I SHALL NOT MISTAKE THE SILENCE

I SHALL NOT MISTAKE THE SILENCE

I shall not mistake the silence

of a small town on a winter night

when only the cold stars

work the nightshift of the lightless windows

for the mordancy of a ruined bell.

I will not fletch the arrowhead of the kingfisher

in its own feathers to strike it down

as if life were merely the art of knowing

how to use others against themselves.

I will not drive

the first crescent of the waxing moon

like a tusk into war with the waning heart of the last

for forgetting where it came from

and where it must go to die.

But I remember what Muhammad said

and the early Muslims under Omar

the second caliph of Islam took to heart,

the angels won’t visit a town at four in the morning

if anyone in it went to bed hungry.

Lack of bread was a sin against the whole community

if you kept the fact to yourself

when every door was knocked upon and asked,

so as not to deprive the people of the angels’ blessing.

And they felt this for real

not in the half imitational touristy way we do

as if we were just passing through town

looking for tea and antique butter churns

we could buff our coke in

as soon as we got to Peterborough

or Havelock, to pick up the go-train to Toronto.

They didn’t horde their lack of anything.

But now we’re all standing in line

shoulder to shoulder with angels at the food bank

trying to second-guess who it is we should thank

if there’s anyone to thank at all.

And you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone

who went to sleep tonight in this small town

who wasn’t hungry for something

they’d be ashamed to admit to their neighbours.

And since the angels have mingled with the daughters of men

and Enkidu has lost the ability to talk to the animals

and Gilgamesh lost his one organic chance

of shedding one skin for another

like a waterclock on the moon

to an opportunistic serpent

who took advantage of him

while he was catching his breath,

and thereby rendered those

closest to the earth immortal and not us,

I’m going to crunch through the snow

like I’m walking on eggs through a field

in a clearing among the quiescent pines

on the highest hill on the Scotch Line

just before you get to Westport

and as indefensibly human, fallible, and brief as I am

compared to the lifespans of the stars

and the rocks in these fields

that broke the tooth of the plough

and the spirit of the ploughman

for thinking it could dislodge and wound them

like the Fertile Crescent

when even the glaciers tried but couldn’t,

I’m going to sit here on a fallen tree and wait

for the stars to divulge the esoteric teachings

of their nocturnal perspective on life.

But I’m not going to impugn the night air

as sharp and unfeeling as a diamond cutter’s eye

for its lack of angels

or excoriate the frightening absence

of any explanation as to why

all we’ve been left with

to show for the centuries we’ve laboured

in those unpropitious star fields

or these underfoot with the dead

in the cold-hearted cemeteries and fields around Perth

to make the earth bring forth its bounty

is nothing but fools’ gold in the sky’s dead pan eyes.

Now you see it.

Now you don’t.

Like me among the living.

And those who aren’t.

Empty spaces between the stars

like frames that have had their pictures cut out

like the bad parts of constellations that used to hang there

blind-folded face to the wall with their backs turned

to a firing squad of fireflies.

I can tell by how wrecked the pines are

even though the moon is applying itself like a poultice

to their fractures and wounds,

that the wind’s really put them through it this time

and that life is grave and violent and serious.

You can poeticize the facts

but picking up the skull of a baby racoon

like a moon rock that reminds you of the paintings

of Georgia O’Keeffe

and a woman you once lived with

who was deeply influenced by her work,

you can deny, distract, or abstract yourself

anyway you want for awhile

but sooner than later it hits home

that this small animal,

this empty nugget of bone

was once such as you

who felt the bewildered miracle of being alive

to sense it could turn into a curse at any moment

to make things cruelly and abundantly clear

wonder’s no more of an excuse

in the eyes of the uncompromising

unarticulated spontaneity of its laws

than ignorance is.

And you realize

how futile and twisted

the wildflowers seem in the snow,

and how life keeps blowing smoke in death’s eyes

like warm breath on the cold night air,

a gust of stars, a ghost or two,

the million silk seeds of the milkweed,

and the terrible finality that confronts the temporal

with every breath, every step we take.

From the moment anything’s born

even its own afterbirth can turn on it.

And what makes it ambivalently worse

is that’s it’s beautiful being here.

