MUSIC ON THE WIND EVEN IN THE ASHES OF
THE SKY BURIAL
Music on the wind even in the ashes of
the sky burial
of a burnt guitar. And I’ve heard
dragons immolating themselves
in the lairs of their prophetic skulls
singing in the flames
to shepherd moons that martyred them
like muses
that came down off the mountain like
waterfalls
unveiling whole new modes of
inspiration eye to eye
with stars in the tresses of the
willows in the valleys of death.
So many blossoms on the circuitous
staves
of the apple-tree boughs suddenly
giving voice to birds
or scattered at the feet of a poet
who’s just found the right key
to the words of the picture-music
leading him astray
to fruition. You can plant seeds,
semeni sectores,
in the neo-cortical furrows of a newly
ploughed brain,
that might root and grow if the crows
don’t spot them first
and your starmud doesn’t die of
thirst drinking mirages
from the unused lifeboats of a dead
language lost at sea,
but one intuition of a firefly on a
starless night
and you can harvest the universe like
Spica
in the siloes of Virgo, unmasking the
dark abundance
of a thousand lunar goddesses shining
all at once,
each of their voices accented by the
patois of the earth.
How many watersheds there are under the
eyelids
of a single tear making its way to a
sea of sorrows
with a taste of stars in its mouth like
wild irises
that bloom along the shores of rivers
in the night
bluer than cremations of hydrogen
burning to create
the universe again and again and again
out of the sacred syllables of its own
ashes.
O thresher take care not to reap the
cornflowers of the Pleiades
when they appear within the sweep of
your gathering powers
or you’ll blight the wheat with
Eleusinian ergot
that will initiate you into the
mysteries of life you forgot
like a bad mushroom trip in the
violated shrines
of your heart and mind, when you fell
upon the choir
like a talon of the moon in the war
bonnet of a great horned owl.
The wolf howls like a wound to heal
itself. The mouth
of a human resonates like a cave that
echoes
the ancient silence of a dream grammar
sweeter than life
and deeper than death buried under the
hearthstones
of fires that burned out a hundred
thousand years ago.
Can’t you hear the nightbirds singing
in the woods at night,
light years of longing in the eras of
their voices
embodying the dead in their
transmigratory vehicles
to follow the herds of the stars
wherever they lead
like nocturnal themes of life dancing
around
the ashes of their aubades laid like
lilaceous urns
in shallow graves with the firepits of
Stonehenge on their chest?
You won’t find many soothsayers in
the truncated ellipses
of creative writing classes learning to
write with scalpels
in the surgical theatres of collegiate
autopsies,
but if you listen like a mountain to
your own echoes
you can hear the liberated shrieks of
an avalanche
of gravestones rolling away from their
tombs
like an asteroid belt trying to get the
inside out
like gnostic gospels dreaming
docetically
of lamps in the niches of occult
cathedrals
that saw holy ghosts rising from
apparitions
of boundary stones in the illimitable
dark
like spirits of smoke rekindled from
the fires of life
that never go out like candles and
fireflies alive
in the eyes of the stars that thrive by
never turning their backs
on the enlightened visions of the night
hidden in their own light.
I don’t impugn the night with my own
darkness
and when has ageing ever had anything
to do with time?
How strange it must be not to live a
dangerous life
or shudder blamelessly before the
immensities
of your own soul. What would you have
to risk of any worth
if you’ve never suffered the follies
and disappointments
of being yourself in this masked
ballroom dance of life
where the shadows of the music eclipse
the chandeliers?
You have fears? You labour to unravel
the knots
in your heartwood without getting bit
by the snakepit
of your own irradiant wavelengths
fraying like neuronic synapses?
Look straight into the eyes of the
worst without
turning into moonrock and remind the
Medusa
in her crone phase despite her
oviparous attitude toward life
without wings, a snake’s just a chip
off the shoulder of a dragon
standing before her like a flamethrower
that can fly
to its own rescue without being
feathered like Icarus on a white horse.
Swallow your terrors whole like
shepherd moons and cosmic eggs
to bring the rain on to keep the
watersheds of mercy full.
And as I’ve said many times to the
suicidal butterflies in my mouth
if life hasn’t got a guarantee then
even death’s a gamble.
Effaced by a black hole do what the
stars do and jump
like a gravedigger into the bone box of
what’s unknown
by your own singularity until you shine
a light on it
like a firefly through a portal to the
other side of your eyes
as if it were your seeing, and not the
sunrise that made sure
dawn was always breaking somewhere in
the world.
You want to write?You want to live as
if to live
were still a noble endeavour in pursuit
of an earthly excellence
that’ effortlessly attained by
failing at it, don’t
keep the shadows of life out of your
work, or exorcise
your dragons to devote your dead air
space to the cultivation
of butterfly farms. Get down and dirty
in the starmud
under your fingernails like tiny
fertile crescents
and don’t despise the starstruck
savages who are always
the first to give birth to the seed
beds of civilization.
What could it matter if you steal fire
from lightning
or the gods as long as the roots of the
tree of life are burning
as above so below, whether you’re
galactic or quantumly atomistic
about your event horizons. And don’t
assume you’re as Luciferian
as the morning star because you brought
a matchbook
to guide the sun to the same
enlightenment path you’re on.
Go off road waywardly and cut a
contrail of your own
knowing even these scars of light will
dissipate vaporously
like a dragon disappearing into the
evanescence of the sky,
like the spiral arm of the Milky Way,
like an electron jumping orbitals,
but for a moment that can last a
lifetime, the whole universe,
or the face of God, if you prefer, him
or her, were lit up by a flash of insight
into the original nature of love we’re
all creating in the name of.
PATRICK WHITE
