SOMETHING CONTINENTAL WITHIN ME RISING

SOMETHING CONTINENTAL WITHIN ME RISING

Something continental within me rising.

Atlantis, surfacing. Pangaea coming back together,

synarthritically, after diversifying its sentient life forms,

from the preludes of the Burgess Shale

to the double-beamed diplodeci of Patagonia.

I can feel the shoulders of an ancient ocean

heaving up beneath me like a Leviathan of life

with the power to smash headlong through

the hull of the lifeboat of my psyche, or tip me

like a seal off this last ice floe I’m clinging to in the Arctic

with four polar bears, Henry Hudson, and a terrified tern.

Sublimely underwhelmed, everything I once transcended

crossing a burning bridge of stars in a long firewalk

now subtended like the underside of a leaf or a starmap

as if my vision of life, and this thread of blood,

this small mindstream at night I am in it, is being

woven and unravelled by the moon I’m giving birth to

in a fire womb of an underwater fumarole

umbilically connected to the magmatic core of the earth,

hydrogen sulphide mythically inflating the scale of life.

I’m heading into a bloodstorm with a ragged poem

like a flag of surrender for a sail on a life raft I lashed together

from the available driftwood that washed up on my shores

like the contorted corpses of those who had drowned in agony,

trying, as I have, for light years, to get to the other side before I die

in this tidal pool of shore-hugging ego that esteems itself

the third eye of the great nightsea beyond it

and when it’s full of stars, the parabolic mirror

of a reflecting telescope in orbit around itself like a deer fly.

The earth is turning into quicksand under my feet.

O, earth, gape! A touch Marlovian, perhaps,

and a sound magician might make a demi-god,

but demi-gods don’t always make the most sound magicians.

My skyscrapers are loosing their footing

like needles skipping grooves across an old fashioned record

of the celestial spheres, striated by retreating glaciers

trying to revive the last word of their literary careers,

like fireflies with enfibulators come to jump start their art

too late, too late, to go south with the other birds.

The mourning dove flees, but the crow winters with its heart

like a continent of coal deep freezing into diamonds

when a dark muse seizes it by the throat like an eclipse

and it cries out in the starless night of the uncomprehending abyss

across the ice-glazed eyelids of the blood-stained snows,

I am the ocean in the eye of a black rose.

I am the prophetic passion of fire in the skull of a dragon.

I am the dark lantern the arks of the stars

send out before themselves as if their myths of origin

were all ahead of them like a time capsule of eyes

to be opened sometime in the future when the light

makes land fall like the Norse at L’anse aux Meadows

before the fishermen anglicized Medusa from the French

in Jelly Fish Cove at the northern tip of Newfoundland.

I am the spectral blazing of the silver heart of the moon.

I am the compassionate ice palace of an Inuit embassy,

an igloo in tears, giving sanctuary to the snow blind ghosts

that can wander the tundra for years like exiled dolmens

following the spectral fires of the auroral borealis

without any sign of a seance rising like smoke

from more accommodating fires on the shamanic horizon

of a mystic trickster that ate the eyes of the snow fox

so it could see in the dark the traps that had been laid for it.

Long before I became the funereal usher

greeting the new comers at the one-way exits of the dead,

I was the gateless gate at the entrance of the living

to the longest white nights of their lives in a northern paradise

where nothing was forbidden and the great oracular snake

that Blake said in his prophetic books would arise in Canada

found it too cold to survive and perished

like a wavelength of dark energy red shifted toward the light

in a six month long nightmare no fire could revive it from

like the hallucinogenic smelling salts of the volcano

it coiled around for visionary warmth at Delphi.

But I can tell by the tattoos on the skin it shed

what it would have said if it had been more adaptable

and let more serpent fire go to its head in this cold climate

like chimney sparks among the stars

shining above its last chakra circumpolarly like Draco

growing wings like a wivern of wild grape vines

wrapped around the axis mundi of the wounded earth.

I can heal. I can soothe. I can seduce you to my love.

I can move like a scar over the surface of the earth.

I can run like a wild northern river roiling in the moonlight

I can linger like a ripple in the oilslick of the Alberta tar sands,

or a perma frost speed bump on an asphalt highway in the spring.

I can be the dark angel in your way who drives

a spear of light through your heart so you can

never really tell if you’re just another Barbie

toying with nirvana, or a real voodoo doll in the night

with a deeper insight into the dark arts of cursing and blessing

than either of the shallower mirrors and scenic vistas

of your blood and tears could have managed

on the same event horizon where they stand on the threshold

of a black hole they dare not enter on their own.

I am the alpha. I am the omega of shapeshifters

I am a dynamic equilibrium of fire and water

at peace with themselves without compromising

the other’s nature for rising up or flowing down.

When my feet are in the stars, my head is on the ground.

I am the balancing act of a sacred clown

chequered like a chessboard calendar

of the days and nights of my life

I’ve danced with the full,

I’ve danced with the new moons

as if my ends always came before my beginnings.

Extinction the prelude of inception,

not the false dawn of its epilogue.

Clarity doesn’t engender an opposite.

It isn’t reality. It isn’t a lack of deception.

It just means enlightenment and delusion

have both ceased to exist

as you make your exit, laughing,

with a real tear painted on your cheek that hasn’t dried yet.

PATRICK WHITE