PEOPLE, YES, PEOPLE

PEOPLE, YES, PEOPLE

People, yes, people. Here comes a rush. A gust of stars.

People will break your heart and then they’ll mend it again

and if you’re lucky, they’ll mend it with a gold sunset.

Me, I like moonrises of the beautiful and mysterious.

That’s what I saw when I was looking through the windows

of a woman I loved as if I were staring straight into

the face of God, and the Queen of Heaven took another veil off.

Be nothing so you can be influenced by everything.

And I’ve always been grateful like the sea or an apple orchard.

I’ve been blessed. I’ve been cursed. I’ve avoided the obvious rhyme.

Most of the time came in through the backdoor but then

so does the moon like a dark, romantic, pale thief

returning Ryokan to his window. What does it mean?

Summations, anybody. Beats me. I don’t know.

I’ve doubted and affirmed, celebrated and cursed

it all my life as the only way I had of exploring it

because it fascinated me to watch my mind walking

its own waters with nothing to save or give away

but what it wanted to and when, fireflies of insight

into the significance of being alive to know it. It’s a gift

that found you on the threshold of the labyrinth

of morning glory you entered to learn to distinguish

the difference between a womb and an empty bucket.

Managed it yet? Or are you still working on eclipses

and sundials with occult philosophies of crickets

to their credits, or castanets by now? Chance it, lady, chance it.

Teach your skeletons how to danse macabre with you.

Sit around a firepit of prophetic skulls and watch the flames

as if it were your first visit to Stonehenge

or Orpheus were being dismembered all over again

by the brutal mystery of the women that he’s slain

deeper into life by going down into death

like a well that could sing to the shadows

under their breath like the waters of light and life itself

when the moon was making its way across the narrows.

It doesn’t matter. Get into it, her, him, whatever

gets you through the night as if it were special,

passionate, blameless, thin as the moon when

it’s playing Zorro with your heart and a masked raccoon.

This isn’t Venice. It’s a cosmic frontier. Conduct

yourself accordingly, walk like a human who cares.

O no doubt it isn’t all fireflies trying to make constellations

in the summer of white-tailed does stepping

out of the mist of their nebularity in the valley

into an apparition made of light. Beautiful. Don’t miss that.

Don’t deprive yourself of your eyes. And keep

the thorns on the roses, especially if they’re black eclipses

in a school for mystical mirrors that are learning

how to dance with columbines. Drink your own

blood out of the skull of the moon, and drink deep.

Let the night wear your bloodstream for a change

and don’t be afraid of the mysterious when a black

hole shows you your face in a dark mirror

and there’s nobody there you recognize. Smile

as if you were glazing the starmud bricks of heaven

to build a temple outside the the lion gates of Babylon,

or bulls if that makes you feel any better. Existential

effervescence. Keep it bubbly as a galaxy of quantum foam,

touch it lightly, touch it lightly, touch it lightly

with your fingertips forever full of farewell

as if the moon were putting her kids to bed and kissing

them on their foreheads as if they were silos full

of butterflies from worlds beyond born in the mouth

of dragon stars. And don’t be feeble about it.

Look it in the eye directly. Have the guts of an arrow

or a sparrow hawk. Make flying carpets out

of the yarn that unravels out of the mouths of lunar toothpaste

that gone’s mad with the taste of itself. Go crazy

but do it human way. Make love to each to each other

and I’m not even going to go there, but you know,

don’t you, you know how much silence there is

in a single, sacred syllable of water and fire and light

and the blue air overhead like an eyelid that just

got French-kissed by a snail that tracked in the Milky Way,

as if your mouth were a garden for thieves and nightbirds.

You hear that. I do. That’s you being a lonely waterbird

among the Lanark hills trying to convince the stars

you’re not an echo of anybody else you ever knew.

Walk beside a candle most of the days of your life,

and when the fire god comes to set fire to your orchid

show him what you can do with moonlight

if you wanted to, but you don’t, because you

just wanted him to see how silk can burn like ice

when it dances with its eyes as if it weren’t looking

at anybody else. Fail if you have to. Just

don’t be mean and mediocre about it. Fail

in a vast attempt to be more than you’ve ever been before,

fail trying to attain the unattainable forgiveably

so you help people on the same burning ladder

up the stars as if they were scarlet runners

with wild aspirations of becoming pilot lights

that put out to sea, full of awareness and dread

but convinced there’s something out there beyond

the starmaps and chandeliers that’s a dark mirror

that clarifies things as deep as you want to take them

seriously in a playful kind of way because I told you

earlier, touch it lightly, touch it lightly, touch it lightly

as the witching stick of a dragonfly on the lip

of a waterlily that’s just discovered

someone’s spiked the waters of life with starmud

and she’s terrified of how much it matters

exquisitely to celebrate the fact with praise

and unlimited joy, though later in life that

will turn into a background noise of cool bliss

summing it all up like a windfall of autumn

as if it’s never been as rich as this before.

Yes, the crows, the shadows, the matriculation

of perfection in the crone phase of the immaculate moon

that takes your breath away, like your life, your love

your wisdom and your ignorance of what it’s all about,

and leaves you with a mystery in a small black box

you haven’t opened yet to see what’s inside

the darkness that shines so you can see the light

and know for yourself if it tastes of fire and ashes

or sumac in the spring in the tender new plumage

of its flightfeathers to get out of the nest

like the sky burial of a starmap and see how big forever is.

PATRICK WHITE