JUMPED OUT OF NOTHING
Jumped out of nothing. The fish did.
Golden.
A flake of the moon. When I wasn’t
looking.
Into a lifeboat cupping something
precious in its hands.
The mind an old junkyard that’s been
collecting windows too long.
So many points of view. So many glass
eyes
looking for the stuffed animals they
belong to.
Death after knowledge. The silence that
follows the music
after the bird has flown. Is the abyss
death’s rebuke
of life’s dangerous proposal to let
us look through the keyhole
at what’s going on in the
uninhabitable room next door?
To dream a little in the interim
between two enormities
abstracted from the need of our
perishing to persist
aeonic light years beyond anything we
can imagine?
The golden fish jumps into the boat
like an unsought insight.
No hook in it. And you can tell by the
scales of light it emanates
it’s risen from the starless darkness
of its own depths
like moonrise out of the encyclopedic
corals
of accumulated knowledge that’s found
a place for everything
like a polyp on a library shelf,
calcium in a cave
shaping itself into temples from the
top down.
Stalagmites and stalactites of
cathedrals inspired by water
to enshrine themselves in form as an
aid to the blind.
Though things along the way might
change
does the journey stay the same ad
infinitum?
Did you amount to everything you
dreamed you might be,
or were there more stairs to climb than
doors to enter,
more walls than windows in the way you
saw things?
I’ve seen the most sublime things
humbled by their own insignificance.
And I think I’ve heard God more than
once
weeping at the stern of a sinking ship
for a turn of events
she couldn’t do anything about once
they were set in motion.
And I’ve listened to people my whole
life
talking in their sleep about how to put
a rudder on a dream
as if there were a focus and a
direction for life to flow in
like a solid, particulate thing instead
of the wandering wavelength
of this exiled mirage of water that it
appears to be
depending on the mood of the
chameleonic mirror you’re looking into.
The donkey looks into the well and the
well looks back at the donkey.
It couldn’t be any clearer than that.
Tat tvam asi. But, then, again
why muddy the mirror by dropping the
penny of the moon
down a wishing-well that never gets
what it wants
and ask for something you’ve never
really been missing?
I learned in my mother’s kitchen long
before I went to school
that just because you can ask a
question doesn’t mean
you have a right to expect an answer
that satisfies you.
And even when you do receive an answer
unexpectedly
it will be the quality of the question
that determines its nature.
The single petal of a candle flame the
size of the fire of life in your heart
like the apple-bloom of a thousand
orchards in the Okanagan
thrives on the winds of change that
blow it out and away
like a butterfly from the open palm of
your hand
wise enough to know a hand is not just
for grasping
and let it go like a mind of its own
without knowing where.
Indirection is an indeterminate voyage
of discovery,
a star’s way of probing the darkness
radiantly
without knowing how the light’s going
to be bent ahead of time.
Destination is a postcard from the edge
of nowhere.
If you want to see anything worth
looking at
while you’re still alive enough to
know it like your own name
don’t adjust your eyes to the size of
the window
you’re looking through like the
keyhole of an orbitting telescope
but the spaciousness of your own mind
like a sky
no starburst of bird, word, or thought
has flown to the end of yet
Whether they’re bearing the souls of
the dead south or west
like early transmigratory hearses yoked
to a brace of angels or not.
Life still greens the tree with meaning
even in the wordless dead of winter.
And who hasn’t been, from time to
time, a thriving neighbourhood
that left town to seek its fortune
buried in its own back yard
only to return empty-handed to watch
its homelessness being torn down?
Those who see themselves as strangers
in the doorways of their own houses of life
are those who ask the most questions
about who that is
that threatens them the most from the
inside out,
that offer escalating ransoms to their
own shadows to let them go unharmed
the longer the silence refuses to
identify itself like an answer
to the incomprehensible questions about
what they’re doing here
like rivers weeping over what’s going
to become of them
or the sun worrying about opening the
wrong flowers
like somebody else’s mail without a
return address
though all flowers like stars are
loveletters addressed to everyone alike,
and it’s not hard to recognize a
river in captivity by its handwriting
or the jewels of the dead from the eyes
of the living by the accent the light
they speak in through the medium of a
mother-tongue that slurs the distinction
between a seance and an exorcism once
we realize we’ve been summoned
to the comings and goings of every
breath, every step, every
mistake we make with our lives like a
revealing insight into who lies
under these deathmasks we wear like
crocuses in the spring
under the unpaginated duff of last
autumn’s petals and leaves.
The way life carries on, it feels to
me, is no different
in the heart of the incomprehensible
mystery
than the wind that sweeps us away like
death
the stars off the stairs in one and the
same breath that blew them there
to ensure our continuity is always
within reach of attaining
like a river that at all times and
everywhere is in touch with itself.
Like a waterclock. Or a goldfish in the
deserts of an hourglass
swimming through mirages on the moon
that launches
our lifeboats and coffins alike on the
same undifferentiated ocean of insight
that washed us ashore in the first
place like islands in the night
that have more in common with the stars
that at first glance
we might think we do in the vastness of
the spirit’s lost and found.
But of this I am bold enough to remain
uncertain of my bearings indefinitely.
PATRICK WHITE
