NOW HALCYON SEAS
Now halcyon seas, the Kingfisher Star,
Alcyone.
No sign of ever having drowned here.
Most
are as unaware of the sentient space
they’re immersed in
as a fish is of the water it wears like
skin
or a bird of the air it plunges
through. I was
given a brain. The universe was rolled
up
into a ball of starmud, a planetesimal
of my own,
that was meant to receive a lot more
than it
could ever transmit. The way this
bursting bubble
of a multiverse gets you to listen to
it
once you get sick of listening to your
own voice
trying to lift words and feelings like
an ant
with a butterfly wing in its mandibles
like a sail
that knows more about which way the
wind is blowing
than it does. I may be only a whisper
of the shriek I used to be in a much
denser medium
than this when I felt my lungs being
crushed like bag-pipes
by the implosions of a black dwarf.
Thirteen tons
per cubic centimetre of mass. Things
weighed
heavily on me back then like
basso-profundo bells
with overactive pituitary glands in a
shell game
of the pea in the pod. Maybe I was
looking for God,
and God was playing hard to get, who
knows,
but the devil, time, death, suffering
and the brutality
of certain modes of oxymoronic mystic
bliss
have blown like compassionate winds
on my magma ever since like a mother
cooling the burns on her only child’s
fingers
as if she were blowing out a votive
candelabra in a church.
The river reeds are drawing maps of my
mindstream.
I’m going with the flow without
letting go.
Serpentine currents of picture-music
playing me
like a cobra plays a flute in the sway
of things.
Precisely where you run out of rope and
road
to hang yourself is where the way
begins and ends.
I look up at the stars tonight, and as
aloof as they are,
my heart opens up like a black
waterlily, and says,
without any prompting from me, after
all these lightyears
of staring at each other, they in their
heights, and me
in the places I had to climb up to see.
Friends.
Because it’s not hard to imagine them
suffering
the way I do, shooting into the dark on
the midway of life,
like a ray of light hoping to hit a
flower or two
to let them know it’s time to wake up
like radio telescopes
looking for signs of extraterrestrial
life
like a loveletter that doesn’t have
to be opened with a knife.
The dire wolves of all my Pleistocene
ferocities, extinct,
I don’t think Gandhi’s hearing
footsteps coming up on him
from behind, to bring him down like a
bison on the run,
but I can still hear their ghosts
howling in the dark hills
that surround my homelessness with a
local habitation and a name.
Now I’m a gray wolf by acclamation. A
gentler adaptation
to my environment than my environment
is to me.
I’ve still got my fangs but I’m
into smaller, more diversified game.
The beavers are huddled in their mud
bunkers.
The lakeshore rocks still bear the
scars of the glaciers
that were driven off by the sun
protecting its prey.
And the new moon is flint knapping
itself
into a lunar spearhead that sinks a lot
deeper into the heart
than the old Clovis points used to. And
I can smell
hot poppies of blood on the air
startling the pungency
of vegetable detritus and decay in the
duff
of last year’s holy books going up in
flames.
Never been a fan of words unless words
are living creatures,
dragonflies in their chrysales. But
once the secret’s out,
they have wings of their own, and names
that have power
and a unique integrity endowed upon
them
like their mystic specificity by the
mouths
of the humans that use them like rain.
Thousands of droplets falling like
veils
from the wings of a rising waterbird
shattering its own reflection like a
sand painting,
a mandala, a spell, a holographic
projection
of the pineal gland or a two
dimensional black hole
like the urn of the ashes of the
Library of Alexandria
after it burned down. John Keats said
here lies one who name was writ in
water,
but here it is before us, written on
gravestone.
The whole universe is an encyclopedia
of wavelengths.
And it doesn’t really matter if you
send out the dove
or the crow first, by the time they get
back to you
about sighting land, they’ve reversed
colour
like chameleonic dice in the cold hands
of misfits.
The willows are looking haggard at the
approach of fall.
The aspen and the birch leaves are
beginning to curl
and turn brittle like gnostic gospels
and the sumac is burning.
My thought waves are syncopated to
those of the lake.
My heart is jumpstarting the frogs like
dozy engines
as I watch the wavelengths of the
watersnakes
hunt them down like serpentine wizards
with tuning forks with perfect pitch
for tongues
to make up for their lack of ears, as
do their scales,
as if amphibians were always half a
note off key.
