TIME TO STOP DYING AND PRAISE THE SKY

TIME TO STOP DYING AND PRAISE THE SKY

Time to stop dying and praise the sky.

Time to set your eyes free from what

you’re looking for and marvel at the stars.

Time to forgo the Leggo girders of your intent,

and offer up a few sand castles to the tide,

release your mind from the petty chores

you apply it to and grow astronomical

in the way you let things come about as they will

without trying to raise a sail or attach

a rudder to chaos, as if you could so easily lead

chaos astray into doing things your way,

forgetting you’re not the road, you’re

just the one who walks it like a dream figure

in the omnipresence of the rain. So many eyes,

so much to see, and you’re still looking at it all

from the angle you were born with.

Sylvia, uncuff your shepherd moons

from the dungeons of your bedposts.

Life is cruel. Stop blaming the swallows for it.

You ever get caught nude in a squall of fireflies before

and stay in the water long enough to feel the delicacy

of their lightning sending little shocks of ecstasy

whitewater rafting down the axons of your deltas

as if you had a chance to drown in your joy

at being alive for a change, instead of holding your head

underwater in your sorrows to see if you’re a witch

that’s huffed too much rue? Time to let go,

fledgling, your first nightflight into the abyss.

Time to ride your own thermals, my kestrel,

like bannisters down the stairwells of the maple keys

then swoop up like an arrow from the bow of a lead guitarist

and take hold of the moon in your talons.

You can do it. Turn your scales into feathers.

The low raised up high like moonrise

on the threshold of your wingspan, come on, dragon,

one big gulp of atmosphere to overcome

your fear of koans at these precipitous heights,

stop lingering in the doorway like a portrait in a picture frame

it’s time, it’s time, it’s time to jump.

Don’t tax the tolerance of the wind for shore-huggers.

Get rid of all those thought chains that tie you

to your own wrist with a hood over your head

and designate your prey like an agenda with a menu.

Thinking about freedom enslaves it. Don’t try

to earn it like a gladiator longing for a wooden sword

from the emperor, take it. Be a great thief of fire

and do a victory roll because you got away with it.

You jumped into the black hole of chance

and trillions of stars smiled favourably upon you

like a zodiac of fireflies when the sun’s off road on its own.

Sylvia, dry your tears like puddles on the footpath

and let your eyes, vapours in the sky, fly on the wind

as if your seeing weren’t a lapwing and your crying

weren’t a housewell with a lightbulb that keeps burning out.

Get around like sentience in a dream for a while,

No lack of nightmares in the world to make you sleep

like a trap door spider peeking out from under your eyelids

like a false dawn, or squinting at the stars as if

you were looking into oncoming highbeams,

frozen in your tracks like the ghost of a doe on asphalt.

Lavish some space on yourself and take a bubble-bath

in the universe and you can tell the gargoyles

on your Gothic cathedral you’re sitting in a blast furnace

trying to come up with new ideas for stained glass

and you think you might be on to something

more seraphic in its zeal than fire and blood.

You’ve got the attitude. Maybe it’s time

to de-alpha your beatitude as if life were a friend

with nothing to prove like a river that isn’t always

swimming for its life or a waterclock that overidentifies

with aqueducts and is convinced time runs in a straight line

only a slight gradient off true midnight well within

the margin of error between the mountains and the swamps,

between this inconceivable life and that unbelievable death.

What are you holding your breath for, it’s

a generous atmosphere, let it out like genie from a lamp

no one’s ever wished upon before. Imagine,

a star of your own. The first time the light’s ever

seen your eyes you weren’t trying to hide them

like sunspots, though all those beautiful

auroral storms of yours were a dead give away

there was a star sapphire somewhere beneath

all those bruised orchids of yours you grew for lightyears

in the shadow of an outhouse in a shitty world.

Don’t be so corvid in your approach to the moon

you forget you had a bright side once as white as doves

when you went looking for land and they went looking for you.

So what if the dove came back with a leaf in its beak?

Silver-tongued cousin of diamond, you still speak

less incorruptibly, an eye to the eloquence of moonlight

on the dark side of your neglected veracity.

Black is always the colour of wisdom in an aniconic abyss

that compassionately takes every wandering wavelength in,

every one of them a prodigal daughter of the dark mother,

that’s you, Sylvia, raven flint-knapped from pure obsidian,

all around you like the thorns and petals of a black rose

little chips and lunettes of a spear point in an eclipse

of the new moon, the new moon, Sylvia, opening

its eyelid like a star or a waterlily out of the muck

in the cauldrons of our fetid starmud working its morphic magic

already one white feather into the flight of a wild, wild swan.

PATRICK WHITE