SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH IN STEWART PARK

SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH IN STEWART PARK

Sitting on a wooden bench in Stewart Park

directly behind the jumping statue of Big Ben

frozen in bronze and time beside the black marble slab

that looks like a mini Vietnam wall of corporate sponsors,

staring into the sun at the white water rushing

over the rocks under Little Rainbow Bridge,

under the greening willows, galaxies of stars

winking in and out of existence like fireflies,

whirlpools of radiance spreading out across

the reflection of dark leafless tree trunks

shredded by the blue of the sky then pieced

back together again in the wavelength of a snake

charmed by the muscular undulation of the surface

of the pond rippled like a membranous universe

in some earthbound mode of hyperspace, as if

someone took the Pleiades on a clear winter night

and sowed them like first magnitude wildflowers, chicory

and asters, perhaps, in the troughs and furrows

of the sinusoidal waters moving like supple mountain ranges

toward shore where a clash of wild irises

raised their tender green swords up to the sun,

created and annihilated millions of times an instant

in the blink of an eye, white hot and young again,

and for a moment, as fast as an insight

into the nature of a vast intelligence inspired

by the scintillance of its own light playing

upon the waters of life as if nothing, not the skulls

of the underwater stones striated and webbed

by the waves of the golden webs and nets

dreamcatchers and runes inscribed on the rocks

like a language that never speaks in the same tongue twice

in a world of white shadows in unfathomed depths,

things took off the patina of their deathmasks,

and what was solid and inanimate, even Big Ben

anchored to the earth in the afterlife

of his arcing transit through the air forever,

couldn’t help but be alive and real

in every visionary act of seeing that animated

the whole of my being through the eyes

I saw shining out of everything like aeons of stars

opening loveletters like wildflowers and metaphors

addressed to what’s nameless and illuminating

about the substance of sentience that beguiles everyone

in a world of forms shapeshifting transmorphically

as the mindstream turns and the light burns

for the dazzling face of the stranger behind the veils

of the willows rooted in the spring run off of the Tay River

like a flashflood of life threading the eye of paradise

like the creative rush of the fledgling awareness

of the cosmic unfolding of chaos under the wingspan

of Little Rainbow Bridge reconciling the disparities

of light, love, life, in these recombinant unions

of starmud and mind and the heart that smiles within

to feel what’s liberated thereby like the light upon light

of a million epiphanous suns from one side the mind

reflected like the memory of a face you saw in a mirror

in the depths of a dream where you’re bright and whole

and creatively free to wake up on the other

shoreless river of life to realize there’s only

this small, red bridge of blood you’re standing on

watching the flow of things, without waiting

for anyone to show up who isn’t already arrayed before you.

PATRICK WHITE