IN THE FIRES OF LIFE

IN THE FIRES OF LIFE

In the fires of life stand up for the heresy of your humanity

as if there were no one else to burn for it, but you.

When you’re enveloped in the flames of an estranged loveletter

that embraced you like a flower that bloomed in fire

a long time ago, o how many afterlives has it been

since the hive had a dark queen to attend upon,

whether they honour your urn or spread your ashes

on an icy walkway for more pedestrian traffic,

don’t hitch your dragons to the death cart of a false dawn,

but ride the wind exhilarated as Icarus in your own updraft

like the errant flightpath of a firefly with a mind of its own

knowing there’s more insight in the sun that shines at midnight

than there is in the shadowless noon of a shallow enlightenment.

Listen to your heart as if it were real, not solid

and soon enough you’ll be able to hear with your eyes

what your ears can’t see that far beyond

the aerial perspective of the dark where parallel lines meet

to focus on burning another black hole in the sky

with the congruence of the intensity in the iris of your third eye.

Fire doesn’t burn fire, so you can shine lyrically like the earth

in the presence of your own star without being consumed.

How do I know this? I can taste the words life puts in my mouth

like a prophet in a fireproof furnace steeling the iron in my blood

like the growing edge of a sword tempered in my tears

that kills me back into lightyears of life every time I fall upon it

to save the face of some unknown tomorrow from debasing

the integrity of its sorrows by not hammering out the slag

of lesser stones than we draw the best Damascene swords from

as we do the sabres of the moon to the rhythm of a pulse

on the anvils of our percussive hearts forging fire-breathing dragons

shedding the darkest nights of our eyeless ores,

like a bunting of skin, a ribbon and windsock for the stars

that keep circling the north pole like the exoteric tree rings

of the lost art deep in our heartwood of calling down the lightning

like the roots of a seed embedded in our starmud, waking up

after a long sleep, like a pine-cone in the firestorm

of a germinating desire to live as immensely as possible.

While there’s time to grow the preludes and epilogues

of the next threshold we’re about to cross like refugees

over a bridge that spans the omnidirectional extremes

of our mindstreams getting on with their going

like waterclocks and aqueducts, or nightcreeks

whispering their lyrical way like the ode of a dark road

out of a grove of sacred aspens into a clearing brighter

than the light of the stars that pilot the orbs of the dung beetles

or shepherd dragons to graze on fire in higher pastures

than the world mountain could imagine in its wildest dreams.

Swept up in the fires of life, in this delirium

of inconceivable probabilities sleepwalking among the stars,

clarity isn’t so much a matter of burning your old tattoos off

like constellations that leave scars or cauterizing sunspots

like dangerous moles before they eclipse your immaculate wholeness

with the veils of isotopic ghost fleets raising sail in the bays of the north,

as it is in losing yourself in the picture-music of the lightshows

the mind puts on like an artist who isn’t looking for an alibi

to justify his eyes to what he sees without corrective lenses

like a starmap of fireflies without a fixed place in time and space.

In the fires of life you must be perfectly combustible

like the rainbow bodies of the wise men of Tibet, your eyes

inflammable as two lumps of coal in the skull of a snow man,

dead branches for arms, and your heart so generous

nothing left of it can be found like an ice cream cone

that’s fallen to the ground from the hands of a child for the ants,

and melted away into diverse forms of life that ensure

it doesn’t go to waste. We will all break bread in time

with the worms that shall nibble the crumbs of our dreams

from the corners of our eyes. Maggots overpunctuating

our mouths with too many commas and semi-colons,

necrophagoi editing our hearts and brains like turkey vultures

amending us like roadkill as if we were merely the first draft

of a poem ablaze and scattered with life as rapturous frogs in the rain.

PATRICK WHITE