The stars, the juniper,

and all the little tracks that radiate

like aberrant lifelines out of them,

the groundwillow, the snow, moonlight

on the last gasp of leaves on the dead aspen,

the eerie wailing of a young porcupine

that isn’t used to the solitude

and climbs a tree to go off intermittently

like an air raid siren that isn’t sure of itself,

and won’t know what there really is to be afraid of

until it’s too late to evade it,

and not least of all nor different from these

the idea of angels not visiting a town

where anyone goes to bed hungry at night.

So could be a curse, could be a blessing

as an old Chinese boatman used to say,

and maybe this godless freedom

the angels don’t show up for anymore

is the greatest gift and grace of them all,

the third wing on the bird

that no one ever looks for,

the middle extreme of the immensity

that’s wholly open

to creative interpretation between us

like the dead souls in the bodies of Canada geese.

My eyes include the stars in their story

and the stars include my story in theirs.

Same with pioneers, baby racoons,

the moon among the wounded pines

making plaster casts

to mend their fractured limbs,

or that gathering of solitudes

along the narrative theme of a river

that makes for small towns like Perth

where everybody’s been talking for two centuries

about going somewhere else

as if their canoes were always half in

and half out of the water,

one cloven foot on Devil’s Rock

and the other stretched so far out over the Tay River

it thinks it’s got wings on its heels

and keeps trying to migrate with the water birds.

But with all the gates and locks,

canals, bridges, dams and waterwheels

you’d get the impression

Perth was running a prison for water

that’s been given a life sentence

without a chance of parole or appeal.

We’re better than beavers

at brainwashing water to go

wherever we want it to

even against its will.

No doubt a reflection of the temperament

of the first people to build in this place.

Make something in the vastness of this solitude

that was recognizably useful.

Build a town.

Turn the dangerous wilderness

with a weapon in its hand

into a tool everybody could use and understand.

The swords of retired British half-pay officers

into imperial plough shares

in the hands of Irish immigrants.

Giant insects of hay balers and iron rakes

rusting in the fields with horse faced tractors

like an extinct species slowly being engulfed

by the reclaimed starfields of the end times

returning to the wild as the wind

and maple saplings change

the expressions on their faces

to something more relaxed and reassured

than military, resourceful and precise.

Displaced people like me show up out of nowhere

And after they’ve stopped asking everyone

where this place is on a starmap of the multiverse

they begin to ask

who is this place

and it’s at that moment

the graves all over town

and those lost under maple leaves

along narrow trails deep in the woods

with the names of children on them

over by Black Creek

give up their dead like the sea

gives up a message in a bottle from the past.

And you can hear them gibbering in the birch leaves

silvered by the wind with excitement in the moonlight

as if they were all clapping hands in anticipation

of some big insight into what became of them

and of what they did and didn’t do.

It’s only fair when you’re finished

looking through the telescope

at how unimaginable it all is

to give the ghosts a chance

to look into their future as well

so they can see that you’re living what they did

story after story, death after death,

that the cones of the jack pines

still wait for a forest fire

to open their eyelids

even after twenty years of dreaming

to weep their seeds in the ashes of their urns.

So my big idea

around four o’clock on a Wednesday morning,

remembering that story about the angels

and not really caring

whether I sort the chaff from the grain,

the hungry from the fat,

the scales from the feathers,

thinking every good story

has its villain as well as its hero,

its black holes and its radiant star clusters,

its poison oak and its New England asters,

and that’s what makes

for the character development

of our place in the universe,

I’d add a spider thread

like the tiniest filament of a tributary sub-plot

to the main theme of a dreaming town

eleven miles away

and let it find its own way around

like a night creek flowing into deeper waters

where an intensely visual imagination

actually does things in the depths of reality

with the slightest of radical adjustments to its roots

that no one ever suspects

by the time the effects come into bloom.

I’m going to unspool my heart like a fire kite

caught up in the wind like one of Van Gogh’s stars

until it hovers like a flying saucer

where the angels used to appear over the town of Perth

and though I know I’m making a farce of myself

trying to live up to an enlightened legend

of the common humanity

of our most contagious emotions,

just for one clear night

like an impossible probability

I’m going to feather myself in fire

like a fact in the image of Icarus

and whether it’s real or not,

take an angel’s place,

and in its huge absence

bestow as many unconditional blessings

as I can get away with

under the eyelids of the sleeping town

like pine-cones sowing the fires of life

in the nurturing ashes of those

whose homely contribution

to the story at hand

is to know how to burn out

like a demonic poet

and hope somehow you got the job done

that no one who wasn’t

at least as half as mad as you could.

