IN THE MOMENT BEFORE SILENCE BREAKS
WATER
In the moment before silence breaks
water
like a thimble of oceanic consciousness
and the fish are jumping through the
underside
of the moon looking for the dark side
of their reflections
in the genetic waterclocks of time
endlessly editing
the first draft of three quarks in a
membranous monad
as the inflationary tendencies of the
initial inspiration
cool down into molecules and space
gives lead to the light,
I cast one long last farewell of a look
like a waterbird disappearing into the
eyes of the void
that have never turned back like
nirvana
to ever say good-bye to anyone,
indifferent as smoke
to the path anyone takes away or toward
it
as you realize you are the journey
you’re on,
you’re the vehicle and the starmap,
you’re
the dream of getting somewhere that’s
making you up on the go.
Marvels and madness. The business of
wonder.
Asylums crammed with star-shocked
astonishment.
The exponential rush of knowledge, and,
as always
the mysteries last to the dance, an
innocent lover’s slow advance
to embrace the novelties of this
Cambrian explosion
of fractals and facts like the
wavelengths of a suspension bridge
swaying between two crows’ nests of
straw. Memes
on the memomes, evolution, brutal
genius, shaping space with thought
until matter itself is seen to be a
translucent mode of sentience.
A dream of stars adrift like an empty
lifeboat
in the wake of the path it takes
without knowing
where it came from or where it’s
supposed to be going
over the edge of a black hole into the
tunnels of love and death
with a whole new universe at the other
end of a telescopic hourglass
where bliss makes its own molecules,
and compassion
the heavier elements of our starmud
deep in our sorrows.
Things of the world like a language
without a voice
until you say them like a secret you’ve
kept from yourself
in your heart of hearts, the ear of
your ear, the eye
of your eye, so deeply intensified by
your understanding
they begin to shine by a light of their
own to say they’re
as alive as you are to live as freely
as they seek
the key to why they exist at all, as
you do, to know this.
It’s the longing of hunger that
inspires you
to use what you have to seek what
you’re missing.
Content with what you have, ripeness is
all,
you fall from the bough like a windfall
of shepherd moons
to erect a provisional scaffolding to
climb up again
and paint the creation myths of the
constellations anew
in the crowns of the treetops washing
in the underpainting.
No sailors in sight, life sings to
itself like a mermaid on the rocks.
Out of the mouth of the mountain that
wanted to speak
in a grammar of eagles and stars to the
next peak over,
in a lyrical outburst of echoes, a
valley was born to listen.
One star west, is one star east, one
foot after another.
The humanizing of our solitude is
deranging strangers at the gate
as the signs of life have become a
matter of course,
and the miraculous doesn’t know what
to do for an encore.
Even if you don’t, the mystery of
your own life
takes you more seriously than your
enquiries can imagine.
When a hidden secret wants to know
itself
it looks at you in the mirror of your
own awareness
and as much as you’ve been given a
light to see by
is the colour of its eyes, the shape of
its face, the curl of its mouth.
Looking into the mind like a telescope
looks at the stars
and the stars look back like fireflies
in the well of the telescope,
admit you’re invisible, formless, and
start from there.
Or you’ll languish in the timeless
eras before the Big Bang
without eternity to back you up.
Ripples in the microwaves
of your cosmic background emanation,
can you feel the pulse
of an ancient rain in your own veins,
or did the golden fish
that eludes you jump into your lifeboat
of its own accord
the moment you stopped tying lures to
hook it on your questions?
Trickle or sunami alike, everybody
makes it back like
a wave of the mindstream to the great
night sea of their source.
Like an apple makes it back to the tree
that abandoned it
like a god, or an atom, or
mitochondrial Eve looking
for a purpose in life that wasn’t too
deep to conceive of
given that she couldn’t know what she
had to work with at the time.
When you listen to yourself clearly to
hear the universe
talking through you, if it doesn’t
sound unapologetically absurd
you’re either lying or mindless of
the madness in the mirror.
This is what comes of updating your
questions
but listening in the same old language.
The universe is polyglot.
It speaks in tongues of
undifferentiated chaos, and the ear
you give to it is the grammar, the
magic of what it has to say
so the message is always
collaboratively creative
like the quantum entanglements of
binary star systems
dancing around each other like lovers
whose bonds
are not proportional to the elastic
distances between them.
Just like the impersonal intimacies
between crystals
on the same frequency. Go out and look
at the stars
on a winter night and say anything you
want in their presence
and it’s heard in reverse on the
other side of the galaxy.
You can tell who’s been looking at
Orion
by the labyrinthine eyeprints of earth
bound fireflies all over it
whose light you didn’t think could
reach out as far as a star
to leave an indelible impression on the
third eye of a sunspot.
Pure motivation doesn’t set the
agenda of what you’re fated to live.
Ambition even less. Yet they’re both
open doorways to enlightenment
as expedient and delusory as those
spiritual keyholes you peek through.
Life accommodates itself to the
morphology of your knowledge forms.
Inconceivably, it exists because you
imagine it, not because you know it.
Astronomy for poets. Picture-music for
cosmologists with stone ears.
The shape-shifting pillars of the moon
in a palace of water,
the way all poems move like serpents of
light
dancing to their own flutes like the
wind on the waves.
Many waterclocks and broken hearts that
do,
but the lyric of the mindstream doesn’t
taste of time.
There are no ashes of the stars on its
tongue,
no new moon like a pupil in the iris of
a moondog.
It doesn’t enter the future trying to
improve upon its infancy.
It doesn’t hire a tutor to help
perfect its spontaneity.
It’s not the idolatrous familiar of
its companionable mystery.
It’s not the nightwatchmen of
everything it reflects.
It’s not the eyewitness watching you
being you in your dreams.
The circuitous blossoming is your own
emergent life. Your seeing
flowers into music like stars on the
tendrils of the wild grapevines
feeling their way through the darkness
like the cursive script
of a serpent of light writing glyphs in
the wake of its going
as if any wavelength of water were a
sign of intelligence
in a desert of stars where sand may be
the measure of time
but the hourglass of the sky never runs
out of insights
like fireflies writing back in
ungrammatical constellations
of pictographs in the luminous hand of
their vagrant imaginations.
PATRICK WHITE
No comments:
Post a Comment