IN THE STRAIGHT UP BUILDING ACROSS THE STREET

IN THE STRAIGHT UP BUILDING ACROSS THE STREET

In the straight up building across the street,

a master work of stone masons dead at least a hundred years,

now abused as a bank, the fieldstones that were pink in the dawn,

roseate quartz, are still yellow as wheat in the dusk.

Mood rings of the way the light feels about things.

Milky blue sky and grimy windows, a crystal menagerie

of perfectly still mobiles and stained glass stars

with stubby white candles waiting

for someone to light their wicks with conviction

hanging from cuphooks on the windowframe

to glean the lean insights of the light in winter.

I adorn my solitude with a palace of translucencies

in a dumpy upstairs studio apartment. I paint

the walls of the cave my prophetic skull contains

like an abyss in the palette of my emotions

with starlike things and wheeling solar systems

that would make you think the only path in life to take

is dancing around one another, pendulously suspended

from thin silver chains linked like ripples of rain

into the vertebrae of slender spines, gleaming stems

of the low hanging fruits of the earth. Among them. My brain.

Deep blue jars on the windowsill, mystic nights

in a poor man’s cathedral, how many highbeams

on the cars passing down below like blood cells

have they brought to enlightenment without

anyone realizing it as the achievement of their usual discipline?

That wisdom is as capricious as beauty about

the fathomless lucidities of life that happen in the blink of an eye.

The light doesn’t insult time apportioning out its gifts.

One firefly’s enough to ignite an entire universe.

Icons of bliss. I make a shrine to the light of any place

I’m living in. I illuminate the innate darkness

that overtakes me from time to time like an eyeless nightsky.

Black holes in my galactic spirit crazed for the light

that sends out missionaries to convert their void bound invisibility

through the medium of my sensory starmud into wildflowers

blooming like starmaps of my imagination all over the earth.

PATRICK WHITE