TO ASPIRE SO HIGH YOU’RE OUT OF TOUCH
WITH YOURSELF
To aspire so high you’re out of touch
with yourself,
the dying sacrifice that’s lost
perspective of its exits,
your mind, a comet on a hyperbolic
flyby of the sun.
A shot in the dark. Whether it was
lucky or not,
you took it, you slowly squeezed the
trigger of the moon,
a portent, a sign, a beautiful night,
an engaging view
of the river and its willow, a flash of
insight
with no recoil to echo like a mantra
among the hills,
in a perfect moment of silence, in a
gentle colloquy
of lightning and fireflies, life was
more over
than anything death had ever tried to
attain
on the rungs of the bones of the shakey
ladders
the skeletons use to climb out of their
graves,
chakra by chakra, scarlet runners of
snake fire
setting their staves like rafters in
the house of life alight.
The dragon cradled in the fledgling
ashes of its pyre.
A cosmic egg trying to break through
the down
of another grey day of the
extraordinarily mundane.
Unheralded. A childhood unmothered by
time. Insane.
Not two. So no one ever there to make a
third.
No shadow standing in the wings of the
stillness,
the silence, or the empty stage of my
one-act solitude.
The sky is there, but I’m the famous
disappearing waterbird
that migrates circumpolarly north of
nowhere
a compass needle could point out the
stars to
like a lightning rod with confidence it
won’t
burn out its nerves jumping its
neuronic synapses
without a timing chain to synchronize
the firing squad.
I can tell by the shadows I’ve cast
behind me
like sundials how many times I’ve
peeked
through my blindfold to catch a glimpse
of death
as if I were consulting the oracular
ashes
of irreplaceable starmaps of the
inconceivable
in the fire-pits of the Library of
Alexandria’s
accidental cremation every fall when
inspiration ignites
the leaves of the flammable maple
groves
and everything is ageless as a
perennial farewell
wearing an expiry date like a
wildflower in its lapel
to commemorate the eternal recurrence
of autumn stars over the smokeless
chimneys of Auschwitz.
Yellow Capella’s broken horn of
plenty when Almathea
suckled Zeus, and the kids weren’t
boiled alive
in matriarchal milk unlike the
fratricides of Rome’s
procreatrix wolf mother howling in her
tears for blood
through a thousand reichs and gulags of
violated starmud.
O Osip Mandelstam, where are you now?
Are you still
writing somewhere underground like a
rootfire
flowering in the eyes of your
tormentor’s demented gene pools
as if you could take the muck and
detritus of the lowest places
and transmutate them into something
hard and cold and beautiful
as a waterlily of swords blooming like
a vow together
to raise up one flower, one star, one
inviolable word more
than the tyranny of your disappearance
could silence
or work to death? It’s the trivial
pursuit of sublime energies
to entertain lesser goals, until they
begin to focus
like gravitational eyes on bending the
light like a destiny
that effortlessly unfolds like a
posthumous loveletter
to the human spirit that candles, and
gutters, shudders
in each of our hearts like the slow
fireworks of an evening fire
on a cold night blazing with Russian
sunflowers the dark
couldn’t put out in an unheated
barracks that failed to freeze
the ink in your pen, or the moon that’s
symbolic
of the madness and the wisdom of the
rest of us,
like Luna moths come to the light in
your broken window in winter.
PATRICK WHITE
