CANTERBURY BELLS, A CARILLON OF THE SORROWS WITHIN ME

CANTERBURY BELLS, A CARILLON OF THE SORROWS WITHIN ME

Canterbury bells, a carillon of the sorrows within me.

Something beautiful growing out of a garden-plot of pain.

The dark so deeply wounded, it brings forth stars.

And the river runs by the willow as time speeds up

to a standstill, nothing in sight as far as the eye can see

as it evaporates like a crystal ball with all its visions,

a wraith in the mist, a breath on a winter night

when you’re looking for your shadow cast by Venus

just to say you’ve seen it and somehow that’s significant.

No will of its own the abyss is inexorable,

and you feel so ageless and alone you can’t help

but know this is the image of divinity you were created in

like a hidden secret that wanted to be known,

a black hole peopling its inconceivability

with familiar dream figures it can relate to

its own estrangement through by looking

through your eyes like a snakepit of oracular telescopes

trying to read their own bones. Canterbury bells,

violet as a touch of sad genius, flowering.

Hard to know who’s making who up when

you’re collaborating on a dream together

with everything else that substantiates your existence.

As you, theirs. It might well be an empty lifeboat

full of moonlight drifting without a star on the horizon

anywhere, and though you can reasonably unexplain it,

your understanding, grown inclusive as the nightsky

inevitably glows like a pilot light of compassion

for every sentient thing, and don’t think the rocks

are any less animate than the starmud you’re made of,

lost on this great nightsea in a squall of awareness

that sometimes sees you scuttled on the moon

in the Sea of Tranquillity, and others, shipwrecked in the Pleiades.

Canterbury bells on nightwatch, greyed by

the tungsten lamp post as somebody sleeps

they’re looking out for like a tower of delicate mouths

with no secrets left to disclose, except for

the green clappers of their pendulous capstones

still in bud. And I could go on like the widening wake

of a simulacrum trying to circumscribe

a sense of identity encompassing all the god-particles

and the wavelengths they inspire in the imagination’s

passage through time until the waterclocks of our mindstream

don’t know what hour it is for any of us anymore except it’s dark.

But my presence has caught the attention of a star

taking a bird bath in the foliage of a well-plumed elm

standing like an imposing fountain in the ocean of itself,

its roots as deep as its crown is high as I sense

an intelligent resonance, indigenously wise and aristocratic,

an earthly excellence it’s kept alive in its heartwood

after all these lightyears of quotidian profusion

like a secret aspiration to reach out for the moon like a river

beginning to shed its leaves like waves, a long road

worth the walk, a ghost dance of smoke around

the homeless evanescence of an underground root fire,

that speaks as one for many tongues, breath by breath,

aspire beyond yourself like a shadow of the inconceivable

when you’re wandering alone at night through the heritage life

of a small town, intrigued, in passing, by how unbelievable

extraordinary, ordinary things are when you show them your solitude

like the scar of a bond with the moon that remains unbroken.

PATRICK WHITE