SOME THINGS YOU WEEP OVER FOREVER
Some things you weep over forever.
Fathomless watersheds of infinite
sorrow.
Others last as long as it takes the
rain
to get a flower to bloom and perish,
with promises of good things to come.
Beauty cherishes a lock of wisdom.
Separation, departure, exile,
severance, change,
since the womb, and a good chance
earlier,
things coming apart like a mother
giving birth
to the ghost of herself she gave up
to facilitate your coming forth upon
the earth.
Here you are in the splendour of your
mystic specificity.
And who knows how many lifetimes
had to be achieved and forgotten just
as they were
so you could show up here so uniquely?
Point is. Goodbye’s always half of
the greeting
and sorrow uses the same hand to hang
on to life
as it does to let go of it with.
Our entrance is a back-handed exit.
We celebrate the seance and mourn the
exorcism
depending upon which way the wind
is blowing our mother’s ghost in our
face.
Out of sorrow was born compassion
as our eyes were born of the light
flirting with nerve cells, as the sky
and the stars
adapted to our ocularity and
soft-bodied animals
grew shells and thousands of scales
like eyelids
and the Burgess shale became the
communal gravestone
for millions, and all the new angels
were snow blind lab technicians in
white coats
and the goddess who embodied life
in a ceremony of picture-music
became a particle and a Hox gene.
Do you see how it all transmorphs
surrealistically
as it sings you to sleep in a dream of
life
that fits the typography of your
mindscape perfectly
like the skin of moonlight brushing up
like a feather
against the skin of water, mutually
realizing
the millions of waterbirds that arise
like oceanically enlightened emotions
from them both?
I’ve heard the sea weep. The sky
release the tears
that others pray for like rain. The
earth groan in its agony.
I’ve sat at the bedside of dying
friends
and said nothing the numbing silence
wanted to overhear whether it was
wisdom or a prayer.
Here. Then it’s There. Now it’s
Where?
We die into a mirror we can’t look
into.
Or maybe when the light disappears
from our eyes here, it’s because
we took it with us like a star to see
into the abysmal darkness ahead of us
as we bring the future with us
like a perpetual myth of origin
that begins like a snake with its tail
in its mouth
inconceivably where it ends.
One drop of blood from the rose’s eye
doesn’t violate the wonder of the
child
that’s trying to live on in you, nor
death
keep the iron bells of the elegy from
ripening
like apple bloom born of grief
sweetening the clouds of their
unknowing
even as the wind persists in blowing
what was once attached to us
like feathers to a bird away
as we make constellations of its
evanescence
as if indelibility could slow down the
rate of change
like the rear guard action of a
retreating army.
Born to separate into more elaborate
unions,
child of the elan vitale within you,
Polaris
of all the indirections it took to find
you,
the epiphanous life force that wears
your body and mind
like the lifemask of a creative
imagination
that has a flare for painting the world
with its eyes,
but in all its works can’t find a
similitude for itself
that suits it for the moment any better
than you.
It’s a mistake to think that you’re
the only one
that’s wearing your face, or a lack
of identity
is your most cherished possession, or
your sorrows
aren’t shared by the rubble of a
thousand shattered pietas.
Celebrate death like a lunar fire dance
at the entrance
to the creatrix of all exits. Truth
can’t improve
the lack of things to a heart that’s
only tasted
solitude and sorrow and clear cuts the
crutches
on the mountain sides of all its
legless tomorrows
hoping they might abide for awhile as
trustworthy cornerstones.
Sorrow can be an emotional road
suffering from its own erosion. Tears
that were clarified by the flowing of
their radiance
can turn into a festering stasis of
ditchwater
if they’re left to stand too long
among
the purple loosestrife and lost and
lonely hubcaps,
deathmasks of the rogue planets that
got left behind
when everyone went on without them
riding a four-wheel drive eclipse with
three full moons to go.
Vehicular witchcraft. Or divine
intervention.
Or the probable concourse of both,
the mind will nacreously secrete either
a black or white dawn of insight around
it
to bury a thorn in a pearl of
compassion
as things you couldn’t imagine the
day before
flower out of a black hole like a blind
rose,
and people fall away helplessly without
life boats
like the rafters of an abandoned temple
better left to the birds than the
prayers of the unfaithful
victimizing the martyrs of outrageous
morphologies.
If sorrow ripens into compassion, the
moon
enlightens the seed forms that orbit
the core
of the green star of the apple and it’s
chilled
by the stars of the night that turn
its taste buds into nanodiamonds
that can discern the flavour of the
Pleiades
burning like a spice on the Silk Road.
If sorrow isn’t always a closed gate
without a fence
trying to enclose a garden in an urn of
ashes
it’s neglected like a cosmic egg for
light years
trying to get over the disappointment
of finding the holy grail only to
notice it was chipped.
If experience isn’t mentored by
sorrow
deeper into the source of joy in life
that’s the voice coach of the
exuberant birds
that are nine parts aubade and one part
threnody,
and there’s frost on the windfall
that isn’t stardust.
Set sorrow loose with an apple branch
to witch for wells on the moon
that have closed their eyes to spring
in Aquarius.
By an overt act of sustained
imagination
let sorrow root in you
like a wild grape vine
in the encyclopedic duff
of your last autumn on earth
then cry in your cups
as your tears turn into wine
remembering all the blossoms of the
moon
that had to fall so you could taste
the moment of this sweetness
as if your own bloodstream,
its shadows and shining alike,
were a Gulf Stream of stars
that loved being swept away
by their own momentum
whether they’re photonically
discharged
from a halfway house of decaying
orbitals
like tree rings, birth marks, ripples
and moon dogs
or moved by the dark energy
of their shape-shifting sorrows,
the ripening wavelengths
running up and down
the xylem and the phloem,
the ida and the pina,
the solar and the lunar threads
of their spinal cords like serpent fire
to reconfigure the world
through the third eyes
of their enlightened tears.
PATRICK WHITE