PATRICK WHITE

MYSTIC REGENCY

Blue hole in a swarm of afflicting emotion,

I cannibalize my own event horizons,

to turn off the glare of the lifelight

that boils my brain in delusional bleaches

that present themselves as the truth.

I have known nothing

but the fragility of a tolerable hell since I was born

so I am not fooled into believing

anyone stands on more than quicksand.

And yes, there are women and stars and flowers,

orchids in the shadow of an outhouse,

eclipses that draw the veils

off faces and hearts like shadows and eras,

gold in the bones of extraordinary people

who move like swans across the mind

easy in the grace and dignity of their excellence,

and sometimes, for brief islands of serenity

I am one of those, but only briefly

and only long enough for me to disallow myself

the luxury of thinking I’ve arrived anywhere.

If fireflies were once

the souls of unbaptized children, still-borns and embryos

flirting with the night for salvation, now

they’re the unbound abacus of joy

that has lost count of the days and nights

I’ve stood by myself before a winter window

and looked out into the darkness

and wondered if I am

what I seem to myself

or some other man

I’ve been looking for all these years

better than I am, more courageous,

able to absorb the bitter light

and sweeten it like wine. I can endure

the miseries and sorrows, I can act

when there is call to act, and I can see

into the dark corners

where the spiders age their poisons without malice,

and I can be a tree in the morning

just before moonset, and hear in every bird

the lonely bell of blood that rings like time

advancing the night with departure;

and feel the incredible onceness of being alive,

the igneous beauty of the black virgin

buried in the wound of my own mortality,

and the terrible longing that arises and wants her forever

knowing she’s unattainable and yet prefers this folly

over every other delirium of desire,

certain only of my own demise in the attempt

and the fanatical universe that decrees it

as if it were heresy to try,

but never, never in those depths

have I ever understood so much

as a hair on her head, not even

an eyelash of insight to show for all my agony, not

a word from her lips

for all that I have sung and seen of her,

that wasn’t a falling rose-petal, a kiss upon the skull

that gapes at her feet

like the cold stone

of a full October moon rising over

the lean fields, the empty silos

of my devoted desolation like a crown.

PATRICK WHITE

THE EARTH A MESSAGE

The earth a message in a blue bottle

someone threw into a desert of stars

for help,

I’m stranded on the island

of a single thought

in the galactic archipelagos

of a deconstructed myth of origin.

There is no myth.

There is no origin.

I am free to write what I want

in invisible ink

on virgin mirrors

in an indecipherable alphabet of stars

because every mouth

was first a bird of the void,

the echo of a scar

that wrote with a knife

how testing it was

to cut the throats of the yearling bells

that were slaughtered like apples.

This, too, is an eyelid of life,

a shedding of the peony,

the blue silk sheet of an atmosphere

pulled off a naked planet

that will die of exposure

in a blizzard of necrophiliac flashbulbs.

No one really wants

to be understood,

but for years I’ve laboured

in the shadows of profound delusions

to look upon every face

blossoming in the unkempt orchard

as the hidden eye

of a human divinity I was trying to uphold

like a pillar of cloud.

I wanted parity with angels,

I believed just to be born

was to be exalted to the ranks

of an heroic order

that had evolved out of

the embodiment of suffering,

the pain that was cast away

like the illegitimate afterbirth

of a silo full of thorns,

the swamp

that tendered a waterlily nevertheless

and a sky that wore its stars like campaigns,

and the warriors that had died

to be carried home

on the shields of their constellations.

I accorded to even the most wretched

the dignity that was due their pain

like a sword they had pulled

from the stone of their heart

or a straw from a loaf of bread

to see if it was cooked.

We were all nailed to the world

upside down,

the slow tar of a sacred agony

that was always a voice beyond

the shriek of the sayable,

the long scream of the silence

drunk on the silicon wines of glass grapes,

slumped like thunderclouds and junkmail

across the hills and thresholds

of our own unattainable event horizons.

I drank from the reflection

of my own humanity on the nightstream

and compassion came with insight

like the shadow of water in a dream,

a rag of blood

torn on the horn of the moon,

that we were all nothing more

than the brevity of a warm breath,

a fragrance of the void

it pulled from its sleeve like a guest bouquet.

