IF IT’S A TRUE RELIGION, IT HASN’T
GOT A HISTORY
If it’s a true religion, it hasn’t
got a history, it’s wholly
of the moment. No time for a teacher.
No martyrs, saints, apostates or
heretics.
No Summa Theologica trying to
proof-read the spirit.
Like a star, it’s always ahead of the
light
it lavished on yesterday. It advances
into the dark
like the root of a flower without
nightvision.
The moment you say anything about it
you’ve flawed its silence with a lie.
Like
the light of the star in its eye on a
long road
after midnight, you can’t fly toward
it,
you can’t run away. Whatever it
shines upon
is true north, and the wind is its only
direction of prayer.
Make a shrine of it, and it’s empty.
Deny it
and it returns your voice like a bird
in a valley
to a bough that lets you overhear
yourself.
The world is construed from the absence
of a self
like a mirage on the moon that doesn’t
affect the tides.
If you want to paint the worlds the way
the mind does
lay your brush aside, and watch what
unfolds.
Show me a leaf that isn’t a
masterstroke of your seeing.
Show me a starmap that isn’t a
mindscape of your being.
Show me a book that isn’t trying to
decipher the silence
as if you were written in code to
disguise
the enigma of your unlocatable presence
everywhere
without a sign of yourself that depends
upon your magic markers.
The moment you say it is, this is it,
and mistake it
for the foundation stone of a nacreous
paradigm
for the new moon beading rosaries of
black pearls
like the bright beginnings of a born
again eclipse
you’re anointing quicksand with a
desert of holy oil
and all the pyramids you took to heart,
start to thaw
like the eternal recurrence of an
hourglass that lost track
of history when it abandoned its
perspective
for a telescope among the stars, no
three alarm fires
to rush off to like a volunteer
waterclock in scuba gear.
If you want to grasp becoming stop
trying
to take a hold of it like like a
hydra-headed snake
shapeshifting in the noose of a
solitary question.
Stand away, let it go, let it flow like
the wavelength
of a black river through the
undergrowth of your sacred woods.
And don’t throw koans at it in the
last moments
as it disappears, if you meditate in a
glass zendo.
Every accusation is a confession and
the karma’s
meted out in full immediately as your
feathers
revert to scales, and opposites are
conjoined
like dragons in cosmic eggs with wings
on both sides of their extremes such
that
as it is above so it is below, a matter
of starmud.
The earth in harmony with the light
that shines upon it.
And you who are lost upon the nightseas
of your own awareness,
whatever terrors of the deep sleep
under your lifeboats
dreaming of bobbing their way to rescue
like prophetic skulls washed up on an
insular beach
like green Japanese fishing floats
picked like early grapes
from the vines of the nets your
dolphins are tangled in,
what is there to fear from your own
weather
that isn’t a reflection of the kind
of love life
you’re deriving from an affair with
oceanic notions
of keeping aviaries of kingfishers to
quell the commotion
of the storms that pass through your
life roiling
your thought waves with turbulent
reflections
on the surface of your awareness rooted
in the music
where fumaroles toot on the bottom of
the sea
like the stops of a flute playing the
dangerous lyrics of life
in different keys, making them up on
the fly?
In an interpendent universe whatever
your eye falls upon,
stars above, dragons below, versatile
enough to reverse
the telescopic spin of your perspective
of what’s high
and what’s low, anything you see is
the mother of the matrix
even when you turn the light on
yourself to discover
there’s no one there, just this
creative absence, this
dark abundance that’s goddess enough
to fill her bright vacancy
with worlds within worlds that unveil
her immediate intimacy
as if she were telling the truth to
herself like a secret that didn’t exist.
PATRICK WHITE
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