TO BE ALIVE HERE
To be alive here
is to suffer the godspear
of light
that enflames your breath
with life
through the heart, the
night
of its napped shale
embedded in every part
like a mystic jewel in a
wound that never heals
or a hidden nightbird in
the far fields
when only the stars are
listening.
To be alive here is to
know
your only here and now
is to be alive.
Born into the lifeboat,
who needs to be rescued?
Is the fish afraid of
drowning,
does a bird implore the
sky;
is there not enough room
in your eyes for stars?
Images, thoughts, symbols,
feelings, words,
we live behind billboards
illuminated
by artificial daffodils of
light,
and walk our own midways
alone
from tent to tent of
sensation,
from mutant perversity to
mystic elation,
blind in the blazing: come
in, come in,
to the darkness under a
flap of your skin.
How much has not changed
for how long
inside the cocoon that
diapers your reluctance
not to hump out of
yourself with wings,
not to jewel the maggot
with stars,
not to let the swamp hold
up its waterlily,
not in overcoming or
advancement,
not a white diploma of
moonlit skin,
but a symbol and a
celebration of what became of you
elaborating the world
generation after generation
until, not enough just to
see it,
your eyes immersed in the
sea like rain
that has known the roots
of the flowers
and opened the golden
mouths of the grain
and washed the stars out
of the hair of the fool,
and rinsed the age like a
bloodstain off the stage,
you can finally be it.
You are empty.
Blood unspools like a
thread
drawn out like a river
unravelling the oceans of you
that used to lap these
fleshbound shores
and flaunt this palace of
bone on loan
from an absentee owner.
There is no face under
your name
that isn’t looking away
from itself
like light from the sun.
Utterly subjectivized, the
imagination
reverses its spin
and things come undone,
and the skies that have
dropped like petals from their eyes
to see without seeing the
unseeable
are neither many nor one
nor the ineffable sum of
the unbeable
because all things have
already been achieved
and the world returned
like water to the mindstream
it was taken from
like a snake that startles
the stillness
before it flows away into
the silence
or the light of a star
that shines within
that doesn’t trouble the
day.
But to live here in
irrefutable bliss
you mustn’t confess to
anyone
you were born knowing
this.
To live here truly is to
live
as if you had never
existed,
though there are lifetimes
behind you
like footprints on the
road of ghosts
to say where you’ve
been,
and every breathless
glimpse is the eye
of someone you’ve never
seen.
Here is the
everywhere of is
and there is no shadow of
another,
no map of blood to follow
you like a pilgrim,
no sister, no father, no
mother, no brother
you could possibly mean
to the photo-album of an
aging gene
that doesn’t remember
you
except as someone who was
passing through
who didn’t know what
things could lead to
when the stranger in the
dangerous valley
took the highroad out of
the mountains like an echo.
To be alive here
is to suffer one day, and
dance the next,
to pass by rooms within
yourself you never open
like tiny lockets of rain
you weep alone in the shadows,
among so many furious
stars,
trying to seed the pain
with flowers
or patch new skin, a cool
herb of light
over the burnt face of the
moon like waterlilies
so the black mirrors will
reverse themselves in the night
and turn your eyes away
from the things you can’t
shatter with looking.
To be alive here
is to know you are dying,
the whole breath of the
moment in every death
baling like overwhelmed
boats to stop your crying.
Where do we go? Does
anyone know?
Are we cinders and crows
in the eyes of this shoreless sea
that watches us like a
dream
no one can wake up from
alive,
is this disproportionate
night the jewel in the hive
that eclipses this rapture
of honey
with more space than the
flowers and stars can face?
Is a dead thing the king
of its own skull-throne
or a toy of the ants
lugging dismembered butterflies through its eyes
like sails crushed in the
ice of a northwest passage
to be reassembled like
moonboats on the other side?
We are islands and waves
and we close our eyes like
the sea
in the imageless depths of
our own inconceivability.
We are humans, worlds
within worlds, and each
with a light of their own
to know them by.
We are stars circling the
lighthouse of our own knowing
like words off the coast
of consciousness
that all mean, like birds,
the same boundless sea
that slowly wound its
aeons up like alarm clocks
to set us off like an
insurgency of thought.
We are humans, bells and
hells of blood and water that walk
upright like lightning
rods wired to a brain
that the sea panned like a
nugget of light
freaked with night, from
the ore of a lunar vein
and everywhere we fall
upon our own roots
and wash our own skulls
clean of ourselves
like rain that was once
alive
to raise them again like
the moon to our lips, and thrive.
Long-winded brevity; brief
longevity,
to be alive here is to be
constantly giving
without knowing what your
true gifts are,
like rain and rocks or the
light of a star,
because even to share
is to set us apart
divisively,
to break the plough like a
wishbone.
There’s silver in the
voice of the rock when it speaks of change
and though the rain
doesn’t really know what it seeks to be
it gives itself everywhere
inexhaustibly like a hinge
to the turning of
everything,
and how could the night
have guessed
the enlightened fury of a
star
under the scars of its own
elements
would lead to us in all
our radiant intelligence
like something it got off
its chest?
