ACUTELY AWARE OF THE ONCENESS OF LIFE
Acutely aware of the onceness of life,
one
of the many shadows that followed me
for lightyears
was the terror of wasting it on myself
and not
the mystery of what it is to be here
knee deep in starmud,
up over my head in a fathomless
atmosphere of awareness,
knowing I was going to leave my body
behind
one day like gumboots. Any moment now.
The green light of the firefly about to
change to red.
In the last flash of insight to cross
my mind,
which could well be, as it has been
here,
the foundation stone of a whole new
universe,
I didn’t want to get caught, one foot
in and one foot out,
trying to weather the storm like a
lifeboat
still moored to the dock like an apple
in winter
on the tree of life, not risking what I
had to let go of
like seeds that abandon the rafters of
the tree to be true to it.
Some people trip, some fall, some
plunge,
some swan-dive into the abyss. I made
a big black hole in my heart and let
all the stars
leak into it like the creative side of
the light when it
turns around to look at itself without
being rebuffed
by its own reflectivity. I’ve danced
under the chandeliers
in the blue-white palaces of the
Pleiades
when the air was full of mirrors, and
that was
as elegant as a graceful woman on the
verge of tears,
and often, I’ve worn my eyelids like
hoods and eclipses
over the falcons of my eyes to keep the
lunettes of my talons
from seizing the heart of the dove like
a bouquet of blood.
Like the gutter receives the spent
flames of the leaves
and the Japanese plum blossoms, like
the baleen
of a blue whale harvests the krill and
knows
by the taste in its mouth whether it’s
autumn or spring,
when they were tired of shining, I let
the stars
go slumming in my humanity as if I were
a spiritual nightclub
where they could let their hair down
like black dwarfs
sick of photo-ops and burn out alone at
the bar
like bruised black and blue flash bulbs
any way they wanted to.
I brought the stars back down to earth
as often
as they raised my skull up like a grail
they poured themselves into until my
eyes
were brimming over with their radiance
and never once
did I ever hear them say when. Or
enough is enough.
My capacity for emptiness was and still
is limitless.
How else could you hold all that
shining within yourself
and not go blind? How could you ever
hope to know
what hour it was like the zeitgeist of
the times at home
in a material eternity if you didn’t
live space
like an intimate experience there were
only the stars
and a few nightbirds you could tell it
to who could understand?
Though the signs were everywhere like a
secret
that wanted to be known. All you had to
do
was open your heart and take a look
through the third eye
of a black hole dilating in the middle
of your iris like a new moon
climbing the rungs on a ladder of event
horizons
as if it were crossing the thresholds
of each house of the zodiac
back into the burning arms of the black
sun no one could see
that wasn’t intrigued by the mystery
of the dark eyes
behind the veils and lifemasks of the
light
that paled them like nightwatchmen
making
their final rounds on the grave yard
shift
turn their lanterns down like stars in
the dawn.
Acutely aware of the onceness of life,
I cherished my fingertips, not what
they touched.
I exalted my seeing, not what it saw. I
honoured my voice
for the nobility of its calling, not
what was said in my sleep.
I gathered up all the myriad thoughts
and facets of mind
like wavelengths of the omnipresence of
the universe
like fireflies and lightning, and
delighted and horrified
as I was by what they revealed, looked
deeply into the eye
of the one jewel of the world concealed
behind all the shining.
I’ve firewalked the Milky Way on a
pilgrimage
of ghosts and smoke and taken the hands
of many lovers
as if they were my own like an Orphic
leper
come back from the dead like a moonrise
silhouetting
the green boughs of a tree that had
suffered many dismemberments,
to revel in the return of life to my
limbs like an orchard in spring,
not the windfall of the fruits of the
earth that fell out of their sleeves
like cornucopias, wishing-wells, and
the caressable magic of lamps.
Though I praised the fountains and
goblets, the flowering
of the starfields after the ice-storms
of Orion thawed
like a chandelier over the candelabra
of the trees
I drowned in the godhead of the dark
watershed like the source
of the great rivers of my life
returning to the sea
like the stray threads and frayed
deltas of my blood
reworked into new flying carpets on the
loom
of the lunar ebb and neap of my tidal
heart
seminal with life along the island
coasts of consciousness
when the moon is in the corals like a
sower in the fields.
But more than desire itself, I
celebrated my heart,
not for what it longed for, but the art
of love that mastered me
like a down and out stranger I once met
in West Van
when he saw I was out of cigarettes,
and opening his hand
like an ashtray of butts he’d been
picking up off the streets,
and saving for himself, picked the
longest one out
and gave it to me as freely without
forethought
as any highroller ever shot the stars
as if he had no limits.
PATRICK WHITE
