SLOW DOWN, SLOW DOWN

SLOW DOWN, SLOW DOWN

Slow down, slow down, look into

the golden eyes and crystal skulls of your soul.

No frenetic redshift, or the blue end of the spectrum

will think you’re stealing its thunder, stepping on its Texas toes.

Blue is an asp. Red is a king cobra that passes like a river

into the grass, but you know it’s there,

and you walk tentatively and you walk slow.

As if you’d just made a truce with

cause and effect, one and zero, or the hydro lines

up at Fernleigh buzzing in the rain where

they crossed the lake with no other music than this

hiss, on a musical stave on which no birds sang

like one of the signs of the last days in ibn Attar’s

twelfth century way of looking at things.

That’s a topic worthy of longer wavelengths

of thought, but we won’t go there until we hear

what the doctor says Friday after high noon

like a Gary Cooper movie walking out

into the bleak, bleached street of the sunshine. Draw.

Pow. Pow. Two tumours with one shot. I think I counted wrong.

Gave them names the other night. Scream and Silence.

Kids of my own. I’ll do my best to treat them right.

Gives a kind of classy ring to their names don’t you think?

Demonic personic psychodynamics of the mind

embodied like Romulus and Remus at the founding of Rome.

How many eagles is it going to take this time?

Two gods on earth, confusion in heaven, and a house

or a skull divided against itself like the cotyledon

of a scarlet runner cannot stand. But nobody

told the seeds that as they climb toward heaven

on their own flames up the axis mundi of the world.

Three poles of triune identity, more like a small fire

that’s catching on its own way, than an auto de fe

that’s going to bring my urn of ashes to heel,

o yes, o yes, but I’m going to keep my spurs on

like Aldebaran and Antares and Betelgeuse.

I’m a three spurred cowboy because I don’t want

to leave my third eye out of this, and every star in the sky

deserves its own eye, like children growing up

deserve a bedroom of their own. A place to run and hide.

Be alone with the Alone. As Plotinus called it.

Crazy mystic. Took himself way too seriously.

But then, again, he had to for the longest time

like a mainspring in an alarm clock until

he hatched it like a koan with a hot red egg

in its mouth. A musket shot. Anachronistic worlds in collision.

Not taking a meteor shower like a combination in the corner

looking for an extinction event among the right crosses.

But Scream and Silence seem to be getting along

with each other these days. Maybe I’ll hire a baby-sitter.

Go play for awhile. Too many farewells in these fingertips

that have been touching the world for the last time

to see how that feels, though I fear these dress rehearsals

like trampled grapes fear rumours of wine laced

with mushrooms like the moons of the Eleusinian Mysteries

on the edge of the wheat flood of Dionysus

dropping tiny spores of ergot in your drinks,

and out of control stampedes that trash your mind,

or the King of the Waxing Year fears body parts,

or Monsanto genetically modifies the crops.

Wonder what the moon thinks of that? And the almonds

and the bees? They must be freaked out by now.

PATRICK WHITE