MY LONELY ISLAND MUSIC

MY LONELY ISLAND MUSIC

My lonely island music,

already I see in your eyes, devastation in the dead zone,

skulls littering the field, autumns wandering away

weeping like windows that mistook themselves for the sky

and murdered a bird. Mystic September, vamp of this vision,

how could the moon not leap from my tongue

in praise of the world that shines through you

bathing alone in the dawn of every moment, utterly

alive, your beauty the page of a unwritten scripture

poised in the ink at the nib of every blade of grass to say

beyond the saying

what can’t be said. How unbearably sad

in this defeated hour that so few know the truth

that walks ahead of them like their own footprints

returning to the door they left by, already lost,

their houses, foundation stones of quicksand. Get it right in the seed,

get it right in the root of the eye, let the wind

take the ashes, sweep the shadows from the stairs,

and all the moons of yesterday are caravans of blossoms on the water.

Get it wrong and you’re a widow plundering corpses

for wedding rings and pocket-watches, black rain

on the open eyes of the dead. Devoid of transcendence

in the mirroring awareness, on a diet of fire,

you’ll end up combing your hair with a ladder.

Can you hear this bell of green before it rings, can you see

the painting in your blood before the brush is lifted

like a maggot of consciousness to the rose?

If you can, then check your shadow at the threshold

and walk naked into the far fields of your seeing, your feet

on the ground, your head in the stars; if you can’t,

you’re deepening your ignorance by ignoring your depths,

your light passes over itself like an eclipse or the hand

of a black magician, conjuring. Peril in the seeing.

A mask of frost over the surgical face of the heart. Understand

deeply and with authority that this dream cannot be understood,

taste this dream for yourself and look once

into the brilliant darkness that lies beyond wisdom and forsaking

and acknowledge in a crown of water

you are queen of that, your own teacherless realms.

Can’t you feel the roots of the black orchid of this space

wounding the soil with the stars of another night-sky

already opening above and below you? Rightly and brightly,

you are that opening, the sum of all the awareness of the whole of your life

expressed in the unborn no-point of a star of perception in space,

blue knowledge beyond the scope of the death-sighted.

Why study your own legends like snapped twigs on the trail

and send yourself in a straitjacket to school

when you already know by heart

the book of the breath you must live? Open your fist. Where

did it go? What’s in your hand? Do you understand? Our lives

are the shadows of birds sown like seed across the skies,

fish-maps printed on water, compasses looking for directions

that don’t exist. We are brief and we are vital, pilgrims

on a bridge of ancient zeroes, angels under every stone,

gypsies at home. Hold your life up like a match to a mirror in a dark room

to see whose face it is

then blow yourself out like an orchard

before blazing becomes a kind of blindness.

Put the world to your lips like a finger

in the black clarity of the silence. Do you see, do you see

the white songbird of the moon enter the throat of the well

to flaunt its plumage privately in an empty theater,

the roar of the ghosts of the infinite aeons for applause,

the sound of one hand clapping? Anciently, you were so

and now you are so

and tomorrow after tomorrow you shall be so, hidden

right under your own nose, calling yourself like a girl to her friend

when the game is over to come out of hiding. Most people

never understand more than a keyhole and a whisper of themselves,

trembling behind the dangerous doors of their own names

when they’re called to come out and play

with a universe that begins in every moment,

a fire-fly in a canning jar. They graze on the fodder of illusions,

domesticated by their own cupboards and cowardice,

peopling the wilderness beyond their artificial paradise

with demons that threaten to behead them in a palace coup

for the genuine liberation of an empty throne.

The blossom doesn’t know its own beginning,

nor the snowflake, its end. Can you find your true face

in this mirror of echoes,

the one you wore before the birth of silence?

I shall come looking for you like the wind

and I shall find you among trees and flowers

and among the grasses of the fields

and in the living light that breathes over the harvest

and in the water-mind of the stream that flexes the reeds

and playfully graces the ripe honey of the sun

with a sweetness unknown to the business of bees. No inside, no outside,

everywhere I step is the arrival and the walking of my blood

the whole of the way to you from whom I cannot be separated,

slipped like a letter under a door that opens, a mouth in space,

to paint the moon on an eye of scarlet water. One leaf falling,

the whole history of the world

in the way I love you by letting go; in the way

when you are closest, your heart, the thunder

of subtle intimacies in a lost well,

I drown in the vastness like a bird in the reflection of the sky,

happy refugees all along the side-roads of my nerves,

my mind, a fool of the moon, all parade and passage.

Do you understand? Not different, not the same,

we are rain on a window, faces beyond

the blindness of mirrors that use our eyes to see.

In every feather, in every leaf, in every flight of the word

ten thousand dawns, all of the earth,

this emptiness within emptiness singing to itself in the void.

PATRICK WHITE