YOU SAY YOU'VE TAKEN ALL THE TENSION OUT OF YOUR LIFE

YOU SAY YOU’VE TAKEN ALL THE TENSION OUT OF YOUR LIFE

You say you’ve taken all the tension out of your life,

but to me you’ve just planed a mountain range

into a parking lot. Your sacred syllable is flatlining

like a synonym for death, and your eyes,

o those eyes were so blue once

I could have made a cult of the colour

and happily sacrificed myself on the altar

of a sky burial where the angels reverted to ravenous birds,

but now they’re one way windows on a braille runway

for blind aliens on the Nazca plateau.

You talk like a tourist guide

with a photo-shopped cheeriness

in the same tone of immaculate voice

as if genesis were beginning all over again

with a logo in the mouth of a vociferous abyss.

I believe in your natural kindness,

those summers of feeling so much like August

out in the fields of an abandoned farm,

where the light kissed the fieldstones on the forehead

as sweetly as it did the eyelids of the wild flowers.

I believe in the integrity of your search,

the sincerity of your confusion, the sway

of your compassion for cellular tissue

over the ideological abstraction of the living details

extracted by vampiric points of view.

Life is messy, soiled, tantrically spoiled,

and even when the moon spices the wine

with love potion number nine, most of the time

we’re still drinking out of a dirty cup,

but I know you’re not blind to the rapture

of the fireflies showing off to the stars,

or the waterlilies shining like a starmap in a swamp.

You see the green candelabra of the maple saplings

rooted in the decay of the mothering stump.

I know there’s love in you. I’ve gone

pearldiving in your sea. And whatever

the coral reefs that rip the hull

out of your moonboat now, I’ve seen

that great Atlantean heart of yours

and its irrepressible buoyancy

rising to the surface like a breaching whale.

You don’t need a broom to sweep

the mirages of an encroaching desert off your stairs.

You don’t need to cherry-pick your delusions

to accommodate a school of gerry-mandered gurus.

Just let your thoughts roost like birds at dusk

in the black walnuts for the night, and rinse

the stardust off your wings in the Milky Way,

or the Pleiades if you want to take a bird bath

before you dream at cruising altitude without a flightplan

or course correction, of bettering the world we are,

by washing it off like a smear on a myopic mirror

that’s impatiently elitist about its perfection,

though everytime we do, we’re sure to leave,

even if we have the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche,

a galactic rim of human rime around the tub.

Delusion is the doorway to enlightenment.

Samsara is nirvana. Noumena, phenomena.

Even a mirage, a feature of real water,

however many times its been reflected

like the echo of a dragon in the valley

that’s inexhaustibly as deep as the mountain

is insurmountably high. Sweet one,

sometimes the mind might be a chandelier

of fireflies making up the dance as the wind blows,

but it’s definitely not a crystal skull

goose-stepping to Deutschland uber alles

to spiritually cleanse the world of aberrant translucencies

that move more like the wavelengths of mindstreams

among the symbologies, than the autobahn

among its traffic signs, or road kill

along the dangerous fast lane highways

to the artificial paradise of an inert motel

in a gaseous state. Why throw out the garden

and keep the gate at attention like a Roman legion?

There are no locks or lost keys, one-winged hinges

that have to be retrieved from the river

we threw them in like a tribute of silver swords

when we first stepped into the open out of the void,

or endless pages of grass to part

like the Book of Total Knowledge, Volume L,

like the bloodied waters of the Red Sea

or the civil war we declare on ourselves

like ambassadors in chains, trying to secure a freedom

that was already ours indelibly

long before we were born to live it creatively

in the vaster spaces we return to on the inside

with heart, with immense heart,

like the fruits of the earth

we’ve all come here to gather

with the worms and the birds, the wasps,

the raccoons, the groundhogs and the humans

to deepen our awareness, to sweeten our insight,

to feel the bliss of an expanding universe

taking a great cosmic risk in the darkness

like the first time with a lover,

that the path to enlightenment begins here

and leads everywhere to the windfall at our feet.

Who insults the feast by bringing

a loss of appetite to the table as a spiritual gift

and though you don’t read the menu,

ask for a guest list to make sure you’re

seated above the salt of the earth in the right place?

Shakespeare suggested we assume a virtue

if we have it not and make a habit second nature.

One of the chief uncharacteristics of enlightenment is

it can’t be abused because it doesn’t have a face to lose

and there’s nothing to imitate except a second head

growing on top of your own, you don’t know whether

to crown or stick pins in like the eyes of a voodoo doll

to confuse the issue of taking full advantage

of this as it is, like a singing bird in an apple tree,

the light and the rain and the flaws in our song, in bliss.

PATRICK WHITE

FACELESS THIS TIME OF NIGHT

FACELESS THIS TIME OF NIGHT

Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice

into a deepening sense of containment

by a dark space with distant cities of light

trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,

or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles

dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains

across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,

the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars

with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.

The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss

of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard

when you were a kid, the mere filament

of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan

of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,

disappointed it wasn’t born a flower,

but a weed more at home among the stars

that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth

like a kindred spirit of light

that must wander through its own solitude

like music at night from an open window

in the life of the mind to reach out to them

like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget

of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire

that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note

of the night bird’s longing to sing back up

like a bell for a sad universe that’s always on the road.

I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.

The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.

I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises

of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily

like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears

saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,

I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,

this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,

a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,

and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,

my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree

as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,

heavy with the weight of too many separations,

yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.

PATRICK WHITE