WHO LOOKS FOR THE SEA BY FOLLOWING ITS
WAVES?
Who looks for the sea by following its
waves?
Or the sky by following the flights of
birds?
Or their mind with their mind?
Who looks for seeing with their eyes?
Dogen Zenji: The place is here. The
path leads everywhere.
And that should be the inexhaustible
end of it. Freedom.
And all along the river that means
whatever I want it to, my unfinished
solitude.
This discrete spiritual protocol
between myself and the stars
that don’t know how many times
they’ve saved my life
by simply being there to gaze upon, as
if in some way
they were so much more cleansing than
water
and I could bathe in them to wash off
the dust of the world
on any clear night, or, sometimes when
you cry
it’s the light that pours out, not
your tears.
Some memories enter a coma and stay
there,
giving you the impression that the past
is fixed,
but I know the past is as creatively
ongoing as now
and what was isn’t the fossilized
substance of what is,
by the way it can still sting, bite,
caress and grow
into the available dimension of the
future,
by how few times I’ve come here in
joy
that wasn’t mentored by some diffuse
sorrow
that lingered over the lake like a
wraith of the drifting mist
that had drowned in it barely an
afterlife or two ago.
Always in the background of my heart I
feel
this compassionate sadness like the
cosmic hiss of creation,
and o how the watersheds of
understanding long to be fountains
and exfoliate into flowing diamonds
that simply
celebrate the scintillance, without
embracing everything
in the mournful tenderness of this
space it shares with them
as if in everything I’m aware of, I
were always
mourning the passage of flowers. And if
not that,
the heretical indignation born of what
it appears
we must suffer to be here, without
knowing why,
though I struggle most times to
suppress that
to make sure the door stays open to any
strays
that might wander in like wayward
oversights of creative clarity.
There’s a sophomoric debate still
going on
about whether I’m getting older or
not, but alone,
I can feel the weight of this seasoned
bell within me
and I ask myself is this the heaviness
of the ripening pear
as it bends the branch as well as the
light toward earth?
Is that why time approaches me like the
night coming on
sweetened with stars, in this second
innocence of wonder
before I fall again? Is pain the only
intermediary
between our death and our birth and
detachment and separation
the only kind of truce or bridge or
oxymoron
that could reconcile them even
remotely?
So often when I can’t see the
radiance of the world
I think it’s because my eyes are
unclean,
that it’s my error of perception if
the arrow misses the mark,
not any inherent injustice in the way
things are,
because who am I to say how it should
all be experienced
when I could talk forever without ever
knowing
what a thought, an emotion, or a word
truly is,
let alone life with all its conditioned
chaos
and dissonant harmonies? All these
travelling companions
on the same road I am, trying to figure
out
whether they’re refugees on the run,
or pilgrims without a shrine. And I’m
modestly
exalted by my humility when I think
like this
until I remember how easy it is to go
blind
looking into any source of illumination
watching two serpents copulating like
wavelengths
and helical chromosomes. And I turn
away
to stay true to the face in the mirror
that isn’t mine.
I plunge into a black hole, a rite of
passage,
and when I come out the other end, even
my shadows shine.
PATRICK WHITE
