THIS OR THAT DELUSIONAL CHOICE

THIS OR THAT DELUSIONAL CHOICE

This or that delusional choice, great exercises of the will,

chromatic aberration of the optics of consciousness,

must there be a you, must there be an I

for us to understand each other, paint rags of a dream,

fleeting lines of a poem uncoiling like smoke from a candle

a gust of jealous stars blew out to make a bigger impression

upon the dark. Radiant fossils of the constellations,

every star in their eyes down to Albireo in the tail of the Swan,

a brilliant mutation, a masterpiece of evolution

tweaking its own creation with hotspots of genius,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

must our thought waves divide the sea of awareness

that isn’t troubled by its own weather on the turbulent surface,

or the low pianissimos of its kingfishers at peace with the fish

in a halcyon mood with each other like a truce of music

in which we drown like the moon every night,

a sword of light returned in tribute to the waters

wounded by the beauty of an act of grace

like a tiny stone in an oyster shell that lacquered it

into a lunar pearl hanging from the neck of the earth.

Must there be a you, must there be an I,

when our theta-waves are weaving a flying carpet

under both our feet pacing back and forth

like the shuttle-cock heartbeats of clacking looms

in front the windows, worried like needles in haystacks

if someone were going to pop our balloons of laughing gas

like joy’s grape against the palettes of our mouths,

extemporizing Keats at a Grateful Dead concert,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when the iron in our blood is still

the youngest bell of the sun at the marriage of light

where atomic numbers join together

that which none can put asunder,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when we’re both children of the same fire-womb,

same dragon mother, same midwife, same wet nurse of the earth?

Separation is not real in an interdependently originated world.

There are quantum entanglements like little knots

in our hair, wild comets that just got out of bed,

hearts being what the other needs as they change

their spin like partners in a dance of stars at the crossroads

of the wind when it gleefully loses its sense of direction

like starmaps and leaves in the euphoria

of an autumn that put its burdens down

on the soft shoulders of the road and walks on

lighter than freedom, more naked than water,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

where two rivers join in an alloy insight and intuition,

is that not the secret meeting place of the imagination

where you know what the rocks are thinking

by the columbine growing out of their prophetic skulls

in the spring, and the vulvas of the visionary crocuses

get a leg up on the nuns of the snow, as if they hadn’t heard of sin,

but merely suggested they must be a good place for spring to begin,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when the alluvial silt of our starmad settles on the fields

and gathers in the same delta renewed every year

at the annual flooding of the headwaters of the Milky Way?

If we both lied and said we were the victims of war,

there wouldn’t be anything left to fight over any more,

no tilting at the shadows and mirages of words

that don’t realize they all were born of the same mother-tongue

when every syllable was as sacred as a hermit thrush

in an aspen grove, and the wildflowers bloomed

from the bottom of their roots up, without saying a word,

like loveletters to the bees with irresistible R.S.V.P.s,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

and the God particle that doesn’t want to be identified

as the archon of gravity that lavishes on everything alike,

a gift of mass that gives us somewhere to stand in space,

face to face beside each other in the bilateral symmetry of the light

that doesn’t divide us a convenience of consciousness

whenever the mindstream needs a bridge and turns

the blueprint of one reflection toward another in order to build it?

Can you see how the star is the mother of the eye,

and the eye gives birth to Al Tair in Aquila,

as if the indissoluble bond between us and everything were

one long umbilical cord of seeing and being,

thrown out to us like the strong rope

of an unravelling string theory making waves

among the drumheads of the membranes resonating

with the parallel lifelines in a guitar shaped universe

to a lifeboat in the abyss that hauls us into it

so we could all meet each other like music

on this spherical dancefloor of a planet like earth?