And all this seems so surrealistically
mystical to me,
when I consider the infinite number of
ways it could have been,
and probably is somewhere in the
multiverse like a fruitfly
perfectly preserved in a tear of pine
resin creeping
like a snail of incense down the trunk
of an evergreen.
It’s the billions of switches in
between, not your genes
that determine whether your
thought-trains
are going down the right track or not.
A diesel howls
like a dinosaur in mourning for the end
of things
through the country darkness,
immeasurable pain.
Once you realize the way things are are
who you are,
there’s no room for separation, even
the skeletal wings
of the bracken that fossilized its way
back to the living,
even a pine-cone, is a psychological
event. What then
to make of Jupiter and Venus descending
in the west,
Venus near Regulus in the Lion,
Aldebaran in Taurus
and Alcyone in the Pleiades
bull-vaulting its horns?
Turn a leaf. Look at a starmap face
down. Turn the light around
Exorcise the sprite in the candle. Thaw
your eyes.
They’ve been falling for light years
like tears on the stars
and they haven’t put anything out
yet. Orion soon
and pharaonic kas on the Road of Ghosts
disappearing
over the skyline of a black hole that
doesn’t come with lifeboats.
But once and awhile, under my
Kingfisher Star,
lets things float along in time upheld
by the buoyancy of their own wonder
that things are as they are as you are
in a world of forms
where each engenders the myriads of
everything else
and no more, even with a razor, than
you can
peel the moon’s reflection off the
water
can you find a skull’s worth of
separation
between the inside and the outside.
Tat tvam asi. You are that. Your
mind
arrayed before you like jewels of your
own seeing,
almost a Mephistophelean compassion for
humanity,
more that of others, than my own, to
judge by the way I’ve lived,
estranged by my own familiarity with
what I wish
I didn’t know. Ah, Faustus, why this
is hell, nor are we out of it.
With this one inclusive exception, that
if you were
to ask an angel where heaven is she’d
say the same
as a fish would say it’s all the sea,
or a bird, the sky.
If you want to be a pilgrim walking
around with a death mask on.
Don’t be surprised by the apocalypse
that dooms you
like an out of date Mayan calendar that
knew time
was an eternal recurrence of a moment
with no afterlives.
Maybe you’re a spiritual humming bird
sipping
nectar and ambrosia from the goblets of
the gods,
or an existentialist dimming the lights
with tunnel vision
or you’re an alley-cat going through
triune phases of the moon
as if birth, sex, and death were all
synonyms
for lyricising the same event. But
reality
is a lot more original than it’s
usually given credit for.
Even in science, mind is an artist,
able to paint the worlds,
and the masterpiece you paint is the
world
you’ve been living in for as long
as you’ve shown up to model for it.
That’s how you know there’s
compassion
quantum-mechanically saturating the
whole universe.
Everyone’s living in a world
that fits them like skin they’re
growing out of
like waterclocks shedding one world for
another
like watersnakes of serpent fire with
backbone.
You see those constellations in the
crowns of the ironwood trees?
They’re not out there shining at you
across
the vast, vacant, interstellar spaces
out of earshot.
They’re all paradigms of your own
mind
whether you look at them in a gallery
or paint your own.
They’re every bit as intimate as
sunshine
that gets in through your eyes or
caresses your face.
And if you give them names, not words,
Aldebaran, Regulus, Alcyone the
Kingfisher Star
and let their dead metaphors age like
sages of heartwood,
they’ll whisper in your ear
creatively
about the leaves of the silver Russian
olives
glistening like Byzantine lunettes
in the markets of moonlight with a
dusky touch of soul
low on the horizon of a visionary
mindscape.
Look at the stars? What do you see? If
it isn’t
your own eyes shining back at you
without
a mirroring consciousness in between,
it’s got to be traffic lights for
fireflies who’ve gone blind.
And that, too, is a fingerpainting of
your mood and state of mind.
And further proof of a compassionate
universe
is that no one can abuse another’s
work
by using it as a palette for their own
because
when you’re wholly effaced by what
you’re doing
there’s nothing to imitate but what
you see before you alone,
the urgent potential of a whole world
of your own
crying out like a nightbird in the
plenum-void of the darkness
kun fia kun, fiat lux, let it
be, and it was,
like the first taste of light and
longing in your mouth.
PATRICK WHITE
