LET IT GO, LET IT GO, LET IT GO
Let it go, let it go, let it go, as if
my soul
were sweeping out a season of
unleafing,
sodden feelings, sodden hearts, the
rose ruined,
cumbrous clouds gusting over the
eyelashes
of the treeline like dust at the broom
of the treeline.
Cold-blooded, shedding an old sky, half
in,
half out, I dream like a snake
thickening
in its own coils as the autumn turns
soporific
of weaving a flying carpet of the roads
I’ve walked
the whole length of myself alone at
night
only to discover that it was me that
was flowing
and every step I took burnt like a new
beginning
as if I were firewalking a graveyard
shift of stars.
If you want to open the third eye of
the needle
in the haystack of your mind, set fire
to it.
What’s left shining in the ashes is a
ticket out of here.
The serpent’s gone down the black
hole
after a rabbit like Lepus at the heels
of Orion,
like a gamma ray burst of annihilative
clarity
and come out the other side of midnight
in an hourglass
drying its wings like a dragon from the
chrysalis
of an urn with the intensity of a
furnace.
The world crowds out the truth of its
own existence.
I’m pierced by the wounded insights
of a butterfly
into the crazy wisdom of a flightpath
without a starmap
that knows anything about where I’m
going
or in retrospect, been. I’ve spent a
whole lifetime
trying to mean what I see when I get
myself out of the way
like an eclipse of fireflies. I
experience the world
like an abyss with eyes looking into
its own ferocious solitude.
I know by the whirlwind I’m reaping,
it’s harvest time.
The whole earth’s a silo and a grave.
Wheat seeds
in a pyramid waiting to sprout like
time locks
on their afterlife when the planets
align with the sun
at midnight to wake them up from the
absurdities
of what they were dreaming. How strange
it all is.
How vague the assurances of our sacred
doubts.
I try to keep faith with my absolute
uncertainty
like the third wing of a bird hovering
between two extremes
and though I’m full of dark energy,
strive
not to be the antithesis of everything
else
like the enlargement of space in an
expanding universe,
where the stars are moving further
apart everytime I look.
Formless, does the mind speak to itself
in a grammar of things
like dark matter providing a vocabulary
for itself
to say the world into existence like a
gesture of light
to keep the heart from reading its fate
in between the lines
of an overwrought nervous system rooted
like axons
in a garden of starmud perishing like a
potted plant in a skull?
Sometimes I think I’ve gone mad, the
pain
gets so unbearable in this tragic mime
of exile,
when I realize how utterly inane
everything is
as the transients walk through the
gates of their homelessness
like a stranger on a return journey to
a place
that’s irrevocably changed like a
future that happened
in the wake of an absence that was
always behind
whatever he was looking for when he
left.
Are we just here to cross our own
thresholds of being
like mystic deaths to deepen the
solitude of our seeing
as if the seeing itself were the
optical illusion of the light
that follows us like a guide lost in
the shadows
of who we thought we were yesterday
like the past of a star with an extinct
future
always catching up to us with news of
the moment now?
Knowledge as the fossil of a future
event
we’re always trying to predict. Hairy
stars
like toupees on the pates of our bald
telescopes.
It’s only when you hold your mind up
to the dark
to look for the source of the light,
that you realize
how lost you are and how many
time-zones
can be cast simultaneously by the
single shadow
of a waterclock running through the
woods
like the mindstream of the Milky Way
we keep weaning ourselves from
like vulnerable gods hiding out in
uterine caves
with umbilical cords as long as the
Road of Ghosts.
I try to see the whole in my own
dismemberment
like Kirlian light. A moment of union
in eras of separation, myriads gathered
into one
that can’t help transcending itself
like a fountain.
Some look for the grail. Some for the
watershed.
And some ask the living in the language
of the dead
what it means, if anything, to be alive
in the fall.
As a bush wolf calls out like the only
witness
of its homely longing like a summons
on a hill in the distance that’s
heard it all before
and knows the ensuing silence is
probably
the most comprehensively compassionate
answer.
PATRICK WHITE
