I'M NOT THINKING WHEN I'M TRYING TO

I’M NOT THINKING WHEN I’M TRYING TO

I’m not thinking when I’m trying to.

I’m just drawing up blueprints for a river.

If thinking isn’t as self-evident as your own awareness

whose dream are you practising like an ant in a prophetic skull?

If you labour at an easel in the woods

breaking through the crowns of the trees all day

like maculate shadows and light, the animals slowly

come out of hiding to watch what you’re doing,

so dynamically absorbed in the mysticism of action,

they’re not troubled by the presence of someone who isn’t there.

What comes to you as effortlessly as that,

a tuft of cornflowers at the edge of the unthreshed starfield

like the Pleiades emerging from the darkness into the light,

is as inseparably yours as the sky indelibly reflected

on the mindstream you’re standing over your head in

second-guessing who you are, because you’re a hydra, always

sprouting new heads like the toppled towers of the hollyhocks

swanning on the block like a Puritan in the stocks

below the unhoned crescent moon of an indecisive guillotine

where the road divided like a witching wand

or the root fire of a snake’s tongue tasting lightning in the air.

And that’s ok, that’s ok, that’s ok, too. That’s

what’s actively copulative about who you are. Who else?

It’s all you, arrayed as you are like a sacred clown

who knows how to walk through walls but prefers

to bump into things like the world to amuse the children

lining the curbs of a shoddy parade promoting the return

of a small town carnival by tweaking their noses

like a heritage horn on a unicycle you ride like an egg-beater.

Unique. Irrevocable. Talking in your sleep

like the Tower of Babel drooling alphabet soup,

in a dream where you’re writing an interminable loveletter

like a blood on the mirror for your eyes only

with a message for your heart as long as a waterclock

circled by the shark fins of perfectly evolved sundials.

Everybody’s shining like a first magnitude firefly

in a lost and found of shadows with the lights out at night,

rummaging through unhinged doors they’re the keys for.

That’s as superfluous as climbing up the scaffolding

of your bones to paint your own eyes among the stars

when they’re already shining back at you

in the same chameleonic mood you are

living under the overpass of a shapeshifting zodiac

reading its own signs like a Tarot pack with intelligent design

based on counter-intuitive paradigms in the logic of metaphor,

drinking mirages with the Queen of Cups out of your own skull

like a dragon drinking its own sea of awareness

down to the lees of the moon, hoping to bottom up

like the mystic reversal of the watershed inundating

your darkness subconsciously like night in an hourglass

or a star inside the genie of the lamp it’s wishing on.

It’s ok to master all the distinctions you want

and set the salt of the earth on the table so

everybody knows their place beside the empty throne,

but however hierarchical you get about your pageants

and ritualistic passion plays, remember the jester

and don’t grow selective about miracles that occur

like wild irises startling the river out of the blue,

and for God’s sake, if you can’t see through the eyes

of your own lifemask that everything that happens

is as demonstrably unreal and true as the life

of your own heart, mind, and body, ghost-dancing

for a better outcome among the tribes off the reservation,

as if you were trying to conjure the other half of the moon

that’s missing from your oxymoron, don’t insist

there’s something irreparably wrong about you

because ankh shaped cul-de-sacs do as much to advance

your waxing sentience as open gates with welcome mats

and homecoming smiles. Take the high, hard path

like a shepherd moon who met itself, a stranger

coming the other way like an avalanche in the asteroid belt

on the same road he carried on his back yesterday

like a wounded mountain he shouldered all the way to the top.

You can tell by what you’ve suffered along the way

whether you were born petty or not. A singer

in your own right or a high-pitched voice coach for wolves

listening inquisitively on the far slope to the echo of a human

who hasn’t learned yet how to bare his tuning forks like fangs.

You’ve got this one chance to be absent-mindedly brave

in the face of the danger you pose to yourself

so the quality of your defeat is a peer of the victory it took

to transcend your belittlement and walk away from both

not exalted by your thoughts, not diminished by the lack of them.

When the errant knight rides the dragon without spurs

and the princess isn’t in need of any rescue she can’t effect for herself.

Set up the double easels of lambda in a dilemma

and paint the picture-music you’re singing to yourself

like a battered pine on a precipice out in the open

no less whole for being broken by what it stands up to,

knowing this multiverse of forces and forms is merely

the thinnest of excuses for the light in the shadows to show off

the painter it’s been working on like a mindscape long into the night.

PATRICK WHITE