TO ASPIRE SO HIGH YOU'RE OUT OF TOUCH WITH YOURSELF

TO ASPIRE SO HIGH YOU’RE OUT OF TOUCH WITH YOURSELF

To aspire so high you’re out of touch with yourself,

the dying sacrifice that’s lost perspective of its exits,

your mind, a comet on a hyperbolic flyby of the sun.

A shot in the dark. Whether it was lucky or not,

you took it, you slowly squeezed the trigger of the moon,

a portent, a sign, a beautiful night, an engaging view

of the river and its willow, a flash of insight

with no recoil to echo like a mantra among the hills,

in a perfect moment of silence, in a gentle colloquy

of lightning and fireflies, life was more over

than anything death had ever tried to attain

on the rungs of the bones of the shakey ladders

the skeletons use to climb out of their graves,

chakra by chakra, scarlet runners of snake fire

setting their staves like rafters in the house of life alight.

The dragon cradled in the fledgling ashes of its pyre.

A cosmic egg trying to break through the down

of another grey day of the extraordinarily mundane.

Unheralded. A childhood unmothered by time. Insane.

Not two. So no one ever there to make a third.

No shadow standing in the wings of the stillness,

the silence, or the empty stage of my one-act solitude.

The sky is there, but I’m the famous disappearing waterbird

that migrates circumpolarly north of nowhere

a compass needle could point out the stars to

like a lightning rod with confidence it won’t

burn out its nerves jumping its neuronic synapses

without a timing chain to synchronize the firing squad.

I can tell by the shadows I’ve cast behind me

like sundials how many times I’ve peeked

through my blindfold to catch a glimpse of death

as if I were consulting the oracular ashes

of irreplaceable starmaps of the inconceivable

in the fire-pits of the Library of Alexandria’s

accidental cremation every fall when inspiration ignites

the leaves of the flammable maple groves

and everything is ageless as a perennial farewell

wearing an expiry date like a wildflower in its lapel

to commemorate the eternal recurrence

of autumn stars over the smokeless chimneys of Auschwitz.

Yellow Capella’s broken horn of plenty when Almathea

suckled Zeus, and the kids weren’t boiled alive

in matriarchal milk unlike the fratricides of Rome’s

procreatrix wolf mother howling in her tears for blood

through a thousand reichs and gulags of violated starmud.

O Osip Mandelstam, where are you now? Are you still

writing somewhere underground like a rootfire

flowering in the eyes of your tormentor’s demented gene pools

as if you could take the muck and detritus of the lowest places

and transmutate them into something hard and cold and beautiful

as a waterlily of swords blooming like a vow together

to raise up one flower, one star, one inviolable word more

than the tyranny of your disappearance could silence

or work to death? It’s the trivial pursuit of sublime energies

to entertain lesser goals, until they begin to focus

like gravitational eyes on bending the light like a destiny

that effortlessly unfolds like a posthumous loveletter

to the human spirit that candles, and gutters, shudders

in each of our hearts like the slow fireworks of an evening fire

on a cold night blazing with Russian sunflowers the dark

couldn’t put out in an unheated barracks that failed to freeze

the ink in your pen, or the moon that’s symbolic

of the madness and the wisdom of the rest of us,

like Luna moths come to the light in your broken window in winter.

PATRICK WHITE