WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY'S WISDOM

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY’S WISDOM

When the unsayable supplants yesterday’s wisdom

it makes it look obvious and trivial in retrospect

and you marvel at the spiritual gestures of goodwill

that swept you off your feet for light-years

as the arcana of a discipline you gave up trying to master,

because you could only see into the matter

as far as the light you were given to go by.

And you didn’t know then that when

you blew the candle out you held

pathetically up to the abyss that you did more,

by blowing it out, to illuminate the universe,

than you did when you fed it your heart

to keep it burning like a night light among the stars,

or a lighthouse paling in the full glare of the sun.

Off the path is the way of the path.

How can anyone be lost? Or found, for that matter?

Midways of gurus with their touring freak shows.

Sacred matchbooks of budding sulphur

throwing humans into the Bonfire of the Vanities,

chasing the bank-rolled Renaissance out of Florence.

Terminal literalism, infectious symbolitis

sweeping down the coast like hemorrhagic fever

from the merchant fleets of Genoa. The wild grape vines

of intuitive insight converted into the razor wire

of paranoid orthodoxies. The heretics bear witness

to the madness in the judgement of their abusers,

and scald the clouds with their blood for it.

The spiritual highways cluttered with exiles,

refugee saints, and scapegoats, where is there

a wilderness left where the tourists don’t go

to gawk at the hermits like wildlife? Back

to the birch groves and the cawing of the crows

like auctioneers that don’t have a thing to sell.

No one’s footprints to follow in. The way things

turn out, at best, a wolf path through the snow

gone by spring, or where you bent the waist high grass

by walking through it like the path of least resistance,

unmapped as the wind. What is it all, when

even the seven-tiered tower of the Scotch thistle

is a mental event, if not open, unknown and empty

in the sense of being indefinable, not missing,

as if anything were there in the first place

it was crucial not to lose? Spare your tears.

Life hasn’t got anything to repent or reform.

The mystery manifest as it is and that’s the whole of it.

What more of it is there to reveal, than the rocks

have already said? Real, not real, the flowers bloom nonetheless

and you’re free to make or feel or think or not

about them as you wish. Mourn the ruination

of the flowers in a passion play as old as the stars

or trust your own mind to mentor you in the ways

of not reifying it into a thing among things,

the source and matrix of your most cherished illusions,

the mirage of the dark mother who eats her own like time.

There is no pattern, path, paradigm, psychodynamic

or unified field theory that the mind won’t

accommodate itself to like a child’s drawing of the universe.

You can elaborate the roots of a tree like a fractal into

a morphology of knowledge forms

that sing in its boughs like sparrows

in the black walnuts of the morning

and then consult it like the grammar of a dream

for the blue print or starmap of the house you’re building

like a screening myth with a built-in library.

The magician gulled in the doorway of his own magic,

having lost the key to the spell he cast

when this desert of stars was merely

the vagrant threshold of a tent in the moon’s back yard.

The folly of sages, the wisdom of fools,

what’s the point of enlightening your own freedom

if you’re too afraid to accept it as the mystical mundanity

that’s under your nose this very moment?

You can hunt your own shadows down like heretics

fleeing the hounds of heaven, you can denounce

an eclipse for being a sunspot on your illumination

and polish the mirror for the rest of your life

and still not wash your face off with a paint rag

like a clown in a green room waxing tragic

to counteract the laughter at the expense of his own wounds.

Look into the eyes of the roadkill for yourself

as if no one else in the world can do your seeing for you

and you won’t see anything very shocking to be afraid of.

No spiritual snake-eyes. No hidden meaning

you have to get at the guts of like a turkey-vulture.

And if you feel compassion, and it’s natural you should,

it’s because there’s something communal about the random

you sense has been going on a lot longer

than the last few thought moments when you showed up

to be misunderstood by your own imagination.

You want some good spiritual advice to get you in the habit

of taking it yourself, whether things are sublimely rough

and death is dying into you, or life is trivializing

the palatial playhouse it was born into? When occasion arises,

and when does it not, learn to call your own bluff

and sit down on the ground, and have a good laugh.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT'S BEYOND THE TRUTH ALWAYS MAKES A LIE

WHAT’S BEYOND THE TRUTH ALWAYS MAKES A LIE

What’s beyond the truth always makes a lie

of what you can say about it. You can feel it

even as the words fall from your mouth like a bird bath.

However beautiful, however clear, translucent, well-meaning,

there’s always one syllable more that’s missing

that everything turns on like a black hole at the nave

of the wheeling galaxy, an unsayable singularity.

Love the radiance of the spokes, but where’s

the vehicle you were trying to assemble

from the yarrow sticks in the Book of Changes?

We get as far as the scaffolding we piece together

out of the bones of the snakes and ladders

we climbed up on like monkey bars to paint

our last masterpiece, and when it’s done,

however admired, it’s a paint rag of the original vision

by comparison with what flashed through our heart

like the spearhead of a life-changing insight

into the nature of chameleonic shapeshifters

mimicking our gestures like mirrors in a game of charades.

