UNDEVOTED, FREE, AND WILD

UNDEVOTED, FREE, AND WILD

Undevoted, free, and wild,

no one to answer to, no one to answer for,

the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,

and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion

and the stars without anyone to walk home,

and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool

as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,

I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.

I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert

and not expected the echo of my own voice

to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel

deep in the sand, without realizing

how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you’re no one but the wind in disguise

you don’t need to be humble, you don’t need to be wise,

nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,

you can watch the dead at night

streaming toward Orion

like a blue-white ribbon of light

undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes

of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone

like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,

that the Sahara will green and bloom again

and the wind sing hymns to the grass

and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,

adolescents in the spring brush,

running like violins succulent with beginnings,

and it doesn’t matter you’re alone out here

listening to the ashes of a mirage

make up legends to tell the fire

about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously

and how their blood once stained the earth

like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn’t wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth

I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution

and overthrow myself like a book in the flames

to keep something I don’t understand alive in me

as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself

and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.

It’s a touch, it’s a feel, it’s a hole in veil

with one eye looking out at me to see

if I’ve intensified the dark enough to break into stars,

if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire

and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal

without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.

Not to be constrained by even so much as

the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk

of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination

of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry

of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.

I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.

So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,

as if it were the perennial custom of the universe

to meet like this for a moment in time and space

and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.

I’m a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me

that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions

and schools the black lightning of its absence

in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates

like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing

like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest

that life doesn’t need an alibi to live and die by,

no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject

no flying buttress to act as a bridge

over a flowing river of Gothic stone,

no strong tree standing on its own to cut down

and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,

no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,

no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,

no footprints on the water Jesus walked,

no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,

no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,

no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes

on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens

to thread the golden needle of the mystery

without any knots in your spinal cord,

to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell

that once gathered armies on a burning hillside

to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister

like moonlight through your window, I shall not

hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star

releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves

of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain

of horrendous transformations into light.

I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I’ve shed

but inspire you with a fire you’ve never been burned by before,

a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor

to guide you by, a torch you can’t drown in your tears,

a long firewalk down to a river of stars,

and there you shall cross on a burning life raft

of the bones you’ve been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it’s a heresy of silence to say, but there

you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness

in the long blue seagrass of the moon

and empower out of your own creative abundance

whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace

to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,

and the dark abundance of unperishing potential

with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void

and the unspeakable absence of any other voice

to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking

the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird

for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,

a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,

a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness

there’s a divinity that sings like a human

in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing

with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain

with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips

of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

PATRICK WHITE