THIS STRANGE VASTNESS RIPENING IN MY HEART

THIS STRANGE VASTNESS RIPENING IN MY HEART

This strange vastness ripening in my heart

that makes me ache with sorrow like a farewell

to the waterbirds in autumn though it’s only

nearing August, and the loons and the kingfishers

are far from gone. And the stars are all wrong. Why?

A new start or the beginning of giving up?

Life in death. Death in life. Fire in the tomb.

Water in the womb, or is it solely human

to go on failing your way into the unknown

trying to make a gift of a gift and all you’ve got for ribbons

are a few shadows cast like words and longing

for the mysterious silence, the unseen spirit

that bids you leave your eyes in the doorway

and enter a wholly disarming space where

the nothing you’ve become can overhear

in the formidable distance, reminiscent echoes

of who you thought you were. And a mindstream

moving like a hidden nightcreek, a pageant of images

bleeding into one another like a watercolour

being creative about its tears. An evanescent chaos

tinged with moondogs and rainbows, all the homely eternities

of an intimacy with time that never makes a promise to anyone

it can’t break like a tree in a thunderstorm.

And there in the heartwood, a calendar of the springs

that have passed like ripples of rain, grail by grail

because what makes the things of life seem holy

appears to be that they share in being as lost among us

as we are to ourselves among them. Comes a thought

like the silhouette of a bat against the moon

and then it’s gone again as if the seeing of anything

goes way beyond what it means. Gapes with significance

because of its passing away. And where within us,

for all the remoteness of our solitude could we hold it

like water and sand in our hands, without limiting

the openness we pass through like waterclocks

in a labyrinth of locks that may raise our spirits a moment

like a lifeboat on the horizon, but as things approach

three bells are ringing all’s well like a nightwatch

on a shipwreck that lost its sense of buoyancy

the seventh time down? As if the hour had marked its place

in the gills of a purple passage in its last entry in its logbook

with a golden hook like a question mark between

the first and last parentheses of its waning and waxing crescents.

PATRICK WHITE

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

No lightning from my cloud of unknowing,

now that this season of storms has passed.

Occasionally tears, but a harvest of stars

shining like Spica in the hand of Virgo

and all these dazzling insights into nothing

I hang like wild grapes and chandeliers

above the dance floor where I press the wine.

Not meditative, but darkly absorbed, who knows,

maybe even void bound, drowned or lost,

I’m not trying to seek a way out of the abyss.

Whatever it is, I accept it as it is. Most of the time.

And when I don’t and I’m stuck like a wishbone

in the throat of a nightbird, even my dissonance

is included in the background cosmic hiss.

So I say you don’t have to be attuned to it

to be in harmony with it, and if you’ve gone astray

or been misdirected, maybe that’s a course correction

you didn’t have to make, because all rivers

are flowing the right way to the sea, and as

for the picture-music you hear like a hidden mindstream

talking in a dream in a dark wood, you don’t

always have to hit the right note to be a great singer.

Or name me a bird that sings its heart out off key.

I can feel the stillness moving under my feet

like a road, a mountain path, a rogue orbit,

or Curiosity like a wandering scholar on Mars,

a vagantes, a Druidic refugee intervening in the War of the Worlds

and a machine this time looking for the Garden of Eden

like an alien mirage in the desert, fossils of Dilmun,

the middens of Shangra La, microbes in the begging bowls

of a new myth of origin, where Nasa is God,

and a robot is the first of a whole new race of Martian nomads.

The silence speaks to me in thousands of estranged voices

like leaves on the silver Russian olives moved

by the spirit of the wind tampering with their sterling currency

to lament their passage at the approach of autumn,

though there are only a few flames beginning

to immolate the trees like heretics that had to

bring their own stakes to their auto da fe.

O how easy it would be when I’m down here alone

to slip into this river like an unobtrusive sacred syllable

into a long-running conversation, even if

it’s nothing but spiritual slang, and yet be satisfied

I’ve had my say, I’ve added my voice

like a bird in a birch grove, whether

anything alive tonight answers it or not.

As a holy book said once on a bus, sitting beside me,

when one jewel is marked they’re all marked

indelibly as stars and eyes and planets,

and there’s a Conservation of Data Principle

in this universe, even in the heart of a black hole,

that says once here, here forever

in this great spiritual lost and found

that can read the whole history of life

in the mustard seeds that yellow the fields around here,

or the stars that do much the same

in a commotion of atmospherically aberrated colours,

burning with the urgency of mystic details

being whispered into everyone’s ear

as if each were a hidden secret of God

that wished to be known and expressed itself flawlessly

like a master of mantric wavelengths

or a mute with an overbite pointing out constellations

and the last of the wildflowers, a signage of light

reciting the fathomless poetry that lives in a name,

ignoring all the fancy lanterns in the windows

of the houses of the zodiac, to follow the flame

of whatever light you’ve been given to go by,

wherever it leads, through the star fields or the cul de sac

of a satoric eclipse with no light at the end of the tunnel

as the only way of ever prodigally coming back.

PATRICK WHITE