THE RIVER AN OLD WALTZ ON THE DANCE CARD OF THE STARS

THE RIVER AN OLD WALTZ ON THE DANCE CARD OF THE STARS

The river an old waltz on the dance-card of the stars,

at the navel of time, at the crossroads of the unborn world,

I take the hand of the waterclock that pumps like my heart

and escort it to the centre of the floor and in a strophic wind

of wheeling turns and counterturns, lyrically reverse my spin

like the weathervane of a Sufi trying to annihilate

my sense of direction in the vertiginous bliss

of not knowing where I’m going on the journey ahead

and as ever, still as clueless, whether it really matters

if I arrive or not, on time or late, mad or enlightened,

weeping like an atmosphere that’s soaked up

too much from the occult arcana of the air

or laughing like a trickster crow shaman as innocent

as a black sense of humour blowing the candles out

like shallow insights into enlightenment to see better in the dark

what truly shines in my third eye, and what does not.

Should I mend the cracks around my eyes with gold

like a broken Japanese teacup, or are those the roots of the lotus

that anchor me like axons of black matter to the lower depths

of my starmud like a radiant alloy of Orion and dirt,

all my neurons wired in series like galactic sea stars?

I don’t take notes on the fires of life in short-hand

and I’m alert to the false dawns of inspiration

that urge me to draft my first impressions of night

in flourishing scripts of cursive smoke uncoiling

like the vapour trails of dragons in the quantum sunsets

of a mystic singularity behind the veils of a black hole.

If it isn’t written in the scarlet vowels of my blood,

koans of unbreakable consonants, seventeen sacred syllables

of the total eclipse of a haiku in nirvana, it’s

only an experiment in the loss of identity of an old science,

not an experience of the crazy wisdom of the new

realizing the shape of the universe is the shape of the mind

that observes it, and knows like an intimate of emptiness

it’s inconceivably alive and intelligent as space.

And I celebrate it now like an ageing man

looks at his hands and immediately understands

why the last flowers of autumn are always the most beautiful.

I have sown like a star what others will harvest

of my light after me like the eyes of a man who spent

a long time dreaming in the watersheds and wine cellars

of the art of learning how to break into song

like a graverobber into the heartwood of his youth,

how to carve guitars out of coffins without cutting

your own throat like tightly bound vocal cords

badly attuned to your jugular vein like the low E string

of a Tibetan mantra with nothing but an empty begging bowl

for a microphone. And the forked tongue of a lightning bolt

witching for serpent fire in the mouth of a dragon sage

that triggers the moon into releasing the mercy of rain

on the scorched earth path of a volcanic grailquest

that might give the lost something to look forward to

when they’re drowning like fish in the sea

that gave birth to them like the sun in Pisces

at the vernal equinox where the celestial equator

and the ecliptic intersect like rippling bracelets of rain

elaborating into mandalic interference patterns

where the protocols of chaos wear the appropriate life masks

like dark poems and light on both sides of the moon

to commemorate the occasion of a rising constellation

in a metaphoric rapture of collaborative illumination.

Homage to the dark mothers of the words for water and light

it took a lifetime of silence for the daughters of the muse

to learn to say as if a poet’s life depended upon it.

Homage to the thieves of fire that set the windows ablaze

from the inside out in ways they’ve never been lit up before

when they least expected it from the least expected quarter.

The sun at midnight. The moon at midday. And the shadows

remarkably supple given the age of the dance they’re performing

like a swan song of black feathers with the wingspan of a ghost.

Homage to the mystery that led me like an exile

out of my own doorway to disappear like a bird in the night,

brief, brief, brief, and gone into the abysmal dark

of an afterlife I followed like a starmap of lightyears

into the open until my eyes adapted to the black mirrors

of my deepening awareness of how the heart

shone brighter than the mind and the entrance not the exit

was the harder way home for a human who was willing to risk it

for a valley full of fireflies and savagely clear insights

that echo a mountain that shrieks in its sleep

like a nighthawk to the sharp-eyed stars. Asleep

or awake, alive or dead, the differences pale

like wandering scholars in the moonrise on the river.

Prophetic skulls lose track of the time like amino acids

in the alphabet blocks of ancient asteroids

trying to keep it together in the Oort belt

after they were messed up like ricochets by Neptune

on tour in the leper colonies of shepherd moons.

The seven inaccessible dimensions of the future

fray like a spinal cord into an infinite number of lifelines

at the deltas and sacred meeting places where

the mindstream returns to itself, water to water,

not ashes and dust. And the silver sword

the moon lays down in tribute to the lake

is bent like the back of an old man so no one after him

could ever wield it like the hands of a clock in battle again.

Homage to the stranger that stands at the gate

to another world without disavowing his homelessness.

PATRICK WHITE