THE DARK GOD FLOW OF OUR CIRCUITOUS
BLOSSOMINGS
The dark God flow of our circuitous
blossomings,
the hourglass lips of two bubbles
kissing
like membranes in a hyperspatial
multiverse
where everything is possible ad
infinitum,
the creative crossroads of
contradictory energies
whirling like prayerwheels and dust
devils
in all directions at once on the heels
of our gnostic vertigo.
Are these wings or propellors? Or dizzy
starfish?
Anybody know where I’m going with
this?
Enlightened and lost. Guided by chaos
into shapeshifting modes of order? The
mind
as it is. No table of contents to alert
you
to what’s coming next. Or did we take
too much acid in the sixties? One too
many
amoebically galactic lightshows with
strobe lights?
So immersed in the algorithms of my
intuition,
no reversing the emergency exit signs
now,
I move into a deeper darkness,
enlargements
of space, the stars separating in the
vastness
like wildflowers at the end of autumn,
grains
of pollen all that’s left of the
garden. Always,
sorrow, anger shouldered as a
responsibility
to people who can’t fight back, the
moral legacy,
until recently, of having been born
Canadian,
opportunistically trusting, healing,
just as happy
to be overlooked as I am elated to be
recognized.
My scars smile. My self-sufficiency,
differential.
Good, good, so be it, but beyond the
pale
where the moon is chopping wood with a
double-bladed axe,
its light frosted to the bark, fingers
aching
as if I’d been playing a guitar
without callouses,
death’s brutal lack of preference in
the night
that puts me on an equal footing with
the animals
the birds, the people, and even the
flies and spiders
that are trying to keep a little life
alight within themselves,
why is it I always cut a solitary
figure standing alone
staring up at the enormity of the
stars, longing
for a larger frame of reference than a
pink dominion
in a nineteen fifties’ atlas that
asked permission
for its independence? I feel the
inexorable onceness
of it all, remote, aloof, uncaring, yet
wholly inclusive
as an extinction event in the awareness
of being a witness
to it, a mere firefly of insight, no
more than can be seen
in the drop of a dream in the galactic
waterclock of the Milky Way
before death wakes us up to what we’ll
never be again.
Unredeemably cold and immaculately
beautiful as a knife blade,
the aesthetic horror that freezes in
the blood
like some kind of polar ice cap that
says, this far, but no further
engenders the poignancy of a wounded
love in me
for everyone and thing that lives, and
I sometimes think
even the rocks and the stars suffer the
same fate we do,
that everyone is so rarely unique and
irreplaceable,
so mystically specific and cosmically
incomprehensible,
as crucially intimate as a stranger we
met on death row,
as much in pain, and hope and joy, lost
like a wandering starmap
in the labyrinth of their own
fingerprints as I am,
I can’t help but cherish everyone as
a revolutionary act
against our inevitable extermination.
Once, for everything
and then decapitated zero like a reign
of terror
we pass through like a nightmare of
liberation
into a being so utterly free, like the
stars on the growing edge
of invisibility, we’ll never see each
other again.
At least not in these forms we so
blithely assume are our own.
It can only make a fool of you to go on
loving humanity,
life of all varieties, your own
included, despite the evidence,
but there you go. So be it. What did it
ever have to do
with me? Given I was born Canadian
enough not
to want to belabour the issue. Given I
can’t be any other way
than I am revealed to myself and
interpreted by others, each a star
like Gemma in the northern crown of my
abdicated
will to power, to move among the
peasants and the paupers
as if crude ore and coal were the
nature of all that lives
but once you accept you’re over your
head in it like a nightsky
you begin to see, as your eyes adjust
to the dark,
there’s diamonds and gold within
everyone. Motherlodes of it.
Perseids of shining panspermically
across the universe.
Zodiacs of the way we arrange the stars
to accommodate our fates
without leaving a lasting impression
upon anything
beyond the occasional Burgess Shale or
Library of Ashurbanipal.
Ciphers of meaning neither real nor
unreal,
watercolor starmaps of the paths we
take in life
bleeding into one another like
bloodbanks of roses
we dance with in our teeth awhile as
our hearts and bodies
move to the picture music of our
mindstreams, and then
throw in our graves as if the beauty we
once danced with,
were the least perishable of the
flowers we had to offer
the unanswerable brevity of knowing the
silence
that follows indelibly in our expanding
wake lasts forever.
PATRICK WHITE
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