O, YES, THE STILLNESS COMES ALL IN ONE WAVE, ONE CARESS

O, YES, THE STILLNESS COMES ALL IN ONE WAVE, ONE CARESS

O, yes, the stillness comes all in one wave, one caress,

like a tide, the salve of a cool kiss of the moon

on the scorched eyelid of a black rose that burned

like a reincarnation of fire, the dark enlightenment

the stars reach for beyond the eyes at the end

of their fingertips. The unattainability that lovers

demand of the night when they blow the candles out.

A warm gust of peace on the nape of my neck

at the base of my skull, the brain stem of the daffodil

not uprooted from the bulb of its head

by the sudden moonset of a guillotine with blood on it,

but washed in a warm rain that makes it glow

like a tungsten streetlamp in the aura of a ripe apricot

in a real garden it never expected to wake up in.

There’s grace in the silence of the garrulous seance.

The ore of my labours have brought forth

a nugget of gold of inestimable age and value

among the asteroids I’ve been mining with my third eye,

strange translucencies that tremble like fluid jewels

when the nightwind is playing the lake like a harpsichord

and the fireflies are trying to read their starmaps like sheet music.

As if the sadness and the fear, the evolution of indifference,

the intermittent sobbing in the muffled asylum,

the terror of a child’s first night in hospital,

or a long term prisoner’s first night out alone on the street,

were absolved of their emotions like turbulent rivers

easing into a halcyon sea that whispers with uncanny assurance

it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, just a bad dream that kept you awake.

Almost a voice I recognize that’s been

following my echo for light years like one attentive star

I’ve caught sight of now and again on long night walks

where the eyes of wary animals glint in the dark

like a nocturnal substitute for flowers along the roadside.

One among many who shine more brilliantly but are

merely clever compared to this sibyl of compassion that turns

their furious flames down low on the night wards of the heart

and gentles the wind that plays too hard on the broad-leaved

basswood guitars of the trees troubled by the lyrics

of the cosmic dissonance that can’t hear what the music’s

been saying before the beginning of the universe

about suffering, about love, about the soul of matter

that’s been raising the dead out of the ashes

of the urns of light like lanterns full of fireflies and stars

for 13.7 billion years now as the crow flies,

prophetic skulls aroused by the longing of the nightbirds

to add more beauty to the truth of their words,

to sing in the quantum notes of an eleven piece string theory

like a band on the corner of anywhere and the universe

banging on membranes like a pulse in the name

of a good cause, bubbles nucleating the wavelengths

of their original rapture to expand a little riff of intimate bliss

into a universal joy as pervasive as the time and space

life’s jamming in like an electric violin with a blues harp,

like an emission spectrum in the starcluster of the Pleiades,

like a moment of peace blooming along the shores

of a winter mindstream like a galactic waterlily

of oceanic awareness blooming in a crystal skull

like life in the Saturnine waters of Enceladus

inconceivably thriving in a greenhouse of habitable ice.

PATRICK WHITE