THE LILACS ARE NOT BLIGHTED BY RUST

THE LILACS ARE NOT BLIGHTED BY RUST

The lilacs are not blighted by rust,

the sky isn’t soiled by a storm.

The stars don’t despair in the darkness

they’re alone, and the swallows

are not deterred by death. Ever hear

the wind complain of the load it bears

or the earth weary of being the footstool

of mountains? Water serves unreservedly

the efforts of the irises along its banks.

Hard and indifferent as it is sometimes

to be here, living is a blessing and a boon

that never asks for thanks, like oxygen,

the table’s been set in the absence of a host

but that doesn’t keep everyone from feeling

like a guest. Praise to the capability

of all those things I can take for granted

like a heart beating without intervening

instructions from the supervisory mind.

Eras of Cambrian seabeds within me

shale loveletters inked in the flesh and blood

of my starmud like fossilized cuneiform

teaching me the abc’s of this elaborate alphabet

I’ve evolved into trying to read my chromosomes

like the plot of a lost epic with a future

that holds us all in suspense as if the outcome

were anything but assured. Though

the hunter in me yearns homelessly

for the migratory nights I spent around a fire

following the herds of the stars

to the lower slopes of the echoless valleys

their shadows lingered in a while to drink

from their own reflections like sacred paintings

drawing blood from stone, praise be

to the stationary freedom that allows things

to grow on their own like wheat and poems

in the starfields of Virgo when I grasp the horns

of the plough of the moon to till the Fertile Crescent.

The sea is too immaculate for seeds,

but the wind is a libertine and the earth is a slut

that doesn’t discriminate between the waterlilies

in their nunneries or the brothels

of the wild orchids rooted in muck.

Praise be to the dark abundance

of her open-minded desire to receive

whatever windfalls might come of her generosity.

The sea lets all things run down into it,

but the earth builds them up again after

their will to live has been torn down.

Not a man alive hasn’t known a woman like that,

the sage and the clown, the braggart and the penitent,

whether he’s overcome his desires or not

doesn’t owe big time for the planet that laid

the foundation stone of the lordly towers in the clouds

that bend like the sky toward earth

in an awkward bow to the scarlet letter

of everything that followed in its wake

like paid mourners and plumed horses on parade

behind a dead lifeboat in a hearse with

windowless waves that couldn’t find anybody to save

who wasn’t any less worse than they were.

Isn’t it weird how men as tough as peacocks

do all the flowering like mirrors with built-in eyes,

but woman burns in the oracular coils

of her own serpent fire like the power

that dreams sidereally in the roots of the larkspur

climbing up its burning ladder of stars like heroes

to a mysterious window in their vision of life

they’re not deep enough to reach even if

they’ve got the balls of bathyspheres or spy satellites.

A downpour of applause, please, for

the unconditional freedom to delight in the earth

more like a Zen courtesan arranging flowers

than a midwife in a documentary about birth.

All that moonlight squandered on star-nosed moles

in the tunnels of love, blind to the source

of the shining like profligate insects having sex.

Even the heaviest of bells are roped to the wind

like the copulating wavelengths of a double helix

that seperates from what it hungers for the most

to bind the dove to the mercurial axis of a caduceus

seducing Medusa into releasing her healing powers.

From Kingu and Tiamat to quantum theory

celebrate the mythic dimensions of the delusions

you follow into deserts like a legendary mirage

of yourself that humbles the rain to bring into bloom.

Celebrate the errors of perception that bent space

down pathways the flowers along the roadside

have never had to make way like intimidated refugees

for passing vehicles in a hurry to get somewhere.

You’re not the worst astronaut who ever

walked on the moon without a starmap of spurs on

his barefeet, when his heels sprouted wings

though so many myopically use them

like feather dusters of cedar to cover their tracks

than fly like waterbirds that leave no trace

of themselves whatever medium they’re swimming in.

Minnows in the mindstreams of early spring,

or albatrosses crucified in the yardarms

of the nautical trees of Vancouver Island,

it’s never too early not to worry though I wish

I’d taken my own advice long before this.

Give your hallucinations a break. It’s not easy

keeping you amused when your mind eats

everything in sight like a wild boar at a feast of eyes.

There will be many to come that will be

just as wrong after you as there were

before we born to illuminate our ignorance

by holding our shadows up against the light

in order to see the invisible made manifest.

You abuse your spiritual experience of life

when you use it to empower your impotence

to make right at the expense of everything

that’s been creatively wrong about you

from the very beginnings of your infallible innocence.

Plead indefensibly human before the jury

or the choir, call asylums to testify out of the box

as character witnesses to your upstanding madness,

then count your blessings like prophetic skulls

on an abacus of calendrical rosary beads

darker than the promises new shepherd moons

that vow to guide like snakeoil through the valleys of death,

though, at the time, it’s not unusual to feel

as if you were in total eclipse, keep your eyes open,

for any sign of a chance in this house of life

to praise the earth for the fireflies you set

your bearings by like a tall ship with a crow’s nest

and a sacred grove of Douglas firs to roost in

like the moon’s bird through the long lunar voyage ahead.

PATRICK WHITE