LESS AND LESS THE HEART ENGAGED

LESS AND LESS THE HEART ENGAGED

Less and less the heart engaged, though not dispassionately,

with emotion intensifying into form, and the elaboration

of its shadows into a sign language of the light.

More a clarification of time, how the golden apple,

about to fall, looks back on the blossoms of the spring,

and sees how everything has already been achieved

by the beginning blooming like a tentative leaf of foxfire

in the ashes of the stars that cram their urns

into every cell of the body to honour the creative detritus

of the light all things are the embodiment of.

How gently the stars open our eyes to them

amazed at how much tenderness can be expressed

by a dragon at a distance sage enough to know

life is a function of its shining blindly into the dark.

And we’re all trying to second-guess like children

anticipating gifts, what’s behind the tent flaps

on the midways of our blazing that drowns the night out

with the white noise of our mind. The careerism

of being alive, the lucky throw against the odds

that wins the prize that mythically deflates the carnie

as he hands it to you like the best of a bad situation,

happy to see you gone like an offence to his opportunism.

How many have wandered off a path that doesn’t exist

except they make it, rogue planets across the starfields,

leaving their wake like a green shadow in the wavelengths

of tall grass that soaks their shoes as if they were crying

and there were seeds in their tears like the waters of life.

Heretics convinced they’re blessed by an inviolable freedom

to dispossess themselves of the conventional fruits

of the tree of knowledge by which it is known.

Do you know the name of the emerald star in the core

of the apple when you slice it open with a Sanskrit blade

of consciousness, which loses its edge the moment

it goes looking for something that exists outside of it

to see where the light’s coming from. Easy enough

to return to the ivy-smothered gates of Eden

but there are no more gods in the garden, nor demonized reptiles

the angels have to raise burning swords against to keep out

of the no fly zone above the exiles and refugees

fleeing the wrath of Nobodaddy like the sock puppet

the manipulative wear like the deathmasks of their unmollified humanity.

There’s a dynamic that’s missing from our creative solitude,

alone with so much beauty it hurts our eyes sometimes

just to behold it and know there’s no one to share it with

but strangers just as amazed as we are at the lack of mirrors,

that there is no more mystery behind it when you peel back space

than there is in who we are, though only the dangerous

know for sure. You can make a housewell of this, or

you can risk drowning in your own watershed like a diving bell

crushed in the depths like a coke can, looking

for an ancient shipwreck that might give you a clue

to where you’re going, as if the truth were still

the prophetic skull of a cave-dweller buried in fire.

Should we dance to the music in the voice

of the life of meaning inspired by the riot of its absence,

and call that liberty, or submit to the slavers of a police state

with a golden chain linked by a consensus of selective orbits

we’re allowed to revolve in without arousing

astronomical catastrophes of petty suspicion?

Should we trust death more than we do life?

Turn over custodianship of our indefensible humanity

to evil clowns that laugh like lobbyists for the rich

at all the wrong things? What’s impotence if not the habit

of letting someone feed you lotuses or bread and circuses

in a repressively tolerant garbage-can?

Little doubt it’s easy enough for the light to be bent

by the gravitational eyes that warp the spaces

we live in like cameras born without eyelids

keeping watch on us in the weird belief

they’re keeping a prison population safe from themselves,

though they plead the focus of their seeing is fraternally pious.

Our children’s children will have mastered the shallow art

of seeing with their eyes, but how rarely, and what

a life of pain will pursue the visionary who actually

sees through them as if light were merely the key

to the magnificent gravegoods of our imagination

long after our children have forgotten how to see in us

what they’re not looking for in themselves.

Waterclocks pouring into the available dimensions

of an empty future, for the sake of the unborn,

let us carry the seeds of metaphors that will bloom

of their own accord in the starmud of the nascent imaginations

of our children so we don’t lose touch with them

precisely when they need us the most to be human.

To share the scars and shadows of our maculate conception

of ourselves, the way we’ve been invariably defeated

by the best that’s in us as a protest against death

that hasn’t suffered enough to understand

the genuine transcendence of a symbolic gesture

that took its hands away from its face as if the sun

weren’t ashamed to shine on it in the full light of a long day

of wandering where we will by the river to include

the wild irises some bush hog has cut to ribbons

in our transmorphic gaze, as it raises the unlikelihood

of the battered stalks of its budding colours up

like the torches of two blue-white, ultra violet flames,

to a suggestion of the Pleiades to bloom like a paintbrush in the face

of the sword that slashes at the beauty of its freedom of expression

like the spirit of the living word to exceed the bounds

of all plausible definitions of itself that limit

the sacred syllable of disobedience caught in its throat

like the blue-blood of an aristocratic nightbird

bleeding out into the future of longing in our children’s eyes

like the ancient anthem of what’s heroically perennial

about humans defying the self-imposed imperatives

of their own tragic existence, by blooming nonetheless

like stars renewing the innocence of our children’s sense of wonder,

our dark abundance shining into the bright vacancy

of the unknown spaces their faces are slowly emerging from

like moonrise over the burgeoning mindscapes

of sleeping hills dreaming aerially like fruitive familars

into the blue distance and intimately human shadows

of our inheritors tasting the same stars in their seeing

that lit up ours when we bothered to look up like wild irises

that refused to be laid low along the shores of our mindstreams

that insisted like water in its outflowing upon

the miraculous follies of an incontravertible life of awe.

PATRICK WHITE