SHOCK ONE BIRD INTO TAKING TO ITS WINGS

SHOCK ONE BIRD INTO TAKING TO ITS WINGS

Shock one bird into taking to its wings

and all the others will fly up out of the sacred woods

into an emergent symphony of spontaneously choreographed words

like rivers reeds dancing in unison to the music of a distant sea.

Fish do the same. And the fans of the corals before the moon

turns them into stone. Listen. Aldebaran

bellows from the heart of the bull sacrificed to creation

like the gift of a gift to itself. It’s raining blood

in some parts of the world. If I don’t look for asylum

in reality it’s because I completely trust my imagination

not to schedule any dress rehearsals for my dreams

as if you could improve the play by upgrading the stage.

And my religion can’t bring itself to believe in a god

that created the world just to let herself be victimized by it.

I don’t take the universe as a sign of intelligence

because I can’t look at a stone without feeling I’ve added

a little wisdom to my thoughts, an earthy, sage laughter

to the unworldly seriousness of my moonrocks.

Life in the universe, elaborating its redundancy

through sex and fractals into an order of complexity

that weaves every wavelength of its picture-music

into a lyrical tapestry that would otherwise

be hanging in hyperspace like a blank membrane. Life

is intelligence in action like a mystic that got up off his knees

to fix the church roof by opening it up to the stars

that keep falling like the mercy of a transcendent rain

to wash the starmud off the roots of life with light

until they shine like lightning breaking into blossom

from the bottom up. Whether things are good or bad

synchronicity reverses the spin of my atoms

like the turn and counterturn of matter and anti-matter

dancing creatively as if love could be measured

in direct proportion to its potential for annihilation.

That’s how things have always gotten done around here.

Someone manages to peel their snowblind reflection

off the mirror like the sunburn of a coronal halo

a throne too close to home, and the night begins

to cool things off with the moonlit salve of a herbal darkness.

Everything lives, animate and inanimate alike,

the lotus eaters, the condottieri of the vulture capitalists,

and in the great reservoirs and watersheds of memory

that generated muses to inspire the living with the fires

of the dead, to keep them from going out, everyone, everything

down to the last mystically specific detail of scarlet paint

flaking off a fingernail as if someone painted a window

to cover up a moonrise with a sunset, lives, endures, thrives

in the well springs of an expansive mind that celebrates

its regeneration out of the magical black holes and top hats

it’s been pulling itself out of like rabbits by the ears for lightyears

while supernovas go berserk with applause just to tempt itself

into finding out how the trick was done by its own sleight of hand

without anyone catching on. Whatever it washes its hands of,

science is still an antiseptic magic that keeps reminding itself

of where it came from the harder it tries to deny its roots,

but there are other vital organs of the body that can

lay claim to being children of the mind as well, not just

this one changeling of a brain child laid on the steps of a temple

or found among the bullrushes. Eye-child, the bird

that lives like a larynx in your throat, heart child,

and the shy child that can feel the light breathing on her skin.

We are the neurons and axons of a galactic intelligence this week

and we’re communicating with shepherd moons and starclusters

that are as alien as we are sending out space probes like genes

unlocking the secrets of the universe like wardens and nightwatchmen

breaking koans like keys to the cosmic eggs where they’re imprisoned

like seven sleepers in the cave of our genome. If you

can put up with that many similes in a row like variations

in the evolutionary bush that might or might not catch fire

like sage brush happy to lay back on the wind and drift, just drift

in the wanderlust of not really knowing what we’re doing here

but taking it on faith, it’s blind luck to be aware of it.

And the available dimensions of tomorrow will have recourse

to these metaphors poured out of the heart like a waterclock

and new dinosaurs will walk the earth among the emotional mammals

in boas of ostrich feathers and suggestive snake-skin sequins

that shimmer like the waves on a lake at night, liquid anthracite,

dark tears with black diamonds for eyes burning heretics

in the unconfessed fires of their adamantine translucency.

Maybe it’s time to let the caves we enter like carbon-based life forms

paint us for a change in colours that have yet to be seen

in anyone’s paintbox like the bulbs of wildflowers about to bloom

in the starfields with a rainbow coloured thumb for gardens.

Let’s turn our astral portraits inside out as if the stars

were embodied within each of us like a starmap

in the crystal skull of a drop of water on a spinal blade of grass.

Mind only. Everything is mind. Not two. Not one. Not nothing.

In every part, in every grain, the whole of the harvest moon.

And the formlessness isn’t inchoate. And the form

is as homeless as the mind looking for its lantern

with its lantern, as if it wasn’t accompanied by its own light

like an honour guard of stars and fireflies the whole way

to the gate and the threshold of an endless beginning.

That’s what’s inconceivably beautiful and playful

about being alive in a mind as aniconicly vast as this.

We only hide the secrets from ourselves

that we must urgently want to be known

like mirages breaking water in the wombs of our wells.

We’re rummaging for grails in our own spiritual lost and founds.

We’re sending telescopes into space like foreign embassies

acting as plenipotentiaries for our eyes only

as if our seeing had to be diplomatic about

the infinite number of ways there are of deciphering the stars.

Make it a loveletter from a bride catalogue of Asian mermaids

if you want to hear the lyrics of what they’re singing to you

about the music of the mind walking on the waters of life

like the Pleiades webbing the constellation of Taurus

among the leafless boughs of the horned locust trees

standing in the moonlight gaping like gored matadors.

Or make up stories to keep the fires within you amused

with a ghost of smoke on a rocky road rising

out of the ashes of its deathmask on a distant hillside

with a nebular glow on its face and a secret syllable

you have to hear with your eyes before you’ll believe its yours

hidden like a jewel in the folds of its veils like a prefix

that isn’t just another false dawn on the mother tongue

of the word for bliss because no one yet has even known

how to say it in the silence of waiting for it to speak for itself.

PATRICK WHITE