I
FEEL THE THORNS OF THE ROSE MAKING INKWELLS OF MY EYES
I
feel the thorns of the rose making inkwells of my eyes.
It’s
me that hurts. But without meaning to,
I’m
bleeding for everyone. A watershed of blood and tears.
A
reservoir of pain. Not all my own, I drink
before
anyone like a hummingbird, or a canary in the mine,
to
make sure it isn’t toxic. No goat skull in a well
of
rotten water. No blood on the horns of the moon.
What
a disgrace it is to be a human sometimes.
What
a sorrow when your heart wobbles like a drunk bell
and
there are perturbations and precessions in your orbit
it’s
hard to explain except as the flawed configuration of a dream
with
your waking life, though they’re both just two waves
of
the same sea of awareness, feathers and scales.
Oxymoronic
maple keys vertiginous as Sufis
at
the crossroads of everywhere and here. My heart
is
a bone-box full of elegies for Arctic swans
shrinking
like ice-bergs from global warming.
And
I’m not as mindless in love as I should be,
though
a muse is still pure oxygen distilled
from
a thousand undiscovered plants in the Amazon
as
beguiling as the ghosts of the fragrances
along
the Perfume Trail. And sometimes, I swear,
I
can smell the weeping of wild blackberries
eclipsed
by the shadows of voracious crows
pecking
out their eyes like dark jewels
in
a crown of thorns. And there’s a feeling
with
too low a frequency for words like the afterbirth
of
an orphaned universe that resonates within me
like
the poignancy of the embrace of one
of
the saddest graces of compassion limning its tears
with
a star’s worth of beauty glowing through the clouds.
And
goodness arises within me like a loaf of bread
left
out to cool on an August windowsill, and I’d
break
it into as many pieces as my heart to share it
if
only for one instant, with the hungry and the suffering
as
I’ve heard several people did inconceivably even in Auschwitz,
just
to make things better a little bit, if I could,
though
I feel like fog trying to put out a forest fire,
knowing
among the selfish and indifferent,
a
gift is a kind of minority protest
that
you have to keep an eye on before it gets out of hand.
Reality’s
just a truce people make with the way things seem
and
what they don’t understand, a consensus
of
poll-watching dilettantes who average out the crucials
in
advance of random happenstance. Perhaps.
Reality
can be any kind of copulative verb it wants,
The
chimerical fire is whatever you imagine it to be,
but
what it does, whether you agree or disagree,
is
what moves me to underground rivers of tears
that
flare up like the pale fountains and grails of the morning glory
to
want to put it out, snuff it like a black candle,
or
smother it in a pillow of its own smoke.
To
die, yes, the wildflowers can do that better than us,
and
the animals enter death as if they were observing
the
protocol of an instinctive nobility greater than ours
but
to die, to suffer and die inexplicably, to see
the
labour of billions of light years of stars, enduring
extinction
after extinction to express their shining in us
as
if we were the content of the message
they
sent on ahead of themselves and we can read
so
much so intimately like the ancestry of the universe into it
like
a child’s eyes, or the luster of a lover’s hair
in
a moonrise, or the second innocence of an old man
who
smiled upon us because he knew he was younger
than
we were, and the return journey
was
better than the first because from cradle to grave,
he
knew the beginning walks with us all the way
like
a star through the leafless trees
that’s
following us home at night down
one
long, shapeshifting road of shadows and dreams
to
one particular gateless gate that unlocks us from our chains.
To
die in ignorance of why, though we guess convincingly.
To
love deeply and see what we’ve cared for,
unspared
and squandered as if time had no more use for it
and
there was nothing rare or precious that wasn’t rendered
more
fatally vulnerable than a bubble in a world of thorns
for
the cherishing of it. In the brevity of our becoming
who
could ever claim they were who
they
were supposed to be in the eyes of the mystery
of
what we’re doing here in the first place
trying
to wake up in time to find out why we doubt
our
own presence sufficiently to labour a lifetime
to
love the unknown well enough like a stranger in passing
we’ve
never met, to enlighten our disappearance?
What
doorways of farewell must linger in us yet
for
all the graves we’ve already filled
with
everything we’ve ever loved, autumn after autumn,
like
wild grapes or a waterclock of hearts,
each
trying to fill another’s bucket of emptiness
with
the rush of their own blood
like
the emergency exit out of a burning theater
featuring
a seasonal re-run of the lies
we
tell ourselves in the dark to make it through another night?
Yet
here we are, like it or not. Unborn. Unperishing.
Delivered
and flawed. Mortality longing for eternity
like
a darkness it’s already the ore of waiting to be refined
like
stars emerging in the night, flowers
from
the starmud of the earth and though
we
have unbelievable conceptions of ourselves
that
are capable of breathing in the light
of
mystic atmospheres one planet isn’t enough to cling to,
most
of us still candle back to the earth we arose from
like
weather balloons with the tail of a comet between our legs.
As
a playwright looking back in anger once said.
Poor
bears. Poor squirrels. Compassion
kisses the burn.
We
get lost in ourselves looking for the grails of better days.
The
secret’s out in the open which is the best place to hide,
if
you had a mind to, in this spiritual lost and found.
Now
you see it. Now you don’t. It sees you.
And
you draw the blind. But the sunflowers
turn
with the sun, and the waterbirds wait for the moonrise
and
in the autumn of our lives, the flowers are extinguished
like
the blue fires of the wild irises along the Tay River,
and
there’s a scent of smoke in the air
that
makes your soul weep for the evanescence of life
and
how there’s even a palpable beauty in the passage
of
the fallen leaves among our gravestones
that’s
always a prelude to the great unknowns ahead
that
can’t shake the habit of haunting us like a ghost
from
the future, summoned to this seance of now
by
a mind reader channelling the wavelengths of the stars
light
years before either they or we will even know we’re dead.
PATRICK
WHITE