I’ve spent most of my life listening like a liar

to what I can’t say. The eclipse of an ink blot

on the silence even when the hummingbirds

gather like tuning forks to sample the larkspur.

I can say it like a star, a flower, the black swan

of a new moon making its first incision of light

like the slash of a scalpel across my throat,

but when the summons of the nightbird

stops singing on its green bough, realizing

no one’s ever going to come who understands

the inspiration and the longing, the Slavic solitude,

for all that I’ve tried to express as lyrically as I can,

I still feel the inarticulate urgency of an abyss

with its tongue cut out of what I tried to say

kicking me from the inside like the embryo

of a stillborn sky burial silently mouthing the wind

like the autumn leaves of a lonely death song.

Always an ear out of reach, a flightfeather

of a voice shy of the saying, a secret letter

of the alphabet without a likeness born of the eyes.

As if I used a blackboard and a bullet of chalk

as an understudy for the shining of the stars

or gummed the anthem of the sea like a brittle-lipped shell

I found washed up among the sea stars

like a larynx at my feet. Though I can sing

like the trees in the morning without forgetting

that every aubade is also a farewell to the stars

as sincere a field of nesting skylarks as I try to be,

my earthbound starmud rising like a constellation

of arcane serpent fire burning at the eastern doors

of the black wisdom of life arising out of the death

of what it engendered it. As with the flesh, so the spirit

salvages the detritus of what remains of its disillusions

and labours to enclose its emptiness in a chrysalis

of meaning and matter that might induce a transformation

of nothing into dragonflies. Stranger things have happened.

Truth is, according to the uncertainty principle,

the universe isn’t a metaphor, it’s a simile

for something you can’t quite put your finger on

like mercury trying to keep a starmap together in an earthquake.

I’ve looked into the future through a window

into an empty room no one’s booked into yet

and I’ve sometimes felt the same agony of stillness

being prepared by space and time as an available dimension

life hasn’t arrived to occupy yet, too busy in the present

to anticipate what’s coming like luggage from the past.

Words were the negative space. I worked in absence.

And something would always be missing. Words

were quantumly entangled like fish in the nets

of assent and denial, like spaced out fireflies on their way

to the stars, enmeshed in the torn spider webs

dripping under the weight of the panicked choirs

of dissonant frequencies strung like trashed guitars

with stagefright at the karaoke microphones of the streetlamps.

The medium beats around the message like nocturnal insects

against a window screen between them and a scented candle.

Young, my words were Luna moths and astronauts

that ached to immolate themselves in the stars

but as I got older, looking back over my shoulder

at the ashes of the winged heels of my nobler aspirations

compared to this long firewalk I’m travelling barefoot now,

and the largesse of the mystery that tunes celestial spheres

to the sound of mosquitoes whining in the woods at night

like dental drills and the villanelles of pubescent poets

that set your teeth on edge, I realized, at best,

words were just a way of whistling in the dark

with the rest of the nightbirds when the stars were out

and the moon was casting shadows as revealing as the light.

That’s when it began to dawn on me the worst lies

are always the clearest, simplest, easiest to understand

like straight lines to curves, highways to serpentine rivers,

things seen retinally from the outside like artists

with eyelids like the shutters of cameras with no feeling

for what they were looking at like reptiles

with third eyes that rarely ever blinked at anything.

Eye on the object reality when poets took notes

in white lab coats as if they were experimenting with fruitflies

under a lens instead of experiencing life as a vision

they’re collaboratively involved in like the dream grammars

of zodiacal alphabets written like eleven dimensional starmaps

on the backs of their eyes, hidden harmonies of the unseen

shining from the inside out like an emerald star

in the heart of an apple, under the skin of the sunset,

liberating the seed syllables of new myths of origin

from the straitjackets of a dysmorphic reality

that insists it’s the true shape of the universe

when it’s only another mirage of water trying

to put out a cosmic root-fire of underground stars.

Listen like an empty lifeboat to the mermaids

singing in the fog. Turn the light around and see

the evanescent shadow of smoke emerging

from the urn mouth of the chimney silhouetted

like lyrical dark matter on the roseate field stones

of a new morning closer to the vernal equinox

raising the level of the bright vacancy of consciousness

even as it lowers the dark abundance of the night

in a lock of light across the street opening its floodgates

on the walls of a heritage bank like a rite of passage.

Here on earth I’ve learned to reason surrealistically

according to the logic of asymmetrical similitudes that occur

in the dark of the mind like starfields of fireflies

all talking to each other at the same time

in a conversation about the next constellation

they might possibly be and what to name it after

once inspired by the muse of their prophetic memories

to remember what associative insights they forgot

when they first learned to write like cracks

in the archival creekbeds of their neo-cortex.

Next time you put words to a page like a loveletter

to a mysterious black rose that’s eclipsed

by the light of a one-eyed liar, trust your own nose

and ask yourself if they’re alive enough to smell the silence.

If the absence that surrounds them lingers in the air

like the aurora of an ancient solitude fragrant with light.

If there’s any joy of life in the starmud you blood with insight.

PATRICK WHITE