And you can quote

your tables and chairs at me all you want,

but the soul of a human is a match

invited like a minor relative

to the death of stars,

that throws itself down on the coffin lid

in its moment of flaring

like the last memory

of a homeless flower,

and the gesture is enough

to fill the urns with light,

the wombs with embryonic wicks

already drunk on a night that shines

like the small house of a firely

in a blind abyss.

PATRICK WHITE

BORN BELOW

BORN BELOW

The rich will eat the poor like the krill of the sea

and grateful there is no real estate among the stars

flowering in the furrowed branches of the willow,

I stand in the backyard parking lot,

and look up with the wounded longing

of a man whose questions are older than his eyes,

knowing nothing will answer the agony

of being alive awhile to bear

this incredible burden of stars

to a grave that gapes without wonder, without sky, without light.

The night is a whisper of God to the dark minerals

composed in the vastness of space

to be humbled by the exaltations of time and mind.

Mercy and healing the radiant view

that expands like a universe within

when the heart grows tired of reading the braille of its scars.

Those lights, ferocious hawks shrieking in their wheeling heights,

the shattered glass of their unsoiled scintillation

thrown down like a goblet they only drink from once,

were my first teachers, the legends of their fury,

ancient, transformative fire imbibed early

that raised me up out of myself like a face

from the boat of my hands

or a passion I couldn’t return.

Are they changed somehow from the stories we tell of their shining,

the laws by which we divine their mysterious origins,

or enhanced by the thousands of years of gazing

that first raised ziggurats and pyramids on alluvial plains

to witch the will of the gods with lightning rods

in a chaos of mutability, civilization

the delusion born thereof, do they burn blindly

above the brutal business of the world, unconcerned

with the politics of extinction that rages below,

the flaring matchbook of nuclear powers

held to a page of apocalypse

that shadows the cowering earth

with arsonists and Armageddon?

Is all that flare and fury, the creation

of the very letters by which the worlds are said,

nothing but the afterlife of a sterling moment

in which, like us, they can’t in the present be seen?

Do the stars that shone on Babylon

shine on us; shine down on nothing,

or have they been humanized even slightly,

as they have been reputed to urge our own blood into fate,

by the view of love and carnage down below?

And gods, each to themselves,

have we become as they are, indifferent to our own glory,

random debacles of accidental intent

weighing our lives in the same purposeless breath,

the same hollow heartbeat

as moments of no appreciable account

in the grandiose obscenity of a loveless creation?

If a star could speak

would it curse or bless the dream

that adorns and torments it,

these eyes of mine that search it out in the darkness

a petal of light in the orchard of dendritic space

to give it a name and ask

for mercy from the bone-yard of the world awhile

by staring into the cool fountains

of its self-purifying mystery,

grateful for its unattainability? Given a voice

that even a child could understand

would it consider what we’ve been,

what it’s witnessed of what we’ve become

over the last five million years

and scream eureka or shriek?

Or would it break down in tears

and put its own light out,

disgusted with the embodiment

of its own elements, the issue of its fire-womb?

Iron rises up against calcium

in a war of murderous siblings

like a sword against a skull,

a bullet through the brain,

the chain of bestial beatitudes

that enslaves us in our cities to the ethics of steel,

and destroys on the whim of a few

for the advancement of a few

iron in the form of blood,

the millennial millions slaughtered and wasted

by the extravagant progress of metal

crazed against metal in a robe of red. Ferrous cannibals

in executive suits, in uniforms, in rags,

we eat the brains and drink the blood

from the planet’s fractured cranium, the orthodoxy

of our overly-vaunted evolution, the structure

and inhuman elaboration of civilization

after civilization nothing but the enforced order of our eating.

The big fish eat the little fish

and the little fish cry.

If the eye by which I see this star

is the star that eyes me, could it be

the stars have gone mad

over uncountable nights afflicted

by the same recurrent nightmare

of our astounding savagery,

the gigantism of our capacity

for agony and mutilation,

the brutal depravity of our deepening ignorance

exalting in its consciousness of new modes of murder,

our societies, organized theft,

the flowers of our culture

rooted in the bone and blood meal of a garden

planted in the shadow of an abattoir,

Auschwitz with daisies? Atoms join and separate,

their annihilations, edicts of light,

amalgams and almagests of matter,

mind in the fire-womb

mastering the art of water,

the elixirs of life drawn alchemically

from destruction and putrefaction, the water-lily,

the water-star that opens like a hand

that would give something back to the stars,

transforming the muck and mud of the swamp into light.

