LESS AND LESS THE HEART ENGAGED
Less and less the heart engaged, though
not dispassionately,
with emotion intensifying into form,
and the elaboration
of its shadows into a sign language of
the light.
More a clarification of time, how the
golden apple,
about to fall, looks back on the
blossoms of the spring,
and sees how everything has already
been achieved
by the beginning blooming like a
tentative leaf of foxfire
in the ashes of the stars that cram
their urns
into every cell of the body to honour
the creative detritus
of the light all things are the
embodiment of.
How gently the stars open our eyes to
them
amazed at how much tenderness can be
expressed
by a dragon at a distance sage enough
to know
life is a function of its shining
blindly into the dark.
And we’re all trying to second-guess
like children
anticipating gifts, what’s behind the
tent flaps
on the midways of our blazing that
drowns the night out
with the white noise of our mind. The
careerism
of being alive, the lucky throw against
the odds
that wins the prize that mythically
deflates the carnie
as he hands it to you like the best of
a bad situation,
happy to see you gone like an offence
to his opportunism.
How many have wandered off a path that
doesn’t exist
except they make it, rogue planets
across the starfields,
leaving their wake like a green shadow
in the wavelengths
of tall grass that soaks their shoes as
if they were crying
and there were seeds in their tears
like the waters of life.
Heretics convinced they’re blessed by
an inviolable freedom
to dispossess themselves of the
conventional fruits
of the tree of knowledge by which it is
known.
Do you know the name of the emerald
star in the core
of the apple when you slice it open
with a Sanskrit blade
of consciousness, which loses its edge
the moment
it goes looking for something that
exists outside of it
to see where the light’s coming from.
Easy enough
to return to the ivy-smothered gates of
Eden
but there are no more gods in the
garden, nor demonized reptiles
the angels have to raise burning swords
against to keep out
of the no fly zone above the exiles and
refugees
fleeing the wrath of Nobodaddy like the
sock puppet
the manipulative wear like the
deathmasks of their unmollified humanity.
There’s a dynamic that’s missing
from our creative solitude,
alone with so much beauty it hurts our
eyes sometimes
just to behold it and know there’s no
one to share it with
but strangers just as amazed as we are
at the lack of mirrors,
that there is no more mystery behind it
when you peel back space
than there is in who we are, though
only the dangerous
know for sure. You can make a housewell
of this, or
you can risk drowning in your own
watershed like a diving bell
crushed in the depths like a coke can,
looking
for an ancient shipwreck that might
give you a clue
to where you’re going, as if the
truth were still
the prophetic skull of a cave-dweller
buried in fire.
Should we dance to the music in the
voice
of the life of meaning inspired by the
riot of its absence,
and call that liberty, or submit to the
slavers of a police state
with a golden chain linked by a
consensus of selective orbits
we’re allowed to revolve in without
arousing
astronomical catastrophes of petty
suspicion?
Should we trust death more than we do
life?
Turn over custodianship of our
indefensible humanity
to evil clowns that laugh like
lobbyists for the rich
at all the wrong things? What’s
impotence if not the habit
of letting someone feed you lotuses or
bread and circuses
in a repressively tolerant garbage-can?
Little doubt it’s easy enough for the
light to be bent
by the gravitational eyes that warp the
spaces
we live in like cameras born without
eyelids
keeping watch on us in the weird belief
they’re keeping a prison population
safe from themselves,
though they plead the focus of their
seeing is fraternally pious.
Our children’s children will have
mastered the shallow art
of seeing with their eyes, but how
rarely, and what
a life of pain will pursue the
visionary who actually
sees through them as if light were
merely the key
to the magnificent gravegoods of our
imagination
long after our children have forgotten
how to see in us
what they’re not looking for in
themselves.
Waterclocks pouring into the available
dimensions
of an empty future, for the sake of the
unborn,
let us carry the seeds of metaphors
that will bloom
of their own accord in the starmud of
the nascent imaginations
of our children so we don’t lose
touch with them
precisely when they need us the most to
be human.
To share the scars and shadows of our
maculate conception
of ourselves, the way we’ve been
invariably defeated
by the best that’s in us as a protest
against death
that hasn’t suffered enough to
understand
the genuine transcendence of a symbolic
gesture
that took its hands away from its face
as if the sun
weren’t ashamed to shine on it in the
full light of a long day
of wandering where we will by the river
to include
the wild irises some bush hog has cut
to ribbons
in our transmorphic gaze, as it raises
the unlikelihood
of the battered stalks of its budding
colours up
like the torches of two blue-white,
ultra violet flames,
to a suggestion of the Pleiades to
bloom like a paintbrush in the face
of the sword that slashes at the beauty
of its freedom of expression
like the spirit of the living word to
exceed the bounds
of all plausible definitions of itself
that limit
the sacred syllable of disobedience
caught in its throat
like the blue-blood of an aristocratic
nightbird
bleeding out into the future of longing
in our children’s eyes
like the ancient anthem of what’s
heroically perennial
about humans defying the self-imposed
imperatives
of their own tragic existence, by
blooming nonetheless
like stars renewing the innocence of
our children’s sense of wonder,
our dark abundance shining into the
bright vacancy
of the unknown spaces their faces are
slowly emerging from
like moonrise over the burgeoning
mindscapes
of sleeping hills dreaming aerially
like fruitive familars
into the blue distance and intimately
human shadows
of our inheritors tasting the same
stars in their seeing
that lit up ours when we bothered to
look up like wild irises
that refused to be laid low along the
shores of our mindstreams
that insisted like water in its
outflowing upon
the miraculous follies of an
incontravertible life of awe.
PATRICK WHITE
