SOLITUDE AND SILENCE

SOLITUDE AND SILENCE

Solitude and silence. The emptiness of the living moment

subsumed in the mundane middens of the soul, clam shells

and sheep bones, the shucked content of the heart

cherished again as the afterlife of the evidence

I once lived here along with everyone else.

Before I write, this archaeological seance I hold with myself,

this ingathering of everyone I’ve ever been

flowing back into me where the mindstream meets the sea.

The continuous stillness of this contiguous awareness

where everything is a symbolic event in a dream

trying to wake up from itself to set the dream people free.

Emotional effusions of the moon bleeding among the coral.

Solar flares of conceptual insight returning like ingrown hairs

to the source of their deception like unwanted children

though I’ve franchised orphanages all over my mindscape

to shelter my rational thought from the persecutions of my intuition.

Serpent’s tongues that have been struck by black lightning

humming like a choir of tuning forks half a note off

like a lie they told God, they’ve been living ever since.

No piety. But a natural kind of reverence for the life of the mind

breathing me in and out of my body like a bellows

trying to boil spiritual gold out of my default metal of lead

as things begin to heat up like the tongue of a sword

on the anvil of my voice. And by that I know

prophetic heads are going to roll on the growing edge

of an imaginative insurgency nothing flammable with life

can resist for long. I know anything I say about this,

if experience hasn’t cooked you in the same cauldron

I was born in, will seem unpatently absurd, but then

so are thermals in the open fields just before sunset

and the hawks that ride them for the sheer joy of airing their wings

unperturbed by what’s moving in the grass down below.

Infinite grammars. Myriad alphabets. Space talks in tongues.

Everything that is lives and isn’t intelligent, but intelligence itself.

Chaos the mercurial cornerstone of an order that’s lost

the rhythm of life trying to syncopate its heartbeat

to the unmusical paradigms of stone-eared preconceptions.

I see crows with rubies in their beaks as if

they’d just isolated the gene for symmetry.

In this miasmic swirl of images and wavelengths,

third eyes coalescing like starclusters

out of clouds of unknowing breaking into light,

and the shadows they cast no less prepossessing,

how uninhabitable I feel as a planet hoping the night

will prove me wrong and make all things

communicable and clear as a mother tongue

I’ve been speaking for years without knowing it

even when I exile myself like the sacred syllable

of a native son wandering the earth like a rootless tree.

And there, do you see that constellation rising

like a distillation of the starmud I’ve walked in all my life?

Doesn’t it make you want to dance under it with the wind

like a chandelier you’ve thrown rocks because it’s beautiful,

as if someone were standing in it like a window

with the elevated perspective of the Pleiades

shining down in equanimity upon its desecrants

as if by their fruits you shall know the luminous generosity

of a windfall of light that falls at your feet

as if someone were germinating star sapphires in your bloodstream

to give you something higher to aspire to

than just teaching fire how to swim through the blues?

Inside the allegory. The logic of metaphor.

Hidden harmonies in synchronous pictographic fields

that resonate like cave paintings with otherworlds

that are not occluded by the imposition of space and time.

The younger ore of the outer world smelted down

like imagistic strokes of luck into the visionary elders

that transform them in the fires of their imaginations

into the igneous bloodlines that pour out of them

like the mystic metals of swords descended from ancient stars

that can give and take life at the same time

in these homeless realms of sacred ambivalence

before the dark mother tempered the forms she engendered

in tears that broke like the waters of a docetist womb.

Things here don’t relate like thought-trains on parallel lines

that never meet, whatever the destination, they associate

like chords and keys you can hear with your eyes

and see with your ears in a synteresis of the senses

that wash up on the shores of cosmic, island consciousness,

all wavelengths of the same inexhaustible oceanic mind

that doesn’t make things appear so much as emerge

like species efflorescing into the medium they’re working in.

Alloys of light and earth. Hybrids of water and fire.

The sky calling its birds. The river its fish.

And the longing of time in the mouth of the earth

to call us out of the starmud and bathe us in the rain

gentled out of her atmospheric acids so as not to burn

the tenderness she lavished on us like eyes and skin,

a new kind of shining to enhance the radiance of the stars,

light upon light in the skulls of the unbegotten ancestors.

This is the morphological matrix of knowledge forms

shaped to the organs of perception like neuronic synapses,

enjoining efferent axons to the walls of nervous villages

waiting for the news of what they’re experiencing

from the abstract receptors of oracular impulses,

construing the world as a dendritic grapevine

tendrilled like Celtic silverwork throughout the mind

rooted in space as the closest similitude

to the emptiness that is the ground of its being

and the great commingled watershed of its subconscious commons.

The simpler the window, the cleaner the view

so I attend to my seeing like a nightwatchmen

attends to his own eyes like the glow of a lantern

warns and reveals the shadows of his presence in the darkness.

Eye to eye with the sky at either end of the telescope

things of the world are things of the mind,

cosmology the bubble-brained psychology of the multiverse.

And there are some nights, waiting for a poem

to bloom like a flower in the flames of my intensities,

I swear I can overhear from stars away

the exhilarated echoes of alien voices ruminating

on how we might have changed the gestural expressionism

of our shapeshifting, river-turning, morphotic souls in their absence.

Probable concourses of multiplicitous insights

into the jewel I’m turning in the light of my mind

like the sun and the moon at midnight and noon

when the measure of words is the wingspan

of whatever sky I happen to be flying in

like comets and birds and maple-keys

that have unlocked my heartwood and set me free

to blossom like an alphabet on a pilgrimage of trees,

to express myself like an inconceivable wind

with wings on my heels in the hermetic shrines

of this unearthly solitude, this estranged silence.

PATRICK WHITE