Is there any flower a human

can offer up to the night

that has come of all our killing, the suffering

we have enforced upon one another

as if, insane, we despised our own species?

Is there anything we have made

of the tragic waste in large and small

we could hold up to a star, to ourselves,

to the moon in the willow

and say, yes, of all the blood we have spilled,

of all the minds and lives

we have brought to rot and ruin

there is this great, black rose of wonder,

this light by which we know the light

born of the billions who have lived and died

in the course of our conception, the countless exterminations

to show you this, just this,

one flower, one incorruptible efflorescence

worthy of the fire that engendered us?

PATRICK WHITE

SOMEONE LINGERS IN YOUR ABSENCE LIKE AN ICON

SOMEONE LINGERS IN YOUR ABSENCE LIKE AN ICON

Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate

to an open field where the white horse

that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude

like a phase of the moon come to earth

is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much

distance and disappearance in it wings

and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by

I can barely hear you singing from here

over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night

when the ghosts are rioting in their graves

like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new

and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree

as do I these strange epiphanies of you

that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom.

And the depth of the emptiness that informs

the substance of my imaginings, devastates me

like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart

like a black cataract of snake skin I keep

trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck.

As if I were bleeding out like a rose after

the green thorns have hardened into fangs

that are killing and curing me at the same time.

Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours

and be done with it, no more of this, no more.

No more of watching the beauty of the world

burn out into a dark radiance that makes me

want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing.

Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose

that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions

of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning,

thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can’t go

without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain.

And it isn’t anything either of us can do anything about.

It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining,

small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands

vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry

blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you

sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle

mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light.

As I am now that you’ve become that rip in my heart

all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound

I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays

piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter

that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light

carved out of one of these black walnut trees.

Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.

Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing.

And when you’re hurting your worst, sing.

And even when I’m soldiering my way through stone

like a flying fish in the wrong medium,

or walking alone with the Alone through the woods,

just to meet you where you ask me to when you call

and I come like a burning bridge down to the river,

wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime,

I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants

and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect

hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck.

Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case

I forget how to dance on my own grave

with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile

that really means it if it really means anything at all.

Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell

my tongue is stuck to like a child’s to a wire fence,

or this black diamond nightbird

that cuts my darkness to the quick

because it’s got nothing to sing about

that can answer the call of the living for someone

on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat

drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver,

except the dead air of this strange place

where space is indelibly bruised by the passing

of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar.

Like a candle in the lantern of a skull

I’ve carried before me like a nightwatchman

on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears

until I lost my footing and fell in one night,

as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark

I was growing wings where I had none before

and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well

noticed the dead still blooming like stars

in the white shadows of the sun at midnight.

And out of the corners of my eyes

when what I can’t see what need to know about being alive

comes looking for me like the sacred syllable

on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse

like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird

to the dead branch in my heart

that’s having trouble remembering how to blossom

after a long winter, as if you’d summoned me to the trees

like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead,

to teach me how to take the pain

and through the alchemy of the grief

that flows through my heartwood like light and rain

turn it into life again, as if every leaf

were a new loveletter from the dead

I’ve been saving for years like expurgated starmaps

illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille

to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips

where they know who you are, and they’ve seen you

like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows

down by the river that weeps like a black mirror

for the stars and waterbirds in passing

that appear and disappear each in its time

and you wait for me like the longing of the dead

to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere,

the withered star of a wild rose without a flower,

that let’s me know you’re near, you’re here

rooted in me on earth where we’ve both come

to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom.

PATRICK WHITE

THE EARTH HIDES NOTHING FROM YOU

THE EARTH HIDES NOTHING FROM YOU

The earth hides nothing from you

when its time comes to be revealed.

Not the bones of the dead, not the green wind

blowing on the young leaves of the maple

to see if it still remembers how to break into flame

or the loaded horse-hair brushes of the flowers

trying to decide what colours to apply first

to the blue-toned underpainting of the sky on their easel.

