ESTRANGEMENT YOKED TO THE INCOMPATIBLE

ESTRANGEMENT YOKED TO THE INCOMPATIBLE

Estrangement yoked to the incompatible, is it

some kind of heartless joke? Surrealistic, surely,

don’t average out the crucials and tell me

it’s a compromised oxymoron. I’m twisted enough

to see further than that. My imagination

can remember things that haven’t happened yet,

and equally forget the past wasn’t possible.

A labyrinth of wormholes in the hull of a shipwrecked moon.

A snakepit of incisive perceptions. A unified field theory

knotted out of stray wavelengths into the flying carpet

of a cosmic hymen that makes a big bang

beating on the membrane of a drum of water,

jazzy butterflies practising rimshots with their antennae

on the third eye of another bubble floating in hyperspace

that feels like a kiss on your forehead from your daughter

for something you haven’t got the slightest notion of

except there’s something quantumly entangled about love.

Since I was sixteen, in a first year astronomy class,

I’ve always thought you had to add a factor for mind

to Einstein’s energy, mass, light equation if you want

to see the whole of the big picture, not just the postage stamp

field of view of a careerist visionary writing haiku

he hopes to get published in a journal of cherry blossoms,

but the Bayeux Tapestry, Monet’s waterlilies in the Tuileries,

thinking if life and death can open their eyes that wide,

how long would it take a comet of thought to cross

the abyss of the nightsky of the mind before I’m

expansive enough to accommodate the many in the one

like a dimension of intelligent awareness beyond

the other eleven, for the moment, we’re circumscribed by.

Where’s the element for mind in the periodic table?

Am I just a shadow of my own constituents,

or did someone spike the waters of life with a star

on the sly to lead me into believing that mind

was more luminous than mere light and I wasn’t

just glassblowing the hash pipe of an alternative universe

in the land of the cosmological lotus-eaters

dreaming like Cambridge brahmins in deep sleep

that I’m the quantum aura of a dream figure

that got sucked down the black hole of a trap door spider

waiting like the singularity of a predator inside

to weave me into the flatlining mandala

of a new cosmic web that drips like silk

and embalming fluid from its hourglass abdomen.

My body a bag of water with nine holes in it

I’m always paying tribute like a feudal river

on its way back to the sea like an imperial bloodstream

with spoils of oxygen and protein led in chains

like the dna of slavemeat by the triumphant legions

behind the throne of the empire that’s risen like Rome

from the pagan dead within me like a lion

reborn in the blood of the lamb on an altar in the Forum.

I may be mad, quantum foam frothing like the sea

with hydrophobia of the mouth, contrails

of white phosphorus like jellyfish in a cloud chamber

but I’d rather be included in the picture-music

of a nightbird with a communal sense of solitude

than be excluded like the retinal circus

of a cameraman circling the earth like a telescope

he never turns on himself as if it were his head, not mine

under the shutter of the guillotine every time I blink

and a new world issues from the void in my absence.

PATRICK WHITE