THE MYSTERY DOESN’T COME WITH WINDOWS
AND POINTS OF VIEW
The mystery doesn’t come with windows
and points of view,
errors of perception, smudges, smears,
labyrinthine fingerprints
on grimy glass, half-legible runes of
names people longed for
last year, breathless palimpsests under
a glaze of nicotine
varnishing the pane like an old
masterpiece to keep it
from being washed away by our tears.
Nothing to argue about.
Nothing to sour your clarity over by
washing your eyes out
like mirrors with vinegar, instead of
tears, wine, and blood.
Nothing to feel impure or unworthy of
if you go home
to take a bath and you turn the faucet
on and stars don’t pour out.
If you’re standing in a field of
broken corn stalks on
an immaculate winter night looking up
at the ferocious radiance of the stars
wishing you could trade your feet of
clay in for winged heels
as you go inside to attend to being
mortal and notice
the wheelbarrow stuck in the ice like a
baby mammoth in a glacier
flowing like frozen time to calve in a
sea of awareness,
your insight is no more or less
pristine than a fish monger
watching the sun going down in the smog
of Beijing.
The mystery floats into your field of
view like a gravitational eye
that wraps itself up in a skin of
oleaginous space like the silks
of the aurora borealis, a bubble of
life that parts the light a moment
like the wavelengths of a lover’s
hair. Comets, curtains, veils,
rivers of red cedar, the flowing of the
mindstream around
the rudder of the rock, the shark fin
of the circling sundial,
just to add the buoyancy of a bell to
the emptiness without
weighing you down with the gravitas of
starmud in the human heart.
It humbles and exalts simultaneously.
Nothing to crow about,
no need to wake the neighbours up,
nothing to found a cult upon
like a meteoric foundation stone
entering the upper atmosphere
like a flashback of Mars throwing a
rock through the window
of a glass house it doesn’t live in
anymore. The wings of the housefly
and the scales of the oilslick are no
less stained by rainbows
than the rose windows in the eyes of
the most famous, beatified cathedrals.
Do you see the ruby-throated
hummingbird at the larkspur,
the maggot eating the meat of your
tongue like a sacred syllable
you could never pronounce for fear of
choking on the name of death?
One’s not enlightened and the other
ignorant. One doesn’t
cancel the other one out by adding a
blessing to a curse,
an acid to a base, Gomorrah to
Gethsemane, to nullify the bad
with the good like a pillar of salt the
wind doesn’t waste time on
sowing the seeds of life like rapturous
wildflowers and apocalyptic blights.
Seeing deeply into the mystery of life
isn’t a matter
of choosing one eye over another. What
discipline has to be mastered
to see a tree, a star, the moondog
haloing the detached retina of the moon?
Life doesn’t summon you to a burning
bush like a fire extinguisher
to put the fireflies and chimney sparks
of insight out for fear
they might catch on. Look at how long
the field fires of the stars
have been burning like revelation in
the ashes of a waterclock of urns.
There’s no lost skeleton the light’s
looking for to unlock
the keyholes of your pupils to open the
door to the darkened room
where you live like a recluse behind
your eyelids like a rose-bud
that’s going to bloom any day now if
you die faithfully long enough
trying to second-guess a cultivated
vision of what’s just outside your window.
What’s the difference between a
deluded mujahdin
and a corporately funded cosmologist
trying to tailor
the desert of stars in the hourglass
wombs they were born in
to the mirages they kill professionally
like scholars in the name of?
There’s no holy war between the
silence and the solitude of what you see
when the mystery of life opens the eyes
in your blood
to deepen your ignorance of the
ineffable by suggesting in secret
there’s no need for the visionary to
transcend the visual
like a moonrise on the waters of life
it’s reflected on,
no need for the fish to ask what’s
true or false, far shore or near,
about the oceans of wary sentience it’s
swimming in.
When was the last time a dream ever
lied to anyone?
How often have you known a nightmare to
tell the truth?
I look at Vega in the constellation of
the Lyre in the summertime
and I see the birth of a fossil of
light. In the winter,
walking brutal country roads, I’m the
altar of a sacrificial mailbox
shot full of black holes like rusty
stigmata without a return address.
I can smell the incense of loveletters
burning in the flames
at the autos da fe of old roses
martyred by venerable heresies of the heart
and like a river as it approaches the
sea from the wellspring
of inspiration on the mountain top it’s
all one continuity of flowing
like autumn leaves and cherry blossoms
on the same mindstream.
Haven’t you ever felt there was
something draconian about butterflies
and pellucid about crows ever since
their feathers changed from white to black?
The lustre of the empty stone, the
jewel in the eye of the ore.
The bright vacancy, dark abundance of
our quantum entanglement
with the full moons and eclipses of
what’s arrayed before us here
like a hidden secret that wanted to be
known in the stillness
of a liberated heart alone with the
Alone walking beside a river
running like a starmap of ancient sky
burials and resurrections of the mind
as the Pleiades go down dancing into
exile like homefires on the waters of life.
PATRICK WHITE
