WITHIN, AN INTIMACY WITH COSMIC AFFAIRS

WITHIN, AN INTIMACY WITH COSMIC AFFAIRS

Within, an intimacy with cosmic affairs

down to the mystic details of the labyrinths

I’ve wandered in like a lab rat trapped

in my own spiritual fingerprints.

Without, I stare for light years into

the vast, cold, vacancy of the abyss

leeching the light out of the stars

by applying black holes to the blood-letting

like the poultice of an eclipse to break the fever

and drain the delirium of my starmud

by sweating visionary eyes out of my pores.

Reality is no more probable than any other delusion.

If you’re truly ignorant, there’s no confusion.

What could there possibly be to argue about?

That’s why I know less about death

though it’s all around me like an absence

I’m inconceivably unaware of like a nightwatchmen

who doesn’t know he’s dreaming realistically

of bearing a skeleton key like a cross on his back

that would rather make sure things are locked up

and accounted for, than hold his lantern up

to see what’s going on inside beyond the bars

on the closed windows of his one-eyed way

of looking at the world as if he were protecting its secret.

The marvels never cease. The wonder never dissipates.

The mystery will always be the unrecognizable fragrance

of a wildflower you’ve never seen before that haunts you

like a muse of life that aligns your longing with hers

to amplify the whispers of the fireflies talking in their sleep

about unionizing the night shift into constellations like the stars

and the guild houses of the zodiac, each with their own sign.

No need to serve a long apprenticeship looking for your mind

with its tail in your mouth, no need to turn your mirrors

inside out to get to the bottom of your creative origins

that made you up like a story that followed you

around the fires of life like smoke as you got along

the best you could with what you couldn’t help living

like a ghost dance in the ashes of your sacred pyres

and sky burials that taught you the wings

that feather your thermals like a joy-ride in a stolen vehicle

might be yours, but the wind belongs to no one.

You don’t need to get so spaced out about

your mythically inflated enormities you go into orbit

around the earth like a Cyclopean Hubble Telescope

shuttered like the third eye of a lizard looking dispassionately

upon galactic events in a universe throwing

the luck of our bones and skulls up against the wall

like black dice with albino snake-eyes like Castor and Pollux.

There will always be more to the shining

than the sentience of whatever life forms are looking at it

from the shadows of an absence it’s impossible to express

except as a feeling that perhaps this time

you received a secret loveletter

that didn’t go to the wrong address and lifespan after lifespan,

era after era of your infinite afterlives, you’re deeply assured

won’t return you to the lost and founds of the spiritually anonymous.

The notoriety of your solitude will be famous

among the nameless who have never heard of you

but for a rumour or two of some light-hearted hermit

that’s laired up in the cave of his prophetic skull

with the wavelengths of demonic vipers intelligently weeping

like underground rivers from his eye sockets

in the unwalled gardens of galactic paradaisia

in a desert of stars he drinks from

like both sides of the hourglass that intoxicates his seeing

as if time were the measure of how empty and full

a human face can feel under the lunar deathmask

he’s been wearing like the birthmark of enlightenment

since he first opened his eyes like observatories

raining in the ancient grasslands of the Sahara

to illuminate the blooming of wild asters in late September.

When nothing’s revealed. Nothing’s dissembled.

And herein lies the crux and dizzy crossroads

of the essential insight that drives humans

lucidly mad with crazy wisdom, nothing but nothing

is the way it is and isn’t, not the light, not the dark,

not the water, not the mirage or the clarity, and this

is the unlocatable insubstantiality of unattainable reality

and that the omnidirection of the only road it can be approached by.

PATRICK WHITE