And this is the essential freedom of information act.

Walking with a thoughtful, cooly blissful, festive spirit

on a windy night by a spring lake trying on stars

like earrings to go with the season like crocuses

realizing, as if you weren’t there alone, though you are,

how inestimably unique and precious it seems

just to be aware of this lake in the moonlight

trying to grow waterlilies in her Mars black hair

and one wild iris, because she’s obviously French.

And I can tell by the way the eddies and ripples

circle and tendril the sensuous undulance

of her dark depths, and the way she’s eyeing me

as I toe my way along the path I’m making up on the go,

she’s intrigued and modestly threatened

or she’s got other things on her mind

if I’m meant to know, I’ll know, in her good time, not mine

because there is no birth or death in the present moment,

it doesn’t have a future, it doesn’t have a past,

and it flashes by so fast, it hasn’t even happened yet

so everything is still and silent and timeless

and yet nothing is hidden, nothing held back.

Everything’s shining out like a star

that can’t keep what it knows to itself.

And any lingering question

of who you might have been is everywhere

reflected in the universe like a face in a mirror

with no one standing in front of it.

Something deep within and without me seems

to humanize the lake in my mother-tongue

and how astoundingly wonderful just to listen

to the lake’s accent when she answers back

in a language I can fully understand is universal,

rich with metaphors and similitudes that are the bloodlines

of everything in existence rooted in a grammar of dark matter

that can be as eloquent as the stars

when it waxes lyrical in spring, its uncontainable heart

overbrimming with joy at the return of the nightbirds.

The great, blue, lunar heron and the solar ray of the osprey

returning after long absence to their nests,

like lost jewels to a ring, eyes to the skull of a blind seer,

high in the Ys of the dead trees that look like harpoons

and dangerous tuning forks and witching wands

out whaling for water, stuck in the flukes of the lake.

Evanescent shape-shifters in the vagrant emptiness

learning to read each other like a star group,

say, the Pleiades, the daughters of Atlas,

the cornerstone of the world it upholds like a starmap

adjusting our eyes, our seeing, our unreasonable being here at all,

to the light and gravity of everything around us

in harmony with a life that’s never

at peace with itself creatively

to keep the wild grapevines growing like grails

that everyone seeks like sweetness and light

at the root of the truth of themselves, as soon

they’ll be sipping bliss from the towering stars

like ruby-throated hummingbirds from the larkspur.

Be empty as a cracked cup or an eyeless skull

and know what it is to be filled

by a lake that takes the low place so you

can flow into it like a bloodbank into the lifestream

of the spring run off of winter stars thawing in the dark hills

like patchy galaxies of snow that have found a way

to get off their islands by realizing

one wavelength of light

one wavelength of water

one wavelength of thought or insight

one wavelength of love and compassion

one wavelength of a seeker with a mindful heart

is all the flowing of the same night creek

growing into consciousness like a stranger

we come face to face with as it dawns upon us

emerging out of this dream of a self

like a dragonfly from its chrysalis,

like the wet sapphire of an eye

from the dark abundance of the seed

that prophesied that it would be so,

the best way to navigate your way

on this ocean of awareness even if you’re shipwrecked

like these dead trees at the bottom of the lake

with herons in your crow’s nest

is to take your hand off the wheel and let go.

Let go the way an archer releases a bird from a power line

or the first purple marten of the year

from the blossoming bow of an alder branch

hung with catkins in keeping with the fourth month

of Bran in the Celtic calendar and the letter, Fearn,

in the Druidic way of speaking to trees

to ask for directions through life and death and beyond

as if they’d made a library out of the whole forest

by listening to the wind in an alder copse

in a language the alders understood

they spoke in common with the water stars

of the blind and enlightened alike.

And if there’s no one to fall in love with,

or out of, this time of the night starwalk

the circuitous blossoming of your way

deep into a nearby grove sometime,

along the shoreline of the improbable concourse

of the way of things like a wild grapevine

gave up being on the go, for growing,

once it got a taste of its own wine,

and watching the Pleiades like crown jewels

in the burgundy upper branchs of a birch

closer to heaven than you could ever

have imagined you could be,

fall in love with a lake with a French accent

and the soul of a Celtic sybil, and doing

what the moon does with her lunar sword unsheathed

lay your silver tribute down upon her waters.

PATRICK WHITE