JUST THE STAR IN THE TREE RINGS OF MY HEARTWOOD

JUST THE STAR IN THE TREE RINGS OF MY HEARTWOOD

Just the star in the tree rings of my heartwood,

centred like the nave of the spokes of this wheeling

mind and bloodstream the Buddhists call the wheel of life and death

going supernova in a distant galaxy, let’s say, Andromeda

because it’s close enough to be intimately beautiful,

and besides, who needs anymore than a hundred billion stars

shining radiantly like an island of light in the night

two hundred million lightyears away to get their point across?

Look at me, Maw. No hands on the optical Zen handlebars

if this unicycle of a planet I’ve been riding around the sun on

like a circus tour of gleemen, jesters, tricksters, poets

and hucksters, ring masters cracking their cat o nine tails

like a nervous system bundled into a spine

to teach tigers who’ve been jumping through hoops of fire

all of their lives, or what do think all those stripes are about,

or a strong rope made out of braided umbilical cords

for anchor chains, moral bling, and the fishing nets of Indra

with all those hooks and jewels in it like flies,

lies, lures, and spinners, bait and spiritual snakeoil salesmen

trying to get you to buy into a bottle of magic elixir

as if you were some kind of genie in a lamp

incapable of granting your own three wishes to yourself,

that’s going to sneak you in the enlightenment concert

through a black hole in the fence just before you gain entrance

through the gateless gate that punches your ticket

like lights out forever so your eyes can adjust to the dark

as you fall upon your own sword like a seppuku suicide

that kills you deeper into life not death by exhuming the universe

from a seed. Soma sema. So there’s nothing left to discriminate

a manger from a tomb, a cradle from the grave, one womb

from another, fire from water, a saint from a sinner,

the Virgin Mary from Mary Magdalene, all dream figures

in a dream that wakes up with you when you do.

That’s my good guess. Or have you even got one?

Though it’s not necessary to switch from analogue to digital,

or even smoke signals, log drumming cave bears

Jews’ harps, or barndance country spoons trying

to jump over the moon like the Mounties musical ride,

if you’re happy the way you are. If not, it’s easy

to translate that synchronized keyboard of dragon teeth

you’ve been playing on all your life into a guitar you set on fire

so after you’ve brought down the house, can you hear

the roar of the crowd as they stand up on their feet

crazed by amazement, ovation, encore, and groupie ecstasy,

you exit stage left in your Draculan Elvis collar

studdeded with stars like the cloak of the night

you wrap your starmaps up in like gnostic gospels

nearly two thousand years after you wrote them

some goatherd’s going to find like parchment

in a cave that’s more a spiritual wine cellar

for aging dreams until their bouquets are wildflowers

that please you like in the starfields

as you spit whiskey and lighter fluid on a voodoo Chanticleer

like some cantor in a dendritic candelabra of dark matter

and ask for blessings like an arsonist in a volunteer fire brigade

for burning down another house of life when you leave.

Depends upon what you believe, I suppose, whether

you think compassion is a fire hydrant, a squad car,

a fire truck, or an ambulance on its way like a screaming poppy

that scratches at your windows like the tree of life

in a sudden squall as if they were your eyes and death

was trying to say how much she loved you like a banshee.

To crib from the bible and a depressing Canadian novel

that never scattered its ashes out of the urn, as for me

and my house, I’ve never left a place in my life

like a fire ax or extinguisher or ungrateful guest

for a billion acts of hospitality I return as I should,

it’s only spirtual manners, adhab, as the Arabs say,

and the poets back them up, without leaving

a matchbook, a blasting cap, a wrecking ball

for creative demolition, a dragon, or a can of gasoline

I was getting tired of lugging around with me anyway

in tribute on their temple stairs where they’ll find it

in the morning swaddled like a changeling among the reeds

in a basket that looks more like a windfall at the feet

of guillotine apple tree more than a strawdog of manger

on their mindstreams that was going to be thrown

on the fire any way like a deathmask that’s served

its pagan purpose, and said thank you to its host

in a spiritual kind of way for letting things go down

like shipwrecks on the moon and catastrophic decisions

that had to be made, or didn’t, whatever the occasion seemed

to call for at the time as an act of liberation were no more

than not forgetting in the most enlightened way you can to say thanks

that feels like an embrace, a kiss on the cheek, a caress,

a koan, a bullet through the third eye of a rainbow

or a cosmic egg you’re just breaking out of like an earthquake

to see how big, and beautiful, uncramped, the nightsky

really is, or a net you just escaped like a dolphin

caught in the interstices by a skeleton key that broke off

in the lock it was drowning in until you came along and cut through the lines

that were entangling it to death like a nightingale trying

to read sheet music in the dark, a musical starmap

long before it began to sing from its heart instead of the dead

to the heretical choir of wild phoenixes passing like stars

high overhead at midnight as if the axis mundi of the word

were nothing more than an auto de fe, just another stake

with a medicine bag of gunpowder hung around its neck

as an act of mercy, love, not hate though I realize how

surrealistically crazy this must make Zhuangzi, or Loki,

or any other sacred clown, sound when you first encounter them

like a truth so childlike, simple, beautiful, and playfully profound

the butterflies rubbed the firesticks if their antennae together and got

a bonfire going that everybody is dancing like ghosts around.

PATRICK WHITE