LIGHTNING HITS THE HORNS OF THE MORNING
SNAIL
Lightning hits the horns of the morning
snail
like the tines of a tuning fork
and the larkspur sees in the ashes of
the holy one,
a tiny urn, no bigger than a cigar
butt,
a deep connection to the stars
at the root of its ultramarine towers,
the ugly and despised become luminously
beautiful
by what they’ve been touched by. Same
with candles, night, the human spirit,
a poem
and the stars and planets
that ride the film of our eyes across
the sky
or slide across the poppies of blood
that bloom
on the other side of our eyelids in the
sunshine
like blue sunspots and serpentine
rainbows
on the deft wings of the houseflies
aspiring
to penetrate the heights and mysteries
of being
as if they approached God like an
ineffable windowpane,
and the black mirrors of the oil slicks
that eclipse our faith in our
transformative power
to change things. Two petals of violet
cosmos,
two eyelids of a new way of looking at
things,
swaying ethereally in the wind
as if they were keeping time
to a faint music they can hear
way back somewhere in their mind’s
eye, fall
and stick themselves to the back of a
snail
inching its way along a garden path in
metric
through a crosswalk of rococo shadows,
and who would have believed
something so low and slow could fly
if they hadn’t seen it with their own
eyes?
Show me anything your eyes have ever
been deprived of,
however ugly, however visually
tantalizing,
inside our out, even if you can count
more than the usual three,
and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t
learned
how to be grateful for the generosity
of the black hole they’re living in
like one of the darlings of light.
Clarity isn’t just a matter
of straightening out the wavelengths in
your line of sight
and then looking upon everything you
see
as if it were flatlining in parallel
event horizons
everywhere you looked for signs of life
and came upon death, and mistook it for
peace.
It isn’t just a matter of
contemplating sundials
in erratically disciplined Zen gardens
until you come to understand how to use
the shadows
on behalf of your own spiritual insight
as readily as you’ve mastered your
weapons of light.
No one’s ever been purified by a holy
war.
Not even the warrior minstrel of the
forlorn hope.
You can exhaust a whole new generation
of third eyes
trying to make it all one out of a lot
of little separate pieces
that reflect the whole in every part
of your shattered chandeliers and
mirrors,
that long pilgrimage, that fire walk of
shining splinters
that dazzle you into believing it’s
skip to my lou my darling
all the way down a Milky Way of stars
from here like a fingerling of light
to there like a wild salmon of oceanic
enlightenment.
Beauty isn’t an essence you can
extract from the ore
of who you are as a human like an
existential alchemist
trying to distill the stars from the
medium they’re shining in
as if you were pulling a sword from a
philosopher’s stone.
All the shining spiritual metals,
copper, silver, mercury, gold,
unless they’re alloyed with the
darker elements of earth,
are too soft for combat. Merlin relies
on the iron forge in his own blood to
work his magic.
He knows a holy war is just an exorcism
on crusade against a seance. A calling
of the dead to the dead. Not the work
of the living spirit that resides
in the human divinity of everyone of us
like a birthright of shining
that’s as indefensible and
unassailable
as time and space. Clarity doesn’t
try to part the heavens
like a mansion into single rooms for
every afterlife
that goes into exile looking for an
excellence within itself
that knows how to keep a promise to the
earth.
Knowing how to fall is half the art of
rising.
Learning how to get up off
your knees, your prayer rugs, tatami
mats
and all those flying carpets
that don’t fly straight in any
direction
with compassion for the human being you
are
as you see yourself looking at you
through everyone else’s eyes,
and hear creation being said within you
like the fleeting meanings of life
that shadow the life of meaning
as fast as it’s being spoken
in the mother-tongue of everyone
who can look upon a morning snail
and hear how a grubby little buddha
of a sticky sacred syllable
that crosses your path in the morning
is saying you into existence twenty
four seven
the way everything else is each other
in the wholly imaginable beauty
of a creative language that isn’t
a tongue-tied stranger to anyone.
Look at any grain of dirt on whatever
path you’re on
and light it up with the shining
from the oil lamps of your own eyes
and you’ll see how easy it is to
enlighten
what’s under your feet like the
billions of stars
that spontaneously followed suit like
wildflowers
once you got the first one lit and
realized
in whatever direction you search and
seek
the spirit isn’t looking for the
right road of thorns
to cut its feet on, or lacerate its
knees on a holy stairwell.
Put a pair of cosmic wings on a morning
snail
and the whole earth turns into a
landing strip
of green boughs in blossom, even
when the fireflies take over the
nightshift
like microcosmic demonic nightwatchmen.
Go ask the bees if you don’t believe
me.
They can read the petals of the secret
starmaps
that bloom like love notes and shared
recipes
for honey that tastes like a solar
flare
transformed by the transactions of a
spiritual atmosphere
that pearls this grain of nacreous
earth
as surely as the air that breathes us
does,
into auroral arrays of beauty and
compassion.
If you can’t love the veils, how are
you ever
going to learn to love the face behind
them
that smiles back at you in a likeness
of yourself,
all eyes, and stars, flowers and
nocturnal metaphors
for what you’re looking at?
A morning snail with two petals of
cosmos for wings,
with flashy grains of dirt on its back,
each
a world within a world in its own
right,
rising chromatically over their event
horizons
as a sign of a significance of their
own
as poignant as the silicates and stars
they’re reborn from,
delivering the mail at its own pace
as if its wings were two loveletters
addressed to itself by the wind
personally
each sealed with a kiss
like two complementary eyes
you must look into deeply if you want
to see
how the hourglass flowers in your
gazing
like larkspur and shapeshifting desert
stars.
If you don’t want to live your whole
life
like a scar looking for a wound you can
believe in.
Even a morning snail, if you’ve got
the eyes for it,
can make a trail of the silver veil it
leaves in its wake
like a smeared mirror on the path to
enlightenment.
If you only love the light at moonrise,
and despise what’s fallen into the
dirt
like so many windfalls of
demons, stars, snails, angels, apples
and humans before it,
your life is not adjusted to the
time-zone you’re living in
and your heart keeps missing a beat
you go endlessly wandering over the
earth to look for
through the gardens on the moon
and the starfields above
when everywhere and always
it’s been right under your feet all
the time
like a snail path shining like the
Milky Way
on the garden walkway through
the blue and white stars of the
larkspur
like lightning in the morning
that flashes from your own eyes.
PATRICK WHITE
