THE DUST ON THE WINDOW NO LESS PART
The dust on the window no less part of
the magnificence
of our awareness than the stars that
will come
later tonight. Look past the obvious
radiance
even if it means you go into eclipse
for awhile
and two full moons weigh heavily on
your eyes,
and the clouds press down oppressively
like a pillow
over your face. When you wake up you’ll
be amazed
by how extraordinary and strange the
ordinary is
in everything. Wake up like a firefly
if you’re
world weary of being a galaxy. Reverse
your spin.
Get entangled in an affair with your
quantum self
without worrying whether it’s a
delusion or not.
I’m thinking about the kind of
knowledge
that puts the petals back on the rose
instead of
severing its eyelids to see what it was
dreaming underneath.
Are there not as many thresholds ahead
of us
as there are rungs behind? The whole
is not the context of the part anymore
than a wave of emotion, breaking on
shore or not
is any less oceanic than the vastness
of the heart.
The secrets aren’t hiding under the
stones
of shepherd moons like life under the
carapace
of a turtle on its way to war
quixotically.
One beginning runs toward another as if
it were the end of things. The
waterclock
never comes to a full stop like a
fossil of water.
Time doesn’t go extinct just because
you lose sight
of what hour it is. Take the patina off
the eyes
of your peacocks, and you’ll see
things
as they are clear enough. Bored with
your life
change your amniotic fluids once and a
while
and look at the world as if you were
born of methane.
Teach your houseflies to roar like
dragons,
like singularities in a black hole
creatively deploying
its emptiness like a plenum-void to
teach
the sea stars how to bloom like
galaxies in fire.
Is beauty the same in an old mirror as
it is
in a young? You can spend the rest of
your life
trying to reknow what you knew but
that’s
a ghost’s way of going about living,
a candelabra of smoke and mirrors
held up to the sky like a leafless tree
looking for the lost constellations of
last spring.
More dark matter in the voice of the
watershed
than there are rivers in the trickling
of a mountain stream from the
wellsprings
of the muses I once drank from but from
the first whisper of light in my eyes,
until now in this monkish scriptorium
of ashes and wax where I labour
elaborately
to match kells like treble clefs to the
starmaps
of the names I’ve given to total
eclipses
like an elder among the tribes of the
Ojibway
who sustains the history of his people
like smoke on a distant hillside in the
autumn,
it’s been the terrible solitude in
the song
of the nightbird that’s been the
longest standing
continuity of my life, the existential
music
of trying too hard not to live in vain
by approaching the creative agony of my
starmud
with as much light, oxygen and rain as
I am capable of.
In this anonymous darkness I am the
skeletal frame,
the scaffolding of the light, the rose
arbour
of galaxies that arc like blood and
burning doorways,
the trellis of starclusters on the
vines of wild clematis,
the unknown boughs that blossom like
rafters
in the houses of life that shine like
zodiacs
over the entrance to the dark
passageways
of mystic black holes in the eyeless
hoods
that web the veils of widowed
constellations
like dangerous executioners that kill
you back into life
as many compassionate times as it takes
for you to realize
you don’t need a starchart to plot
the flightpath
of your inimitable singularity when a
single wavelength
of your indelible shining is enough to
fill up
the whole of the nightsky in the
lantern of space
you’re holding out like an empty
hourglass of time
in front of you as your heart pumps new
watersheds
like a housewell into the empty cup of
your prophetic skull.
Bright vacancy, dark abundance, the
coat of arms
on your shield, stop tilting at dragons
of your own making
and even the emptiness is full of a
strange longing
to reveal itself like a hidden secret
that wanted to be known
like a starling in a birch grove when
you’re out
late at night on your own, shadowing
your mindstream
like a river you been following down
the mountain so long
like the Rideau canal, you’ve dug
yourself
the longest grave in the world like a
creekbed
to sustain the flashfloods of Orion
rising over
the black walnut trees like the flow of
life
through the radiant valleys of the
astonished dead.
Like love, like the universe ageing
into its renewal,
trying to catch one last fleeting
glimpse of what
it once was in an eyeful of parabolic
mirrors
orbiting like the hanging gardens of
Babylon,
the morphology of knowledge is the
shapeshifting
of your own mind as it flows from one
sky into the next.
Yesterday’s earthbound scales that
crawled on their bellies
swallowing the eggs of the mourning
doves
they were about to become, are the
clairvoyant totems
of tomorrow’s dragons pursuing their
craving for the moon.
If you want to look into the future,
look at what
you long for now. Your desire’s
giving birth to you
like a waterclock in the cosmic womb of
a galactic fire eater.
I can hear your eyes from here calling
out in distress
as they drown in the mirror like a
flashback of yesterday.
O lady, you’re not the black dwarf of
your former shining,
the Queen of Heaven in a coven of
cowled candles
conferring the last rites on a black
mass.
In the stillness of what you’re
becoming can’t you hear
the perennial beauty of the crows
reciting the haikus
of inspired dinosaurs singing like
poetic eclipses
in the dead of winter celebrating their
lyrical extinctions
as if their eyes were burning like
young diamonds
in the dark lanterns of their ancestral
shrines of coal?
PATRICK WHITE
