EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW
CREATION
Every morning of the moment, a new
creation,
the distillation of the dreams of the
night before
when the moon was as fertile as the dew
we were born from.
I start out each day with a new face.
By nightfall
it’s just another phase of the same
old ageless deathmask,
heavier than a bell that’s been
talking through my mouth
for more light years than I’ve got
tears to measure in mirrors.
That’s usually when I start thinking
like a potato about stars.
Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening
me like a vision
I’ll only ever get to see backstage
like a forlorn clown
trying to hang on to his faith in
laughter.
You can pursue happiness, but it will
only
run from you like the light, or you can
cover your eyes
and try to avoid it for fear of losing
it like the last time,
but when you turn around, it’s right
behind you,
flirting with your shadow. Better to
let it come and go
of its own accord, like a waterbird in
a moonrise
reflected on a lake. Then when you
speak of things
you increasingly know less about the
more
you’re intimate with them, your voice
isn’t
a bird net trying to cage words on the
fly
but an aviary as open as the sky when
Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the
Lyre’s
a larynx for the asking. And you’re
free
to sing your heart out as if no one
were listening
but you and the trees and the stars you
hit like high-notes.
Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the
coydogs
if you run out of lucky feet and that’s
what comes up
like snake eyes. Lap the experience out
of the bone
until there’s nothing left to eat but
your appetite itself
and among the myriad flavours of life
you’ve exhausted
that will taste the sweetest of all to
that emptiness
that harvests the world like a blue
moon that’s never full.
Is the moon not the equal of its waxing
and waning alike?
Is it trying to enlighten its dark
side?
When the candle goes out, does the
light have any trouble
handling it? Fear returns to what it
knows the best.
It hugs the shore like a tidal pool
beside the sea,
a dead starfish or two it can get its
arms around
like a worm’s-eye view of the galaxy,
and the shell
of a red sunset in the morning on the
carapace
of a crab that left its hovel for a
house in
a more upwardly mobile zodiac.
Sometimes
it comes down to that. Quantum level
gravity.
A gravitational eye with myopia that
bends the light
like a stick in the water, a mirage of
sand in an hourglass
that’s afraid of being swept out to
sea
with nothing to hold onto but the
lifeboat
of a shucked clam Venus just stepped
out of onto land
to have sex in a new medium like an
artist
who’s just switched from water
colours to oils.
You’ve got to accept the down times
as all part
of the same wavelength you’ve been
riding
like a snake scaled in white caps of
light
that break on shore in a turmoil of
kelp.
The cosmos doesn’t need to be put in
order
and chaos doesn’t need any help.
Listen to your sorrows.
Summon them to a seance of yourself
and apologize to their ghosts for not
having the voice
to let them speak through you about
learning to swim with the stars further
out of your depths
than you’ve ever been before. First
you drown
in the fathomless immensities of even
the smallest detail,
and then you bubble back up to the
surface
of a multiverse with an oceanic
awareness
of what’s been hiding under every
eyelid of a wave
like a overturned lifeboat that’s
waking up
to the fact that everything floats like
the moon
in the reflection of its own
mindstream.
And whatever sail you spot coming up
over
your event horizon, whatever
constellation
or black hole you take for a sign of
salvation
or salvage, it first had to sink
before it could rise to the rescue.
PATRICK WHITE
