WHAT'S BEYOND THE TRUTH ALWAYS MAKES A LIE

WHAT’S BEYOND THE TRUTH ALWAYS MAKES A LIE

What’s beyond the truth always makes a lie

of what you can say about it. You can feel it

even as the words fall from your mouth like a bird bath.

However beautiful, however clear, translucent, well-meaning,

there’s always one syllable more that’s missing

that everything turns on like a black hole at the nave

of the wheeling galaxy, an unsayable singularity.

Love the radiance of the spokes, but where’s

the vehicle you were trying to assemble

from the yarrow sticks in the Book of Changes?

We get as far as the scaffolding we piece together

out of the bones of the snakes and ladders

we climbed up on like monkey bars to paint

our last masterpiece, and when it’s done,

however admired, it’s a paint rag of the original vision

by comparison with what flashed through our heart

like the spearhead of a life-changing insight

into the nature of chameleonic shapeshifters

mimicking our gestures like mirrors in a game of charades.

I’ve spent most of my life listening like a liar

to what I can’t say. The eclipse of an ink blot

on the silence even when the hummingbirds

gather like tuning forks to sample the larkspur.

I can say it like a star, a flower, the black swan

of a new moon making its first incision of light

like the slash of a scalpel across my throat,

but when the summons of the nightbird

stops singing on its green bough, realizing

no one’s ever going to come who understands

the inspiration and the longing, the Slavic solitude,

for all that I’ve tried to express as lyrically as I can,

I still feel the inarticulate urgency of an abyss

with its tongue cut out of what I tried to say

kicking me from the inside like the embryo

of a stillborn sky burial silently mouthing the wind

like the autumn leaves of a lonely death song.

Always an ear out of reach, a flightfeather

of a voice shy of the saying, a secret letter

of the alphabet without a likeness born of the eyes.

As if I used a blackboard and a bullet of chalk

as an understudy for the shining of the stars

or gummed the anthem of the sea like a brittle-lipped shell

I found washed up among the sea stars

like a larynx at my feet. Though I can sing

like the trees in the morning without forgetting

that every aubade is also a farewell to the stars

as sincere a field of nesting skylarks as I try to be,

my earthbound starmud rising like a constellation

of arcane serpent fire burning at the eastern doors

of the black wisdom of life arising out of the death

of what it engendered it. As with the flesh, so the spirit

salvages the detritus of what remains of its disillusions

and labours to enclose its emptiness in a chrysalis

of meaning and matter that might induce a transformation

of nothing into dragonflies. Stranger things have happened.

Truth is, according to the uncertainty principle,

the universe isn’t a metaphor, it’s a simile

for something you can’t quite put your finger on

like mercury trying to keep a starmap together in an earthquake.

I’ve looked into the future through a window

into an empty room no one’s booked into yet

and I’ve sometimes felt the same agony of stillness

being prepared by space and time as an available dimension

life hasn’t arrived to occupy yet, too busy in the present

to anticipate what’s coming like luggage from the past.

Words were the negative space. I worked in absence.

And something would always be missing. Words

were quantumly entangled like fish in the nets

of assent and denial, like spaced out fireflies on their way

to the stars, enmeshed in the torn spider webs

dripping under the weight of the panicked choirs

of dissonant frequencies strung like trashed guitars

with stagefright at the karaoke microphones of the streetlamps.

The medium beats around the message like nocturnal insects

against a window screen between them and a scented candle.

Young, my words were Luna moths and astronauts

that ached to immolate themselves in the stars

but as I got older, looking back over my shoulder

at the ashes of the winged heels of my nobler aspirations

compared to this long firewalk I’m travelling barefoot now,

and the largesse of the mystery that tunes celestial spheres

to the sound of mosquitoes whining in the woods at night

like dental drills and the villanelles of pubescent poets

that set your teeth on edge, I realized, at best,

words were just a way of whistling in the dark

with the rest of the nightbirds when the stars were out

and the moon was casting shadows as revealing as the light.

That’s when it began to dawn on me the worst lies

are always the clearest, simplest, easiest to understand

like straight lines to curves, highways to serpentine rivers,

things seen retinally from the outside like artists

with eyelids like the shutters of cameras with no feeling

for what they were looking at like reptiles

with third eyes that rarely ever blinked at anything.

Eye on the object reality when poets took notes

in white lab coats as if they were experimenting with fruitflies

under a lens instead of experiencing life as a vision

they’re collaboratively involved in like the dream grammars

of zodiacal alphabets written like eleven dimensional starmaps

on the backs of their eyes, hidden harmonies of the unseen

shining from the inside out like an emerald star

in the heart of an apple, under the skin of the sunset,

liberating the seed syllables of new myths of origin

from the straitjackets of a dysmorphic reality

that insists it’s the true shape of the universe

when it’s only another mirage of water trying

to put out a cosmic root-fire of underground stars.

Listen like an empty lifeboat to the mermaids

singing in the fog. Turn the light around and see

the evanescent shadow of smoke emerging

from the urn mouth of the chimney silhouetted

like lyrical dark matter on the roseate field stones

of a new morning closer to the vernal equinox

raising the level of the bright vacancy of consciousness

even as it lowers the dark abundance of the night

in a lock of light across the street opening its floodgates

on the walls of a heritage bank like a rite of passage.

Here on earth I’ve learned to reason surrealistically

according to the logic of asymmetrical similitudes that occur

in the dark of the mind like starfields of fireflies

all talking to each other at the same time

in a conversation about the next constellation

they might possibly be and what to name it after

once inspired by the muse of their prophetic memories

to remember what associative insights they forgot

when they first learned to write like cracks

in the archival creekbeds of their neo-cortex.

Next time you put words to a page like a loveletter

to a mysterious black rose that’s eclipsed

by the light of a one-eyed liar, trust your own nose

and ask yourself if they’re alive enough to smell the silence.

If the absence that surrounds them lingers in the air

like the aurora of an ancient solitude fragrant with light.

If there’s any joy of life in the starmud you blood with insight.

PATRICK WHITE