EVERY INSIGHT, THE BIG BANG, AND THE
THOUGHT THAT FOLLOWS, A UNIVERSE
Every insight, the Big Bang, and the
thought that follows, a universe.
Every image that flashes across the
moonscape like a silhouette
in reverse of the dark matter and
starmud that surrounds it,
a black swan among the white when
there’s snow on the river.
Worlds bubbling out of the mouth of a
fish through a hole in the ice
that looks like the third eye of a
glacier taking a long, hard look
at whether it was worth opening all
those lakes
and then filling them like eyes with
the runoff of its own tears
as it disappears into a more fertile
approach to letting go of itself.
I could always see a human shape hidden
in the landscape
and I wanted to free it so I scraped
and gouged
and dug my way into it like a dog
unearthing the fossil
of a distant ancestor that ran with the
wolves.
Even now when their ghosts howl it’s
a sad ballad
of the lyrical hills going mad by
themselves
and sometimes it breaks my heart like
water
in the cleft of a pseudomorphic rock to
write picture-music
in striated cuneiform on the cliff
faces to sing to themselves
like a lost people with more legend
than life in its veins.
I can take a single thread and weave it
into a flying carpet.
I can take a string theory and make it
resonate with membranes
that occasionally break their eardrums
like water from a womb.
There are protocols of the imagination
that have been imposed
by iconic means like straitjackets
fitted to the inside of your psyche.
Cuckoos in your nest, memes in your
mind,
nudging your cosmic eggs out to smash
on the rocks below
like the stillborn of the sun. Embryos
and fractals,
astronomical forensics sweeping the
night sky for fetal stars,
hidden paradigms ferreted out like
secrets
that will bloom each in their own good
time
like the mysteries of life unravelling
the sequel of a waterclock that keeps
on outliving itself
by transcending its own emptiness by
pouring itself out
like a serpent that’s always shedding
its own skin
or a zodiac confabulating a false dawn
of mythically deflated metaphors, red
giants
burnt out into black dwarfs and sink
holes
where the stars plunge like butterflies
into
the gaping maw of the dragon that
consumes them like krill,
knowing its destiny, too, is just a
provisional scaffolding of quicksand.
Yes, but how many make it all the way
through
like wild salmon responding to the
death call
of the spawning ground on the far side
of the white hole
when the hourglass gets turned around
like a fountain
instead of leaking out of a mortal
wound in the side of the universe?
The morphology of knowledge is the
history of shapeshifters.
Cosmology is an aesthetic expression of
enculturated preferences.
Zero among the Hindus the form of the
abundance of their emptiness.
Among the Greeks, a political exile.
And for a Westerner
far sighted enough to see in aerial
perspective,
the bluing of a way of life that’s
always over the next hill.
Sight is a kind of love I once read on
a poster the sixties.
So astronomy for poets. And poets for
astronomy.
Observatories on forbidden mountain
tops
opening their eyes like blind prophets
to the visions
engendered by a seven year eclipse of
their visuals.
Who hasn’t stepped out of their own
well lit doorway
and walked up to the high field on a
cold winter night
and watched their breath mingle with
the Milky Way
like a tributary of a river on intimate
terms with the mindstream
we’re all flowing into like
red-tailed hawks
riding our own thermals for the sheer
joy of it
down the helical stairwells of our own
polished bannisters of dna.
Twenty years a Druid in a vatic college
learning
to speak to trees in the demotic of
their own alphabet,
poetry isn’t the calling of a clown
or a gleeman
amusing the whimsical caprice of the
king’s court,
it’s a summons to risk your life
exploring the mystery
of every facet of what you’re doing
here turning jewels
like stars in the translucency of your
own light
reflected in a brainstorm of parabolic
mirrors that bloom at night.
Haul yourself up out of your tidal pool
of awareness
into the rarefied bliss of a whole new
medium that exceeds
the planetary boundary stones of the
space time continuum
you’ve been so far, by devoting your
disobedience
by bringing back enlightened serpent
fire
from the hearths and the middens in the
starfields
of the gods who first domesticated it
like a selective ordeal of birth
in the imagination of a hungry human
thief enough
to root a new kind of lightning in the
earth that bears
all the birthmarks of the compassionate
fruits of insight
into the nature of a mind that embodies
all this
as if one moment the crescents of the
moon were scars on its eyes
and the next, the talons of an owl
flying out of the abyss in the grip
of a nocturnal imagination that’s as
wise as it is dangerous.
All my thoughts have fingertips. Blood
your abstractions.
Lavish your mindstream on the available
dimensions of the future
as if what you wanted to achieve were
already behind you
like a star in pursuit of an earthly
excellence.
Humanize the uninhabitable as if it
were just
another room in a spatially enchanted
palace
you haven’t finished yet like Thomas
Jefferson.
If you look for the cure in the heart
of the disease,
by corollary, look for the disease in
the heart of the cure
like the lesser vehicle in a pathology
of grails.
Safer to drink from your own skull to
an eclipse
that patched the eye of the moon with
the crossbones
of its colours, than sip rainbows from
the goblets
of lilaceous irises blooming like an
effulgent halo
around the pupil of a black hole on a
starless night
anticipating a cadaverous moonrise
like the dark beginning of death
breaking into
the unimaginable radiance of another
side to all this
that makes the light seem a mere carbon
copy
of the shining that can be emanated by
an enlightened mind
that never hesitates to contaminate the
purity
of its numinous ignorance for the sake
of opening the gate like an exile to a
secret garden
everybody must enter at the crossroads
of a threshold
without the screening myth of a
backdoor to duck out of.
PATRICK WHITE
