NOT WITH THE EYE, BUT THROUGH IT
Not with the eye, but through it
easy to see all the pristine faults and
flaws
in the immaculate mirror of the lake
that asks me to surrender my sword
as proof the scars on the mirage of my
identity
were not self-inflicted or mythically
inflated.
Sometimes the mind is nothing but a
fraud of water,
a handful of starmud from the bottom up
with an ego like the snapping turtle of
the world
savaging the plumage of the moon,
a wild swan thawing like an ice-floe
riding her own reflection downstream
like the pale fragrance of an elegant
loveletter.
This place is the downgraded stuff of
dreams
that animates the misfortunes of decay
with calendar-eyed views of
propinquitous mortality.
Stakes of ghostly bones embedded like
fractured trees.
Red ochre cedars like the fragile
skeletons of filigreed fish.
Dozy limbs of basswood on the damp
shore
pulped by a flesh-eating disease
like the hard heart of an old man gone
soft
in the limelight of a circus of fungus
on tour.
Not an outrage, but a lingering kind of
odium,
this whole place smells like a human on
its death bed.
Stealth in the indelible silence of the
dead
undergoing their dissolute
transformations
into the effluvium of the living in the
wake
of their passage through life. What was
solid and upright as the rung of a
ladder of oak
or the lifeboats of the oar-winged
maple keys
before they went down with the ship,
good captains, all, with nowhere left
to fall,
let’s its hair down like wavelengths
and willows
and returns to going with the flow of
things
like ice melting into water again,
everything real,
with nothing to stub your toe upon
like the imagined intransigence of the
world.
Wing of bat, eye of newt, heart of toad
and the perfect pitch of a virgin
hummingbird,
mummified skin from the leaves
of the star clusters of borage
sapphires,
the ashes of a poem that immolated
itself
like daylilies that no one had ever
cried over,
the unreasoned ennui of a seasoned
wizard’s
attitude toward suffering to play
musical chairs
at the periodic table and rise above
the salt
where you properly belong enthroned
like a dragon
on the skulls of your incommensurable
ancestors.
Salt the earth and it will burn green
as leaves
in the fires of life nothing can put
out.
The axis mundi stirs the seabeds
of the ocean
and visionary wraiths hang above it
like rags of mist
summoned to the cauldron of the lake
like a seance to the endless first step
of an ongoing beginning that calls them
out of exile,
like the lords of life from the last
exorcism
they went through like the
imperfectible ideals
of the wind sweeping stars and deserts
off the stairs
of an underground passage burial
that aimed its spirit at the stars in
Orion
but whose bones only made it as far as
a flashlight
in the nervous hands of a grave robber
startled by his own amazement
at whose likeness embers in old gold
on the death mask that greets him like
a twin of time.
Waterlilies blooming nocturnally in
algaic scum
as if they were spreading their
feathers
for any chance encounter with the stars
they’ve fallen in love with in their
own images.
Stumps of the beavers, and here and
there,
the occasional chain saw, I hear a man
shrieking
in the tent of a field hospital trying
to heal the Civil War
with the tools of neo-lithic
carpenters.
I hear the crow barking orders to its
officers.
Significance by association with the
lost and fallen
bleeding out like flags on an abandoned
battle field.
You fall through the cracks if you
don’t jump the gaps
and the rest is just the history of
electricity
prodding you to twitch like the
puppet-master
of Giovanni’s frog prodded into
leaping like the dead
trying to keep pace with the measure of
their hearts
like lily pads wired to circuitous
nervous systems
grounded in the silken muck at the
bottom of things
that has settled like a peaceful
sediment
over the useful refuse of our
unsalvaged dreams.
The encyclopedic detritus of our
arboreal souls
we keep recurring out of like cosmic
eggs
in a deep sleep of inconceivable
wonders to come.
