SITTING HERE BECOMING WHATEVER DRIFTS MY WAY

SITTING HERE BECOMING WHATEVER DRIFTS MY WAY

Sitting here becoming whatever drifts my way.

Cedar boughs smouldering in an attic to smoke the bats out.

Thought-watching without looking for the answer to anything.

Spiders like badges walking on the waters of my mind.

The autumn’s new, but it’s the same old passage of things.

Apples like bells in the trees of the steeples, shepherd moons

of sloppy solar systems strewn on the ground

with seeds that are going to take them down

a notch or two yet before they make a comeback.

Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.

I watch the picture-music flowing through my mind

like a home movie that’s happening as fast as I am

playing the role of everybody else in the universe

all at once as if every ray of light incarnated

in the emanation of an essential existential insight

into the nature of every mystically specific human being

could all be traced back to the root of the same star.

And what does the star do when the many return to it

if not apocalyptically go supernova into transcendence.

Just because the ashes sleep sweetly in their firepits and urns,

doesn’t mean they’re not dreaming and scheming

to wake up from themselves

I’m firewalking in the ether like a sad volcano.

I’m alone in life and it’s not as bad as I thought.

Prolonged solitude blurs the distinctions between

the trivial and the sublime. Beauty seems

the most engaging waste of time I know of.

I think about love more as an event than a thing,

and I’ve made enough attempts in my life

to convince me it wasn’t for lack of trying

that I’m walking alone with the Alone like Plotinus

trying to keep my telescope in focus and stay open-minded.

But as John Keats said. If it come not as naturally

as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Space, too, has its sirens. And time, its lamias.

A gust of stars and the desert’s full of fantasies.

A star blooms and a comet falls from its dark halo

like a queen bee looking to start a new hive

and I’ve seen enough oases with hourglass figures

turn into bag ladies in paradise to stay shy of gardens

that don’t have any weeds in them that might

uproot me as so many have like a botanical mistake

as if I were some kind of hallucinogenic angel of death.

Amanita ocreata. A mushroom in the death cap

of a nuclear winter when all I am is interspecially creative

in the way I adapt to my extinctions. Attentive and tender

toward the flora and fauna that inhabit my solitude.

Though the peduncle is always lost in the ensuing phylum

as I am like the star in the eyes of the women

who’ve drowned me like a firefly in their tears,

I still send bouquets of constellations to the asylum

like the last of the New England asters this time of year.

Sanity might smudge the tomb with a noose of sweetgrass

but the madness stays clear as the waters of life

in the womb of enlightenment giving birth

to bubbles in hyperspace that can spontaneously pop

as easily as they cohere like skin to the shape shifting multiverse

for better and worse, and all the permutative modalities in between.

God bless them all. Each, a rite of passage

I stumbled through like the blessing

of an excruciating ordeal that seasons you

for what’s to come, or who. I must have loved them

better than I thought to miss them as much as I do

now that I do not. Incubus, muse, sphinx, witch,

oracle and water sylph, I gave to each my crystal skull

they could wear around their neck like a prophetic locket

to remember what we were to each other once

before the moon in the corals fossilized the shipwreck

to set sail on this sea of shadows without a star to go by.

Amor vincit omnia. Maybe. But I’m more a pirate

with the eclipse of my third eye for an eyepatch

and a parrot that’s teaching me to keep my mouth shut

than I am a navy even if there isn’t a rudder on this lifeboat

or a bay to sail into of my own. And I’m not looking

for a northwest passage to Cathay through a periscope

that’s stayed under too long to know where it’s going

without a starmap. I’m not interested in exploring decay

from the inside out like some submersible in a lunar ocean.

I’ve sailed under the skull and crossbones all my life.

And I’m not about to strike my colours like the maples,

lay them down like the burning blades of the angels

at the gates of dying garden. I’m going to hold out

long after the irises have surrendered their rainbows

to a retinal circus without any sacred clowns or animal acts

where the judas goats train the tigers to jump

through the brindled hoops of their own screening myths of fire.

It’s wise to tread cautiously among the duff and detritus of death

like a protocol of your own instinct, good spiritual manners

among the extinct so the dead don’t sink into oblivion

like a garbage barge. I revere the autumnal exorcism

as much as the vernal summoning to a seance.

I’m as sincere about my farewells as I am my hellos

as I watch the wavelengths shift from blue to red,

lowering the frequencies of fountains into watersheds

as if a musician were putting his guitar back into the coffin

he carries it around in. Green bough. Dead branch. Same song

as far as I’ve learned to sing to myself in the dark coming on.

The snakes can tie themselves into knots and hibernate

as long as they want, and all my summer visions

can turn into hard cold facts. I’ve still got a dragon of serpent fire

walking my spinal cord like a high wire act

without safety nets because I’ve always made it

a point of balanced awareness along this dangerous coast

to sail with the wind behind me like the light of a star

a wingspan ahead of my fall. The ghost of a battle scar

that’s made it this far into a wounded future

without a pyre or a lighthouse to chart the course

of my desire not to live like yesterday’s flowers

strewn on the corpse of tomorrow’s hearse.

PATRICK WHITE