COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS
Compassion is the sweetness that enters
the wounded apple of knowledge after
you’ve taken your first bite out of
it.
It’s not an antidote to the facts of
life and death.
And you should know by now if you’ve
suffered at all,
and it’s impossible not to from the
moment you open your eyes,
the night is not a reward, nor the
lantern of the light
that goes before you on a graveyard
shift of the stars.
Compassion is the oldest instinct of
the heart
and first muse of the mind that can
taste only
the blowing blossoms and bitter green
apples of the spring,
gripe brain, before it ripens like a
sunset in your blood.
That’s why the heart knows more about
it than the head.
And I expect, on that basis, no one is
more capable
of loving us who must doubt that we’re
worthy of love
to live up to the truth of it than the
dead who can open
the tiny koans of the seeds at the core
of things
like the lockets of fortune-cookies
that break
like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to
spread their wings
like waterbirds who write the lyrics of
their songs on the fly.
Words for the eye. Words for the ear.
Words
for the voice of the wind like black
walnut trees
and kites in a storm. And if you really
know how to listen,
I mean if you can hear the wavelength
of a black snake
swimming across your blood like a
mantra
of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that
keeps its secrets
to itself, or hear the unfathomable
oceans in the black rose
whose petals and eyelids are always
smashing
like white eyelashes in a squall of
sunbeams
against the breakwater of a white dawn
that passes
like an albino eclipse in a moonlit
leper colony
of extinct black rhinos. If you even
remotely
hear what I mean when I speak like this
sleepwalking
through a dream grammar like a
prophetic skull in a trance,
words that dance like light on the
mindstream
rejoicing in the clarity of the voice
that expresses
the hidden message encoded in the genes
of the fireflies.
You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.
Some like lighthouses along the banks
of life.
Some like thieves with searchlights for
eyes on a bomber’s night
when everyone is underground and the
bummers are out
plundering the evacuated houses of the
zodiac.
Might be the ravings of a star struck
maniac talking to himself
to make sure nobody else is listening.
Might be
the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist
night bird
singing out loud in its sleep for
things it doesn’t know
it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is
waxing prophetic
in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying
to sound his way out
of the mountains without end he’s
being trying to befriend
like a cloud or an eagle silvered a
moment
like the ore of a dream in the corner
of the eye
of a moonrise coming on like a
hurricane
with a black pearl in its teeth. The
eclipse of a sacred lie
compassion concedes to an alibi without
a myth of origin.
Compassion is the child of imagination
that identifies
with its simulacra of suffering by
applying the heart
like a bloodbank to the wounded
eidolons of eyeless images
that didn’t know how to bleed, or
breathe, or cry or see
until compassion tempered their
impression of themselves
as paradigms of rationality, by
shedding real tears
in an ice age of lenses that kept their
illusory distance
from the stars that came out after the
rain, wet and shining,
laughter radiating through our tears,
because life isn’t a dry fire.
It’s the hand on the rudder of a
lifeboat
that keeps you from drowning from the
day you were born
in the undertow of the tides of the new
moon
until the night of the full when you
haul everyone aboard
who’s been swimming through glaciers
of tears
like baby mammoths for the last
twenty-five thousand years
afraid of extinction if they ever
stopped to catch their breath.
Compassion is accepting everyone’s
death as a portion of your own.
Everyone’s life as your third eye, a
vital organ of your own body.
Compassion is an undisciplined action
of the heart.
Compassion arises like a moonrise of
inspiration
in the eyes of the older sister of the
muses
who walks too much alone as if she’d
devoted her solitude
to the suffering of a wounded stranger
she met along the way
when she let her hair down like willows
of rain
to cool the scorched earth and slake
the roots of pain
until they bloomed like foxfire in the
shadow of her passing.
Most poets sit around the lesser fires
of their art
trying to divine the smoke of what’s
burning in their hearts
like autumn leaves they’ve heaped
into books
that smoulder in tears more often than
they break into flames.
But if compassion turns her eyes toward
you
like a star in the darkness beyond your
blazing
the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream
through your veins
and you see in terrifying clarity the
great mystic details
in the deep watersheds of picture music
efoliating
like wildflowers and galaxies, grails,
fountains,
lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off
the ground
to take their place among the shining,
radiant with life,
in the low valleys and high fields of
an imagination that heals.
PATRICK WHITE
