EVEN THE TINIEST WILDFLOWER IN THE WOOD
Even the tiniest wildflower in the wood
tangled in the shadows of the grass,
smaller than an insect, a lonely
diminutive yellow,
five sounding flukes of pygmy whales
for petals,
is a starmap to the whole universe
shining back at itself, the invisible
made manifest,
by swimming against the current of the
light.
It’s just as much the obstructions in
life
that show you the way, the lost key,
chance, hope,
the door you’re only allowed to live
on one side of,
the tree root of the willow in the
garden
you’re chopping at like the tentacle
of an octopus
with a double-bladed axe that reminds
you of the moon
as it is the lanterns of the random
fireflies
that light your way through the woods
like a chaos of lamp posts and guiding
angels.
Maybe you could stand the tentacles
straight up
like the towers of the hollyhocks and
larkspur
and let them blend in with the rest of
the garden?
But that’s a little too wily and wise
for me to propose.
And the way you frustrate yourself like
whitewater
in a torrent of apple-bloom from the
spring run-off
is as long a mile of the journey as the
last three lightyears
of flowing freely around the angel in
your way
with a gravitational third eye that
bends you its way
like Jacob’s hip and Vulcan’s limp,
and you’re
mythically inflated enough to begin to
suspect
you’re a symbolically crippled
sacrificial king or queen
of the Waxing Year. Even the Boy Scouts
have forgotten
how to tie themselves into labyrinthine
knots
the way you do when you’re not
weaving snakepits
into flying carpets like M-theories out
of
the stringy wavelengths of
guitar-shaped black holes.
Poetic dismemberments are more a way of
the one
returning to the many like a river
plunging off a precipice
into millions of gleaming eyes, each a
window
in a palace of water with a star for a
candle inside,
than body parts planted like the ashes
of your sister
in a rose garden that blooms for that
purpose alone,
though their visions seem heavy and sad
as the bells of abysmal solitudes that
have passed
like an era of individuals into the
transmorphic anonymity
of a Meta-Conservation of Data
Principle
that archives every iris and pixel of
your digital fingerprints,
if you were born a poet, you’ll
always be that stranger
sitting beside you in the shadows
around a fire
telling ghost stories with narrative
themes of cedar smoke.
Dynastic Dionysiac plenipotentiaries of
the wild grape vines.
Maenads. Muses. Valkyries bobbing for
prophetic skulls
in the Aegean like apples off the coast
of Lesbos.
Everybody sings along with Sappho after
upstaging
their Orphic voice coach. It’s the
natural order of things.
Full moons of the mistletoe and dusty
blue planets
with wine-dark seas. Barring the F
chords on your
lyres and turtle-shells, capos like
starlings on the staves
of the hydrolines strung out like a
power grid
of bird nets and dreamcatchers in the
palm of your hand.
You want to glimpse the quick of it,
don’t drive yourself crazy
trying to understand. Just dance to the
rush of the river
over the rocks like castanets. Love
disastrously, with no regrets.
PATRICK WHITE