Ignorance isn’t ignorant when it doesn’t discriminate

between itself and wisdom, and wisdom isn’t wise

if it does. Both revel in the same bliss

as the stars and the lightning and the fireflies

illuminating the aniconic darkness with mandalic kells

and constellations that never wear the same fire twice

like Isis, the Queen of Heaven, however young her future grows,

remembering all the cosmologies she abandoned in her youth

like lovers that couldn’t keep their eyes off her

as she hinted at dark secrets in her past that kept them glued

to the evanescence of her starmaps like a fragrance of light

reminiscent of many nights in the astral gardens of earth

among the lemons and the pomegranates, the grapevines

and the moon a gesture of water on the limbs

of the naked arbutus trees cooling off their sunburns.

Our eyes, twin navels of a world of wavelengths

that can never be tied off and cut by the knife

of consciousness if the Conservation of Data Principle

is true even in the deepest black holes, the singularity

of an original insight like the thought in your mother’s mind

at conception that contains each of us within the other,

worlds within worlds within worlds, shepherd moons

in the pearl beds of the elegant dreamers who can take

a bit of starmud and teach it to shine like a black sun at midnight

or an albino one at opalescent noon, a positive and a negative,

both sides of the same moon as the embryo emerges

in the womb of a dark room like a picture of the same music in all of us,

must there be a you, must there be an I, must

we grow heads upon our severed heads like grapevines,

hollyhocks, cemeteries, asteroids and hydras

because we don’t realize we’re all metaphors

seeking our likeness in the eyes of each other

to express the hidden secret in the lifelines of the poem

that wished to be known as the water, blood, light, love, night

of the one mind in all of us so elemental that what it writes,

what it expresses, what it unceasingly sings when it creates,

isn’t an image or sound that acquaints it with its own unlikeness,

but an ear, an eye, a tongue, a fingertip, a nose,

five open petals, five chemoreceptors, five original words

of the one flower that blooms in us like the mind

in all directions at once, like a star that turns its light around

to see itself like the past looking back on the future,

realizes, even after its light is spent and it’s deepening its insight

on the path of the black dwarf that doesn’t mean

there be a you, there be an I, that sprouts a rosary

of heads like prayer beads on a spinal cord

that snaps and scatters the mindstream over a precipice

like a waterfall of separate grains of wheat

ingathered by the wind in the siloes of the abyss

into a single harvest of broken loaves and a string of fish

like baby shoes. That doesn’t mean when the music’s over

turn your eyes out. That doesn’t mean standing here together

in the dark feeling the same astonishment, fear, and love,

three waves of the same mind, that we can’t see, that we’re blind,

that the poem we’re writing to Arcturus in the crowns

of the black walnut trees, or the crows in the sumac, ever

comes down to any one line like a hummingbird in the larkspur,

that isn’t the undiscriminating end and beginning

of everything all at the same time.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE ARE MASKS

There are masks I will not wear,

backstage wardrobes I won’t dress up in,

lives someone else can star in,

fires that will never feather my voice,

or sweep the shadows

from my palace of ice and eyes,

faces that will never hang like fruit

from any bough of my being,

daggers I won’t bury in the wounds

they inflicted like mouths

the tongue has been cut out of,

dignities of desire

that will not circle the roadkill,

my wings linked to the foodchain.

My heart will never labour

like the ox of a bell under a yoke,

though I plough the starfields;

nor will I fill its rivers

with leeches and eclipses

and let it sip the blood of others

to nourish my own lust.

I will not smudge the clarity of my heat

with greenwood, not sacrifice

the hawk’s eye for the ant’s,

cloud the integrity of love with acrid reason.

I will not eat the days

like spoonfuls of my own ashes,

a martyr to my own orthodoxies,

trying to be true to a creed of fire

that moves underground like a root-fire

in a choir of cedars, the forbidden flame

smouldering, trying to bite its own tail,

trying to put itself out with its own tears

for the best of reasons,

for lost earrings in a coffin.

Anyone can see

you’re a raven worthy of silver

who’s roofing her wings with tin,

an urgent orchid with flare

trying to bloom in the shadow

of a nightshift toy factory.