Wingspans of the galaxies in the eyes
of the seed-atoms,
I sow my thoughts and feelings like
symbols and images
as far and wide as the Milky Way, the
Road of Ghosts,
like an old farmer I heard of who went
mad out here
sowing the deep woods, holding on to
the tail
of a black bull that tugged at his
heart like a new moon
or the harvest of stars in the wild
rice fields of the Pleiades
adorning the horns of Taurus in a
garland of light
so the wide-eyed native women could
thresh them
into the bows of their birch bark
canoes.
How long ago was that? Is there still
an Algonquin village around here
somewhere
that didn’t surrender its gates to
the urgencies of time?
Some memory smouldering like a fire pit
under the leaves
that have written over the history of
this place
like draught after draught of an
autumnal lie ever since?
Did they ever come down to the water
like me
to watch the moonlight ricochet off
the wet anthracite scales of a rat
snake
sliding its S-curves back into the
water
like a wavelength of darkness alone and
homeless
in the occult palace of its black
diamond eyes?
Did they feel the same chill of
recognition
when it disappeared like a sacred
insight
into an abyss of enlightened unknowing
that’s as boundless as the myriad
infinitudes
of forms and events that arise
out of the creative destruction of the
mind
efflorescing out of its own ashes,
sunflowers at dawn
when the urns convulse like wombs,
and flowers imitate the garish rainbows
of our afterbirth like the palette of a
masterpiece
that’s caught the ruin and renewal of
life
in the enigmatic features of our
photogenic minds?
Posing like mood-shifting chameleons
aurorally lifting the veils of a dark
mirror
to reveal our own eyes looking back at
us
when the night turns around, saturated
like ripe fruit with the mysterious
sorrows
of being alive to witness our own
windfall
like a rootless tree well-seasoned in
letting go
of the orchards that once danced with
the wind
in their wedding gowns, climbing up
this scaffolding of bones like a
serpent of picture-music
helically winding up the stairwells of
our vertebrae
like a thought making the rounds
of an unbroken circle of zodiacal
skulls
like boundary stones in an
unsustainable orbit,
all living things perfecting the
simplicity of death
in the labyrinth of their own
elaboration
by reducing it to an axiom of
collaborative absurdity
then erecting it like a meteoric
cornerstone
above the graves they dig for
themselves
monolithically from the sky down,
one foot in the boat and the other
clinging to shore.
I can hear the music of the spheres
in the hidden harmonies of dark matter
I’ve been listening to for light
years
like a song with an impact crater for a
sea bed
I just can’t seem to get out of my
head and heart.
I’ve apprenticed my darkness to the
mastery
of a dying art that might make the dead
a little more lyrically approachable
when the picture-music shepherds them
like black sheep born under a new moon
into the available dimensions of the
future.
In everything I see and say and do here
I celebrate the emergence of the
carrying forth
of the light out of the dark urgent
with expression.
I say tree, stone, star, love, birth,
death.
Lonely nightbird, or one of the frogs
at night,
I make my sound like my mark upon life,
I add my eddy of light, the ripples of
my fingerprints
to the flowing. As ignorant of where I
come from
as I am of where I’m going, as
homeless behind me
as it is ahead, there’s an expiring
calendar
of tree rings in my heartwood, waning
or waxing,
always seems to be growing. What has my
tongue
ever been, but a leaf on the wind, or
my eyes,
if not stars coming out of clouds?
Delusion
or clarity, the crazy wisdom of the
madly enlightened,
or sorrow looking for asylum in its own
vulnerability,
the lab rat in a random experiment with
genetic lotteries,
or my voice disappear like the homing
bird
of a word in the distance flying toward
the violet hills that adumbrate the
sunset in residence?
A physics of the heart, or the logic of
metaphor,
two ends of the same sky-borne
telescope.
Whether they’re eyelashes or my eyes
are sprouting wings for the journey
ahead,
effortless effort of the absurd,
or a labour of elusive significance,
I struggle to celebrate the vital
stillness
that animates the heart of all things
into being carried away on impulse
like water and love and life and light
or thousands of fireflies swarming the
valley
after a storm of insight, trying to
acquit themselves
like constellations in a chaos of
starmaps.
PATRICK WHITE
