everything

that grows a mouth without saying like a word

that gathered overnight on the tongue of a leaf

that can taste you like the nascent stars of an old belief;

you have shone so long alone in the dark

to be alive here in every inseparable part.

PATRICK WHITE