WHETHER YOU CALL IT CRAZY WISDOM OR NOT

WHETHER YOU CALL IT CRAZY WISDOM OR NOT

Whether you call it crazy wisdom or not

I mean. Gone. Nuts. Neither in nor out of my mind.

So if I were to say to someone I’d made it

to the other side, I’d have light years further to go

than before I started out. Great wisdom

from the further shore, yes, but if your river

is still emptying into an abyss, something poured out,

albeit in bliss, like the rapturous mindstream of Aquarius

at its most mysterious, you’re still skinny dipping

in the waters of life breath-watching through

the gills and aqua-lungs of your afterbirth.

Meditation might help stabilize your full lotus

vision of life, but that doesn’t mean, it’s not mad

because it smiles a lot with equanimity and compassion.

Proxy enlightenment. Are you still polishing mirrors

like a housekeeper who works for somebody else,

hoping to change all your ostrakons into koans?

The nightwatchmen dreaming at noon on the job

on a dayshift of shadows taking time off like a sundial?

I don’t exhaust myself on the effortless labours of the mind.

Keats: If it come not as naturally as leaves to a tree

it had better not come at all. The rest is artifice.

Il miglior fabbro, but not necessarily, a poet.

The sun turns the heritage field stones of the bank

across the street, pink, orange, yellow, a mood ring

at dawn, at sunset, and the turning of the leaves.

I don’t have to paint a demonic masterpiece of disobedience

to have a change of heart like that. Imagination

explores the hydra-headed life of the mind

caught in the coils of its own delusions with as much

regard for the beauty of its innocence, as its laws,

without trying to con snakes into biting other people.

Should it mean more at the end than it did at the beginning?

Time and space. Perth. September 8, 2013.

Anybody have any idea of what this means

in the greater scheme of immateriality when thought

travels faster than the speed of light time either stops

or returns to the past like a snakekpit of waterclocks.

No one has a local habitation or a name anymore

if they ever did, but runic taboos on the boundary stones

of our prophetic skulls aside, couldn’t that be

the uncaused effect of space expanding

the unbroken circles of our minds centred

in the infinite everywhere of our shape-shifting formlessness?

The more seriously it takes itself the sillier wisdom seems.

One night we’re going to run out of stars

to take our bearings by, far, far, far, into the dark

and just as it is now, so it will be then,

the mind lighting lamps in the shade of its own shining

trying to see who goes there. If you start out seeking

you’ll find a way to hide, or hiding, all things

will be revealed as a kind of childhood game

you’re playing with yourself as if your left foot

didn’t know what your right was up to

when you came to a sacred fork in the road

at the equinoctial intersection of time with the timeless

between your legs like the pivot of a compass

trying to fly in your wake like the begging bowls

of pleading seagulls. Even when it’s new,

the moon is always full. The sun rises at midnight.

In the beginning was the imagination. Were

you there at the creation of the stars, somewhere

in the crowd of nameless angels, or were you

inconceivably notable for the mystery your absence?

A creation myth of yourself founded on the past

as if there were some kind of continuum between you

and your emergency exits off the freeway you were on.

I think we’re all hitch hikers watching the world pass

from the back of a pick-up truck. I think because I think

I am not. What difference does it make to the mirror

if you break it like the radiant of a meteor shower,

or falling stars cliff-jumping toward paradise

like the rebuffed lovers of suicidal angels with nothing to wish for,

or praise it for never telling you the same lie twice?

There’s nothing oracular about anyone’s reflection

they can consult for advice without turning into

a warrior healer who takes the words right out of their mouth

like spears and arrows and lightning strikes of insight

from the blood seal of a wound that authenticates the pain.

Life’s an agony. Life’s a breeze. Three and a half pounds

of starmud packed into the neo-cortical labyrinth

of the brain whispering to itself in the dream grammar

of its own biofeedback, the mind is as uniquely

inconceivable to the enlightened as it is

discretely believable to the indiscriminately insane.

Doubt or no doubt, when the secret’s out

like a mirage of water nearby on a lens of air,

there’s nowhere to hide but out in the open

in the third eye of the storm turning like a prayerwheel

counterintuitively to the clockwise direction of creation

in the northern hemisphere, unless you’re a sunflower

closer to perigee in the south. And you know what

I’m talking about as if you had a mouth of your own

that makes things clear as they appear to be alone.

Feathers of moonlight on the waters of life, stars

igniting fires in the crowns of the black walnut trees,

mad enough to mentor metaphors into liberating you

from unnecessarily sweeping the mirages of the stars

like sand paintings of the constellations off the stairs

you climb on your knees to throw away

the crutches and training wheels of your extremities.

In this house of life, the mind relies on nothing

as the natural cure-all for the heart’s home remedies.

PATRICK WHITE