GREY, MILKY SKY IN MARCH

GREY, MILKY SKY IN MARCH

Grey, milky sky in March, less ashes than the whites

of someone’s eye. The sun without a yolk,

the day, the tabla rasa of a cloaking device

I’m effaced by like this blank page I stare at

until I can see through my third eye without

being in disguise, how sad it is most of our lives

are paper-mache masks of lies we’re dying

to believe in like crutches convinced

they’re the flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals.

And not the unfeathered wings of skeletal fledglings

that fell from the nest a long time ago,

naked, vulnerable, the post-mortem effect

of embryos with big flight plans gone awry,

winged horses that weren’t on the agendas of the wind

for that morning’s sky. For every angel

that falls from heaven, a demon rises from hell,

and it’s wonderful how the more spiritual among us

can disguise a helpless yell for help in the white noise

and crystal skulls whose silence is almost

a colour unto itself. And imagination is

a gravitational eye that can bend the light

anyway it wants, so no one sees in straight lines.

Void bound, eyeless, no profit staring into the abyss

hoping to see a quarry of star sapphires

suddenly appear before you diaphanously

like the Pleiades over the eyelashes of the tree line.

It’s hard to break bread above or below the salt

with a human that lives by signs alone.

Harder still to remain compassionately blind

to people who wear the bluebirds of happiness

like chips on their shoulders you have to hood and chain

your falcon to your wrist, to keep from knocking off

like the revelatory shock of meeting your mystic nemesis

like lightning on the road, or a Zen master

beating you out of the zendo with your own broom

after watching you sweep mirages like starmud

off the mirror everyday to keep it clean and open

as an orchid blooming in the shadow of an outhouse.

Better to mudwrestle with the angel in the way

that take a bath in your own grave to renew

the virginity of the moon in iridescent bubbles

that break like fuchsia fragrances of light in hyperspace

when they wink at blood in the water,

like watercolours of poppies in the rain

washed away down the gutters of the slums

like the echo of a gunshot that stains your meditation.

After Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle you can’t

experiment with life, you can only experience it

as a wavelength or a particle depending upon

whether you’re looking at it or not. The same eye

by which I see God is the eye by which she sees me

as Ruysbroeck said, unaware in the fourteenth century

of the quantum entanglement of gender, but just the same

I look at the stars and I can see the resemblance

of the mother of fires in the eyes of everyone I meet.

Even in the sleet weeping in the cracks of the sidewalk

they didn’t mean step on like their mother’s back

or the thresholds of sheep the shepherds of wolves

used to run through this town like clouds in a mud puddle

that soiled their golden fleece like sunspots on their radiance.

Even in the stretchmarks of the memory of rain on Mars,

even in the way the smooth sailing of your heartwood

sometimes knots up like a rock in your mindstream

or the pebble of the world bruises your heel

in your wing-tipped shoes, or a koan of a poem

you can’t get out of your gut like a haiku of bad sushi,

I see the likeness of desperate measures in the beauty

of the stars above the Parthenon, or the waterlilies

in the mystic gardens of the black Taj Mahal.

However immaculate your firefly of insight into the night is

your shining’s just a lamp in the hands of a nightwatchman

unlocking the gates of compassion from the inside out

like the wingspan of a dragon in an aviary of burning doves.

PATRICK WHITE