POOR LITTLE OCEAN THAT’S ONLY GOT ONE
WAVE
Poor little ocean that’s only got one
wave.
Do the tides laugh at you in the bays
of the moon,
do the seagulls shriek to see you’ve
only
got one eyelid per eye? A mere wink of
providence?
A flower closing up at night, a candle
in bud
that never quite breaks into flame
like the raving silks of the poppies
it dreams about dancing on its grave?
In the penumbral shadow of time you’re
a sunami on a sundial, the fin of a
mountain
on a lunar flood plain of oceanic
consciousness.
The light tattoos the firmament on
every
single drop of you, thousands of
constellations
you’ve never even heard of, vows of
love
you have yet to keep, and in
every tear of your third eye crying
itself
to sleep at night, the hidden paths of
zodiacs
waiting for you to firewalk them like
the sun.
All in one or one in all. Downpour or
rain drop, vapour or glacier, inside
every experience resides its opposite,
so sometimes a few can be too much
and too much not enough. As myriad fish
in the sea, so the wavelengths that
arrive
like prophets in the belly of the whale
from deep in space. You can view the
whole
of the tapestry, every theme of the
vision
in place or you can unravel it like
the flying carpet you’re meditating
on
thread by thread, labyrinth within
labyrinth,
like the strand of a stranger’s hair
on the shoulder of a beautiful woman
with more faces and phases of the moon
than she has veils to cover them.
My own eyes the most revealing of
starmaps
I’ve ever followed into the dark, I
don’t need
an astrolabe or an abacus to count the
nightskies
that have sweetened the translucency of
those jewels
like diamonds on the surface of the
waters of life
whose flowing can’t be cut like an
umbilical cord.
Being is Seeing with all your senses on
nightwatch at once,
the full palette of the rainbow, the
burning bridge
plunging into your mindstream like one
wing
of a bird into its opposite to be
reborn as a dragon
that embodies the serpent as well as
the dove.
An alloy of peace and war. Dragons
teeth sown
around the golden fleece with
water-gilded horns.
A seventeenth century rose with
medieval thorns.
Taboo as a sign of the value you put on
your blessings
when you know as well as an ocean
they were meant to be shared as the
only way
you could keep their munificence alive
like a new moon on the tongue of an
oyster shell
that gapes open-mouthed at what a
little irritation
has brought forth like a virgin after a
crone.
In a crowd I’m irrevocably alone. On
my own
I can hear the lyrics of the mermaids
like a seance of hormones deep within
me
urging me back as if disaster had
somehow
grown nostalgic for the ice-berg that
sent
the Titanic to the bottom of its
subconscious
like a man buried alive at sea in a
iron coffin,
counting on his Zen buoyancy---Seven
times down,
eight times up. Such is life.---to
resurface
like a seal pup through an air hole on
an ice floe
with the heart of a killer whale and
the appetite
of a great white shark in hunting
season
when it’s time to cull the humans for
what they do
to the innocent like feral pigs tusking
the earth
like a wound that never closes however
it scars
like the moon ploughing the Fertile
Crescent.
PATRICK WHITE
