IN THE CEASELESS SILENCE

IN THE CEASELESS SILENCE

In the ceaseless silence, is it my soul I address

in these barely audible whispers of blood,

you, are you there, a friend to me, aloof companion,

intimate stranger, are you just the longing of an echo

after the nightbird’s flown, the light that goes on shining

well after the star is dead? Did I create you

out of the loneliness of my imagination

to talk to under the stars down by the river,

where life seems so sad and beautiful much of the time

and even the most trivial seems supercharged

with a significance that bears no resemblance

to the tiny fireflies of meaning I attribute to the stars,

vaprous candles sublimating in the blaze they try to illuminate,

my eyes, mere raindrops in an infinite sea of awareness?

Science too dazzling right now to be wholly credible,

blinded by its light, its field of view narrowed

by its own expansiveness, is there sorcery beyond this

that isn’t quantumly entangled like you and I in the same dilemma

or is it all clear to you who you are and what you’re doing here,

my simulacrum, my shadow, the dream under my deathmask

that will carry on without me like a creekbed in the absence of rain

waiting to return to consciousness like a fish buried

in the sediment of its own starmud, an urn in a kiln

baked to hold its own ashes like the prophetic skull of the moon

until you return again like an atmosphere and the wind

delights in making the waters of life tremble with anticipation

all that has thrived and died within them shall be renewed again

in your presence standing at the gates of all my arrivals and departures

as if your greeting and farewell were one and the same

gesture of acknowledgment. Or am I second-guessing myself

in a monologue of the alone with the alone that sees

eye to eye with me as if we both made each other up

creator and creature of our interdependent origination?

It’s late on the graveyard shift and I can’t help asking

though I know you won’t answer, am I at least getting

the questions right? In this floating world, are there

shipwrecks at the bottom of a mirage, or are we

walking on stars like spiders at the edge of a lake

trying to connect the dots like a waterclock of constellations?

Are we pearl diving in these bubbles of life

for new moons that will help to keep us afloat

by keeping us self-contained like fishing buoys and crystal skulls?

Mindstreams digging our own graves in our travels,

do we labour to see what we have achieved undone

by hands as busy as ours once were? Are we

working at one another like habitable planets, spiritual proxies

of each other’s supersymmetrical afterlives,

the interreflection of moonrise in an hourglass,

the donkey looking into the well, the well looking back at the donkey?

Times I feel I know what you want of me

and you’re easy to adapt to by holding my mirroring awareness

up to you like a shapeshifter, like a lake to the moon,

a candleflame talking to the wind, and things seem

to find their own equilibrium like water flowing

into puddles of starmud and the clouds not getting dirty.

My earthenware integrity is renewed in the peace I enjoy with you

and nothing is excluded. Resigned to whatever

diminishment must be endured as the aperture narrows

the cat’s eye of the needle I’m trying to thread

with a narrative theme that could weld the disparate parts

of my discontinuity into something whole like a loaf of bread

I left out for the ghosts or some kind of chrysalis

I can crawl out of to dry my wings like a dragon

on the celestial parapets of the waterlilies, or the sunset

of a scar that did the decent thing and gave the wound a proper burial,

fulfilled in a way that’s more a grace of the moment

than a reward for anything that was done or left undone,

the shadows of my life are reconciled to the light that’s casting them.

It’s wisdom and beauty, untroubled freedom

and the lyrical enlightenment of inconceivable myriads

just to be alive as a peer of your complementary presence

I’m always breaking into like a star in a windowpane.

But what does it mean to have lived in vain? To spend

the whole of your life on your hands and your knees

looking for a key in a duststorm, whether it’s gold or dirt

that’s lashing your eyes into tears? Time’s holy commandment.

Don’t waste it. You might wish you hadn’t later on.

Not because any immaculate omnipotence is going

to punish you for it but the very sin of omission is itself

the karmic nemesis that arises synchronistically

like a teaching device that doesn’t impart anything to you

you don’t already know. It’s crucial not to underestimate

the inconceivable. To tempt the truth out of hiding

when you’re not prepared for it, duped by your own ideals.

When the stars aren’t there, our eyes are the less for it.

For the lack of other signs, even a mirage sometimes

serves as a direction of prayer like a scaffolding serves

the bigger picture without intending to. Reality is not

a static state of mind, it’s a supratemporal creative event

and everything that happens, irrevocably once, indelible as space,

inseparable as the moon from its reflection on the lake,

is neither fictive nor true, not one, not two, no gap

like an abyss that must be bridged between one

distinct extremity and another, no thought moment

billions of lightyears old between you and I.

I hear you like music in a dream, I see you like a mindscape

painted in fire, I think of you as the bone-box of my innocence,

the avatar that embodies my experience of the intangible,

my scarecrow, my voodoo doll, my dolmen, my anti-self

my strawdog, my mentor, my buddha, my fool,

and a dead branch flowers on a rootless tree,

as we differentiate ourselves collaboratively

in the ceaseless silence of our configurative unions,

the many returning to the one, the one returning

to transcendence, whole in every part.

Five petals of a flower open and one hand blooms.

PATRICK WHITE