To be alive here is to
know
that a single drop of
water is enough
for the moon to swim in
her own seas again,
and there are tides in the
windowpane she transits
flashing with life, tiny
glass fish
that make a turmoil of
devotion
by seeding the ocean with
eyes.
To be alive here is to
know the wise
know less than you on both
sides of the mirror
that lies in pieces at
their feet like waves
that have learned to hold
their tongues.
To be alive here
is to read a book on
transcendence
while you’re sitting in
the sun,
to ask why the moon is
crying
when you’ve already
drowned in her tears.
Is it holy? Is it joy? Is
it real?
And look at the way it
takes the whole of itself
from beginning without end
to end without beginning
to make a single eye, all
the measureless aeons of the myriads
that stand behind and
before the seeing
timing the shutter-release
like someone taking their
own picture,
running to get in the shot
before the flash goes off
like light in the abyss
to illuminate the billions
upon billions of faces
shed like apple-bloom in
the orchard
from the radiant tree of
its rootless being.
What is this without
antecedent
I so urgently need to know
that I have poured the
stars into me
and the starlessness of
long, autumnal nights
and slept like the eyes of
the rain in the roses of hell,
and grown black pearls out
of a grain of dirt
like new moons in the
mouth of a funeral bell
and hurt and hurt and hurt
until
I could not tell who or
what
was suffering me in and
out of existence
like a dream in a fire
that burnt without consuming,
my eyes in space twisted
like melting windowpanes,
and darkness running down
the blade of my solitude
like a nightdew of black
blood on the tongue of the moon
as I shook in my chains
like an avalanche
imprisoned in the heart of
a mountain
where I wept like a metal
in the cold abyss
of a horror without eyes
or a name
that is everywhere this
that keeps killing me into
bliss
by striking me like fire
from a rock,
like the rainbow from its
lock,
like a sword from the
stone of the moon.
The universe pours itself
out like a fountain
into its own inexhaustible
mouth
like a drunk with a jewel
in a bottle in a brown paper bag
up against the writing on
the wall
in a dangerously infinite
backalley
where Peter pretends to
love Sally.
In each and every part it
gives and takes
the whole of itself like a
gift, like an ocean,
like an ocean breaking
into eyes,
or the squirrel in the
bluebells,
or me sitting here with
the trees, waiting for leaves.
And everything is so
eloquently
this effusion of
transformation
as if fire were a music
all its own
and in every flame and
face,
thread, star, thorn, leaf,
flower and voice,
in every feather and wave
of awareness,
in every thought, feeling,
and delusion,
and in what is beyond what
we think,
the whole of the tapestry,
the whole of the sky, the sea, the vision,
the mystic specificity of
the indefinable,
the creative urgency of
the uncreate
dropping worlds like
pebbles in a pond
where every ripple opens
its horizons like an eye
and even the rings of the
tree are a slow pulse,
and the waterbirds shed
their jewels in moonlight
and beyond beyond into
the immaculate darkness of the thriving night
is the way their wings
beat, the heart flows,
a star reaches out to
touch the skin of a grape,
or a wave greets an island
in a new language,
or a god drowns in himself
so again and again and again
he can review his whole
life flashing before his eyes
through every one of us,
through the rose and the
bloodstain,
through the doorway and
the window and the dream,
through everything that
seems and unseems itself
like roads of light that
move like snakes in the water,
like the holy paths of the
unnamed ones
who return like memories
of coal converted to diamonds
dancing with fools in the
translucent bliss of their clarity.
One existence. Many. None.
Three waves of light.
The sea. The sun. I am
manifested
by everything I’ve ever
been
like the running of a
river
without beginning or end,
not old water behind, and
new ahead,
but the whole universe, my
watershed,
I am drawn from the well
in this bucket of a body
enflamed by this fierce
urgency of stars,
inextinguishable fire on
the water,
growing eyes like
ambassadors
from everything I am
to the empty throne
of the infinite bloodline
that delivers me like a
message to me,
worlds within worlds like
the sea in a bottle
bobbing at my feet.
And everything is always
teaching;
every tree runs a school,
every star
is a private tutor, every
flower
a sage in a brothel, this
harlot of blood
the wine of an unknown
church,
and every bone in my body
the rung of a descending
saint.
And what do they
inexhaustibly teach
if not the youness of
you to you,
if not the dark abundance
of your formlessness
through forms
as if the world, and all
that are in it
were your native language
and you were the ancient
future of everything,
and every seed, a
betrothal; and every flower, a bride?
Why suffer like a refugee
at the gate
of your own estate
by refusing to let
yourself in
through the open doors of
the trees
with eyes that are wider
than space
where can you hide from
your own being,
or wash the seeing from
your face?
Does ubiquity look for a
place to stand,
a place to call its own, a
seat at the table,
when everywhere it’s the
homeless host
of these world-bearing
guests who bow like trees
on the branching
thresholds of a boundless feast?
In the furthest fields of
yourself
you are the star, and the
flower, and the seeing,
and it’s the
namelessness of everything
that grows a mouth without
saying like a word
that gathered overnight on
the tongue of a leaf
that can taste you like
the nascent stars of an old belief,
you have shone so long
alone in the dark
to be alive here in every
inseparable part.
PATRICK WHITE
