THE EARTH HIDES NOTHING FROM YOU

THE EARTH HIDES NOTHING FROM YOU

The earth hides nothing from you

when its time comes to be revealed.

Not the bones of the dead, not the green wind

blowing on the young leaves of the maple

to see if it still remembers how to break into flame

or the loaded horse-hair brushes of the flowers

trying to decide what colours to apply first

to the blue-toned underpainting of the sky on their easel.

And this is the essential freedom of information act.

Walking with a thoughtful, cooly blissful, festive spirit

on a windy night by a spring lake trying on stars

like earrings to go with the season like crocuses

realizing, as if you weren’t there alone, though you are,

how inestimably unique and precious it seems

just to be aware of this lake in the moonlight

trying to grow waterlilies in her Mars black hair

and one wild iris, because she’s obviously French.

And I can tell by the way the eddies and ripples

circle and tendril the sensuous undulance

of her dark depths, and the way she’s eyeing me

as I toe my way along the path I’m making up on the go,

she’s intrigued and modestly threatened

or she’s got other things on her mind

if I’m meant to know, I’ll know, in her good time, not mine

because there is no birth or death in the present moment,

it doesn’t have a future, it doesn’t have a past,

and it flashes by so fast, it hasn’t even happened yet

so everything is still and silent and timeless

and yet nothing is hidden, nothing held back.

Everything’s shining out like a star

that can’t keep what it knows to itself.

And any lingering question

of who you might have been is everywhere

reflected in the universe like a face in a mirror

with no one standing in front of it.

Something deep within and without me seems

to humanize the lake in my mother-tongue

and how astoundingly wonderful just to listen

to the lake’s accent when she answers back

in a language I can fully understand is universal,

rich with metaphors and similitudes that are the bloodlines

of everything in existence rooted in a grammar of dark matter

that can be as eloquent as the stars

when it waxes lyrical in spring, its uncontainable heart

overbrimming with joy at the return of the nightbirds.

The great, blue, lunar heron and the solar ray of the osprey

returning after long absence to their nests,

like lost jewels to a ring, eyes to the skull of a blind seer,

high in the Ys of the dead trees that look like harpoons

and dangerous tuning forks and witching wands

out whaling for water, stuck in the flukes of the lake.

Evanescent shape-shifters in the vagrant emptiness

learning to read each other like a star group,

say, the Pleiades, the daughters of Atlas,

the cornerstone of the world it upholds like a starmap

adjusting our eyes, our seeing, our unreasonable being here at all,

to the light and gravity of everything around us

in harmony with a life that’s never

at peace with itself creatively

to keep the wild grapevines growing like grails

that everyone seeks like sweetness and light

at the root of the truth of themselves, as soon

they’ll be sipping bliss from the towering stars

like ruby-throated hummingbirds from the larkspur.

Be empty as a cracked cup or an eyeless skull

and know what it is to be filled

by a lake that takes the low place so you

can flow into it like a bloodbank into the lifestream

of the spring run off of winter stars thawing in the dark hills

like patchy galaxies of snow that have found a way

to get off their islands by realizing

one wavelength of light

one wavelength of water

one wavelength of thought or insight

one wavelength of love and compassion

one wavelength of a seeker with a mindful heart

is all the flowing of the same night creek

growing into consciousness like a stranger

we come face to face with as it dawns upon us

emerging out of this dream of a self

like a dragonfly from its chrysalis,

like the wet sapphire of an eye

from the dark abundance of the seed

that prophesied that it would be so,

the best way to navigate your way

on this ocean of awareness even if you’re shipwrecked

like these dead trees at the bottom of the lake

with herons in your crow’s nest

is to take your hand off the wheel and let go.

Let go the way an archer releases a bird from a power line

or the first purple marten of the year

from the blossoming bow of an alder branch

hung with catkins in keeping with the fourth month

of Bran in the Celtic calendar and the letter, Fearn,

in the Druidic way of speaking to trees

to ask for directions through life and death and beyond

as if they’d made a library out of the whole forest

by listening to the wind in an alder copse

in a language the alders understood

they spoke in common with the water stars

of the blind and enlightened alike.

And if there’s no one to fall in love with,

or out of, this time of the night starwalk

the circuitous blossoming of your way

deep into a nearby grove sometime,

along the shoreline of the improbable concourse

of the way of things like a wild grapevine

gave up being on the go, for growing,

once it got a taste of its own wine,

and watching the Pleiades like crown jewels

in the burgundy upper branchs of a birch

closer to heaven than you could ever

have imagined you could be,

fall in love with a lake with a French accent

and the soul of a Celtic sybil, and doing

what the moon does with her lunar sword unsheathed

lay your silver tribute down upon her waters.

PATRICK WHITE