SOMEONE TOOK THE GREY DAY LIKE A DIRTY RAG

SOMEONE TOOK THE GREY DAY LIKE A DIRTY RAG

Someone took the grey day like a dirty rag

and wrung all the sunshine out of it.

Ten thousand poems bloom like flowers,

beam a little light back to the stars

and go back to seed before I’ve put

a word to the page. Infinite worlds,

infinite possibilities and all of them

inter-reflectively true. All the cosmic eggs

hatch out like a choir in a nesting church.

Pick a nightbird and give it your voice.

See if you can sing the frequencies of the stars.

The mystery doesn’t exist until

you start exploring it. Not to prove

how wonderful you are. Take my word for it

we’re all uniquely magnificent each

in our unexploited way. Liars err

on the charming side of the truth.

If you ever had an emotion as big as that

you wouldn’t be able to lift it.

Just because you sit down at your desk

like a sacred clown with a bag of bruised balloons

doesn’t mean your feelings are

universally inflatable. Tell a big enough truth

often enough, and everyone will deny it.

Look. They’re laying salt and sand

down on the icy roads like a Kuiper belt

of asteroids. Whatever you can’t

relate to here you befriend in other worlds.

Long before Heisenberg, lovers discovered

the truth of uncertainty principles,

spooky action at a distance. Quantum entanglement.

Cookie-cutters of black matter

shaping templates of dough sprinkled

with galaxies for the abyss next door.

I’m plotting a starmap of my neurons

and everyone of the poems I write

is a myth of origin in someone’s eyes.

The wind doesn’t fuss over the seeds it sows.

I’ve seen wild columbine like a tender carillon

of fragile bells suggested by the rain

growing out of the skulls of Cambrian rocks.

Even the lifers at Millhaven have poetry in them.

Deepen the darkness of your own nightfall

if you want to see the same stars they do.

You want to radiate like the stargates of Orion,

shine with the brilliance of Sirius in solitude,

show up like a bad penny in an abyss

of the first magnitude and see if the moon

comes up heads or tails, bearing in mind

the donkey at the end is in the lead

when the electron reverses its spin

without an intervening medium or even

a reasonable alibi. -290 on the dark side

of Mercury that close to the sun, what’s

the point of deciphering the scars of crescent moons

on icy membranes laid out like rinks in hyperspace

when you could be out there with the rest of the quarks

figure-skating for yourself like the language of poets

who don’t know what they’re dying for,

but let the heart make a generous guess.

Here’s one. Elaborate as sophisticated a universe

as you want out of your own simplicity

and where it stops is your seabed for the night

and write of all the myriad forms of life

that thrive in your dreams, agonistically

dependent upon one another and exhilarated

by the rush of a creative avalanche see

if you can make the same indelible impression

with sacred syllables of your own upon life

as the Burgess Shale without your name on the cover.

PATRICK WHITE