DEEPER THAN A DREAM MY IMAGINATION HAS
ALWAYS SEEN
Deeper than a dream my imagination has
always seen
a pilgrimage of sacred clowns dancing
against a background
of gathering storm clouds that seem to
portend the end of things.
Wiser in their crazy wisdom than the
insanity
of the irrational inhumans, braver than
heroes
in the courage of their joy, their
celebration
almost seems a protest against
ineluctable fate,
but there’s a beautiful rapture in
the sorrow that makes it art,
a subtle threnody in what they exalt
without reservation,
gestures of a playful creativity more
profound than doom.
There’s pink on the mountains of the
clouds at sunset,
Naples yellow, pale tangerine, but
offing to the left
the abyss of a threatening Prussian
blue sweeping
like the cape of an infamous eclipse
about to deliver
the coup de gras to the whole scene
like the sacrificial bull
of the last moonrise trying to get up
off its knees.
The grass is plump and damp green on a
late summer day.
And there’s a girl with a hoop, not a
halo, she’s dancing with
like tree rings jumping orbitals like
ripples of rain
and she’s wearing a corny dress, but
there’s a smile
on her face you’d think more of a
wingspan
than an expression of ineffable bliss
realizing
there was never anything more or less
than this.
The whole procession is staggered along
the ridge
of easy rolling hills like the longer
wavelengths of time
that are going to get there just the
same, but not in a hurry,
and I don’t have a clue what
destination they have in mind
but I’ve always taken it as the sign
of the liberated fact
they didn’t need one. No shrine
waiting for them at the end.
But it doesn’t matter. The humanly
divine is embodied
in the starmud of their own hearts, and
it’s shining.
The apocalyptic millenarian imagination
of North America
has always struck me as a kind of
cosmic viciousness
that wants to call the fire down early
to get even
with the people more inspired to love
than they are
long before the sun has any notion of
mythically inflating its lungs
with one last gasp of the earth’s
evaporating atmosphere.
You ever wonder what a Puritan sees
when he looks at the stars?
Meteor showers or too many flowers
among the vegetables?
I’ve been qualified by love in no
man’s land long enough
to wear bars like scars on my shoulder.
And disappointment
never tires of telling me I’m ageing,
and not to put
too much store in inspiration striking
like lightning twice
in the same place on the far side of
the lake
I swam across like a brain wave to get
here.
Wasn’t it me who wrote life is a
river with only one bank
and I’m not even standing on that? I
don’t
underestimate the accuracy hidden under
the deathmasks of despair
nor the translucency of hidden hopes
disguised
by everyday human faces being swept out
to sea
like eyelids of apple bloom that didn’t
come to fruition.
I’ve bent my will like a ceremonial
sword
no one else could ever pick up and use
again
and offered it in tribute to the water
sylphs
of my imagination like a blade of
moonlight on a lake.
My insights have been disciplined in
the black holes of my pain.
My whole soul’s been a dark monk in
an observatory
on a cold mountaintop where I’ve
lived with my solitude
cowled like an eclipse in the enormous
silence of an abyss
radiant with stars as beguiling as the
sky bound peers
of the earth born wildflowers in the
valley down below.
Love can be a terrorist with a sense of
compassion
or an angel with a flaming sword you
mistook
for a spear of inexplicable ecstasy
when you went looking
for someone to fill your hive with
honey, but forgot
wasps don’t make honey, only the
honey-bees do that.
So it’s tricky. Love isn’t the
answer to everything.
Sometimes a little entomology goes a
lot further.
Cocoons, chrysales, mustard seed sized
eggs and trap door spiders.
Sometimes it’s wise to judge a book
by its cover.
And maybe an urn is the inevitable end
of the furnace of the heart
love is, and everyone is glutted by a
bellyful of ashes,
but even a few chimney sparks of love
are enough
to make the fire spread like a
firestorm of stars
and deep underground, even in the most
demonic, root-fires.
PATRICK WHITE