Your wingspan

should be measured in horizons

from dawn to dusk; and you

free to ride your own thermals,

to slide yourself like a theshold or a love-letter

under the door of the wind,

to take the hood off your sky

and explore your own vastness,

all the bridges you built

to lie in the shadows

of the burning cherry trees,

true to your own emergency,

true to your own fingertips and eyes,

the impulse of the serpent at the gate

who whispers to you like skin

when the candles go out,

who comes to you like water to a witching wand

a root-god to the poppy

that shudders with black lightning

to be consumed like a torch in her own flames,

to drown in the black rose

of an exquisite oblivion,

naked in a moist parachute that blooms

like a smile you’d thought you’d lost.

The butterfly can’t be

stuffed back into the cocoon,

the bird back into the egg,

the pearl back into the grain of sand

that grew a palace

out of the tiniest foundation stone.

Fire is not a flower of ashes

that sheds its petals twice.

There are roads that disappear

like stray threads of hair

over our shoulders

even as we walk them,

every step farewell and arrival,

as time yeasts the envelope

with crucial stars that make things happen,

the wheatfield of an autumn letter

in the loaf of the hollow mailbox

rising like dawn out of a dark mouth

over its own harvest.

You can’t live forever like a sentence

balked at the fang marks of the colon

you can’t remember biting you.

Because life is not punctuated

any more than space,

things will follow

the promise of the serpent’s tattoo

to die back into life,

the black lioness

of your passionate constellation,

not a nun at the stake

of a forbidden lust to live,

but a new moon at the opening gates

of the parenthetical secret

between two crescents.

Are you afraid

to let your life graze like wild horses

on the grasslands

of your own transformations,

do you desecrate a greater law

to obey a smaller;

would you tie your last lifeboat,

your last island full of moonlight

to the sunken pillars of a wharf

that aged like a palace,

an endless prelude

to a book of farewell

that collapsed under the weight

of its own hesitation

to read itself to the end?

Even now your foundation-stones

are turning into quicksand

and the abyss

of what you must jump into

to follow your wings

out of the barnyard

opens like a mouth

trying to clear a wishbone

or a song from its throat.

Are you afraid

to give up your collection of hats,

those skies and overturned nests you walk under,

a hawk behind chicken-wire

for a bough in the wild

without a return address?

I want to hear the nightbird sing

that dazzles the serpent

with the joy of her own being,

slowly ascending the tree like a stairwell

to seize her in the dark rapture

of his amorous coils

and drown her in tide after tide of transfiguring wine,

the secret oceans of bliss

that lie hidden

in every drop of blood, every tear

that falls from the thorns

of the black star that burns like a rose

in the mouth of the dragon

that is waiting like wings

at her bruised heel

for her to wash off the old mythologies,

naked in the eye of the rain,

and mount the taboo and eclipse

of her own repealed desire

and fly from the graveyard firepits

of the grounded comets

praying for a match in hell

to light the pyres of their own cremations.

Ill omen or good,

the brush is loaded with red,

with roses, blood, fire,

and the sky is primed

like the virgin seabed of the canvas before you.

Staring will not paint the apple

you want to bite into,

install the serpent like a voice

in the tree that tempts you,

run the fingers of the nightwind

through your raven hair like a mad pianist

trying to tune your keyboard

to the crazed scales of the full moon.

If you want to dance naked

under chandeliers of black cherries,

alive enough to get away with yourself

don’t turn your eyes to glass

and scan the heavens

like the small end of a telescope

to see if you can spot your own approach

like an astronomical catastrophe

that will burn the house down,

the matchbook flaring of a coffin

that docks like a death-boat

to take on a cargo of ashes;

but lay down one stroke of paint,

risk your own interstellar spaces once,

leap like a wounded dolphin

from the wave of the mirror once,

and life will strew stars in your path

that will awake the dreamer

like gardens in the furrows

of your salted fields.

You will stop living

like an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade

before the blaze of your own hunger

for heat and light

and run like a sudden thaw of honey

from the frozen hive

that wants to ride its own melting

like a forge pouring out the hot metals

of the enchanted swords

the dark magicians plunge into the stone

to sort the jesters from the crowns.

PATRICK WHITE