SOLITUDE AND SILENCE
Solitude and silence. The emptiness of
the living moment
subsumed in the mundane middens of the
soul, clam shells
and sheep bones, the shucked content of
the heart
cherished again as the afterlife of the
evidence
I once lived here along with everyone
else.
Before I write, this archaeological
seance I hold with myself,
this ingathering of everyone I’ve
ever been
flowing back into me where the
mindstream meets the sea.
The continuous stillness of this
contiguous awareness
where everything is a symbolic event in
a dream
trying to wake up from itself to set
the dream people free.
Emotional effusions of the moon
bleeding among the coral.
Solar flares of conceptual insight
returning like ingrown hairs
to the source of their deception like
unwanted children
though I’ve franchised orphanages all
over my mindscape
to shelter my rational thought from the
persecutions of my intuition.
Serpent’s tongues that have been
struck by black lightning
humming like a choir of tuning forks
half a note off
like a lie they told God, they’ve
been living ever since.
No piety. But a natural kind of
reverence for the life of the mind
breathing me in and out of my body like
a bellows
trying to boil spiritual gold out of my
default metal of lead
as things begin to heat up like the
tongue of a sword
on the anvil of my voice. And by that I
know
prophetic heads are going to roll on
the growing edge
of an imaginative insurgency nothing
flammable with life
can resist for long. I know anything I
say about this,
if experience hasn’t cooked you in
the same cauldron
I was born in, will seem unpatently
absurd, but then
so are thermals in the open fields just
before sunset
and the hawks that ride them for the
sheer joy of airing their wings
unpertrubed by what’s moving in the
grass down below.
Infinite grammars. Myriad alphabets.
Space talks in tongues.
Everything that is lives and isn’t
intelligent, but intelligence itself.
Chaos the mercurial cornerstone of an
order that’s lost
the rhythm of life trying to syncopate
its heartbeat
to the unmusical paradigms of
stone-eared preconceptions.
I see crows with rubies in their beaks
as if
they’d just isolated the gene for
symmetry.
In this miasmic swirl of images and
wavelengths,
third eyes coalescing like starclusters
out of clouds of unknowing breaking
into light,
and the shadows they cast no less
prepossessing,
how uninhabitable I feel as a planet
hoping the night
will prove me wrong and make all things
communicable and clear as a mother
tongue
I’ve been speaking for years without
knowing it
even when I exile myself like the
sacred syllable
of a native son wandering the earth
like a rootless tree.
And there, do you see that
constellation rising
like a distillation of the starmud I’ve
walked in all my life?
Doesn’t it make you want to dance
under it with the wind
like a chandelier you’ve thrown rocks
because it’s beautiful,
as if someone were standing in it like
a window
with the elevated perspective of the
Pleiades
shining down in equanimity upon its
desecrants
as if by their fruits you shall know
the luminous generosity
of a windfall of light that falls at
your feet
as if someone were germinating star
sapphires in your bloodstream
to give you something higher to aspire
to
than just teaching fire how to swim
through the blues?
Inside the allegory. The logic of
metaphor.
Hidden harmonies in synchronous
pictographic fields
that resonate like cave paintings with
otherworlds
that are not occluded by the imposition
of space and time.
The younger ore of the outer world
smelted down
like imagistic strokes of luck into the
visionary elders
that transform them in the fires of
their imaginations
into the igneous bloodlines that pour
out of them
like the mystic metals of swords
descended from ancient stars
that can give and take life at the same
time
in these homeless realms of sacred
ambivalence
before the dark mother tempered the
forms she engendered
in tears that broke like the waters of
a docetist womb.
Things here don’t relate like
thought-trains on parallel lines
that never meet, whatever the
destination, they associate
like chords and keys you can hear with
your eyes
and see with your ears in a synteresis
of the senses
that wash up on the shores of cosmic,
island consciousness,
all wavelengths of the same
inexhaustible oceanic mind
that doesn’t make things appear so
much as emerge
like species efflorescing into the
medium they’re working in.
Alloys of light and earth. Hybrids of
water and fire.
The sky calling its birds. The river
its fish.
And the longing of time in the mouth of
the earth
to call us out of the starmud and bathe
us in the rain
gentled out of her atmospheric acids so
as not to burn
the tenderness she lavished on us like
eyes and skin,
a new kind of shining to enhance the
radiance of the stars,
light upon light in the skulls of the
unbegotten ancestors.
This is the morphological matrix of
knowledge forms
shaped to the organs of perception like
neuronic synapses,
enjoining efferent axons to the walls
of nervous villages
waiting for the news of what they’re
experiencing
from the abstract receptors of oracular
impulses,
construing the world as a dendritic
grapevine
tendrilled like Celtic silverwork
throughout the mind
rooted in space as the closest
similitude
to the emptiness that is the ground of
its being
and the great commingled watershed of
its subconscious commons.
The simpler the window, the cleaner the
view
so I attend to my seeing like a
nightwatchmen
attends to his own eyes like the glow
of a lantern
warns and reveals the shadows of his
presence in the darkness.
Eye to eye with the sky at either end
of the telescope
things of the world are things of the
mind,
cosmology the bubble-brained psychology
of the multiverse.
And there are some nights, waiting for
a poem
to bloom like a flower in the flames of
my intensities,
I swear I can overhear from stars away
the exhilarated echoes of alien voices
ruminating
on how we might have changed the
gestural expressionism
of our shapeshifting, river-turning,
morphotic souls in their absence.
Probable concourses of multiplicitous
insights
into the jewel I’m turning in the
light of my mind
like the sun and the moon at midnight
and noon
when the measure of words is the
wingspan
of whatever sky I happen to be flying
in
like comets and birds and maple-keys
that have unlocked my heartwood and set
me free
to blossom like an alphabet on a
pilgrimage of trees,
to express myself like an inconceivable
wind
with wings on my heels in the hermetic
shrines
of this unearthly solitude, this
estranged silence.
PATRICK WHITE
