A ROCK IN THE CURRENT, A SKULL IN THE RIVER

A ROCK IN THE CURRENT, A SKULL IN THE RIVER

A rock in the current, a skull in the river,

time patiently washing away the sidereal silt of my mind

as if insight were alluvial. You can’t keep

what you won’t give away so fling it from you

by the handful, phases of the moon, apple bloom,

fire seeds, eyes that looked through you once into

the secret life of the abyss that glyphed love lyrics

and occult zodiacs for homeless exiles across

the multitudinous firmament like a mystic tattooist

inking ice ages in caves for spiritual Neanderthals

alarmed by the approach of a tedious apocalypse,

dead shamans at the feet of defecating rhinos,

and the hunting magic that expressed the inner life

of slayer and slain in images of blood and burnt bone,

hemorrhagic red ochres of midnight, extinct

as the grammar of fire that once adorned their torches.

You see how I get carried away by the blackwater

of my visions sweeping me downstream

from these arcane symbols of self I can barely remember

except as the vague stations of an ongoing shapeshifter

who knows that all he has in common with time

is its flowing. Evolution isn’t a popularity contest

but some recollections are more violet or vermillion

than others, and I recall the features of several women,

a few kids and an occasional friend who were

more indelible watercolours in the rain than others.

Rainbows made manifest by an auspicious eclipse,

starclusters in the eyes of radiant snakepits,

the brass rings of moondogs on lunar doors

that opened like the first crescent of the knife

you held to your wrist to purge the bad spirits

as you fought for your life in an undeclared holy war

of transfiguring omens trying to seek out

the unsayable syllables of the name of your god.

Estranged lovers of mine still clinging like exposed roots

to the river banks of my shoreless afterlife

moving on in a muddle of stars leaving

dolmens and gravestones in my wake

to say where I once stopped long enough to die

to erect a constellation as a wayward direction

of where I’d gone for those breaking trail

into the available dimensions beyond

the last handprint I spray painted on the wall

of a gate you could pass through to the other side.

Enter at your own peril. No proxies or strawmen,

no voodoo dolls or false idols, no puppet masters,

no witchdoctors with elk antlers or candelabra on their heads

make it this far without being divested of their identities

like shoes at the thresholds of an interminable firewalk

that insists you take your winged heels off

like no vehicles past this point of departure

and walk barefoot over the stars scattered like thorns

along the path of a dangerous initiation no one’s ever mastered.

Here in this mindless realm genuine achievement is measured

by the aspirations of brilliant failures courageous enough

to overturn the sacrificial altars of their conscious expertise

and risk the untutored innocence and polymorphous madness

of their ancient childhoods again, the crazy wisdom

of realizing even on your deathbed as you violate

the first rule of your worst taboo, true to your disobedience

to the end, there isn’t enough time to grow old

when you’re on the run with all you can be carried away by

as eternity opens its coffin like an eyelid on the deathmask of time

and reveals the continuity of all your cosmic beginnings

expanding like a universe that wouldn’t be caught dead

standing still when there’s so much fire left forever to steal from.

Go ask the stars, if you need the affirmation of angels,

where they got their light from, or the demons,

the shining ones, who hide their radiance in shadows,

if you need earthbound followers to believe in your own eyes.

O fool, in your heart of hearts, admit what you already know.

Life is an evanescent stillness that’s been transcending itself in motion

like a secret that wanted to be known when there was no one

to listen but a void with the imagination to create

a selfless reflection of the kind of empty awareness that could.

So we all die laughing in the lifemask of a mirror

that’s never seen its own eyes except as these nightskies

of fireflies and stars we all disappear into like creators

into their own works, like children at play with our bones.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I can still see you shining, and when was it ever not so,

like last night’s stars, sacred syllables

lingering in your voice like broken mirrors of ice

and you so badly wanting to fly above it all,

to burn like a draconian firefly that healed its heart

with a blow torch that welded you back together again

with scars of gold, to prove how intensely pure you were.

And you were o yes you were so serious,

amazingly beautiful, no one laughed,

when they saw the extremes of scorching honesty

with yourself and others you were willing to go to

to be worthy of the excruciations of your art,

and deeper than that, something you knew

was there in the dark by the weight of its eyes upon you

like a stranger with a spirit of bells that meant you no harm.

Of you, I wrote, my muse is lovelier than any running doe

because it was true and there was no other way of putting it

that didn’t blunt the shining, that didn’t cheat the rose,

that you inevitably didn’t when you were the new moon

and I was wholly in love with you like a total eclipse.

Yes, I remember how there was always more dark bliss

in the gifts of pain I received from you than I,

and you know how hard I tried to give back,

ever returned to you like a sacred grove of nightbirds.

You showed me the diamonds in the abyss of my inadequacies.

You were the peer of the mystery of yourself,

a black savage, one third deadly nightshade,

two thirds nocturnal orchid and there was nothing

strategic about your magic compared to mine.

That made you a greater sorceress than I was ever a wizard.

For me the birds sang, but you could hear the sky weeping

for things I’m still trying to understand about compassion.

When I think of the passage of beauty, you’re always

one of the last wildflowers of the fall, sometimes

the starclusters of the New England asters, others,

the last pilot light to go out on the blueweed

or one of those rare times, as I sense this is now,

I’m attending a seance of waterlilies that are trying

to call you back to life like an echo in a housewell

at four in the first October morning we spent on the farm

and were startled awake by the ghost of a white horse

drumming on the well cap in the moonlight

glowing in the frost on the ground, as if we were

both enlightened like two eyes at the same window,

burning in awe of the vision we shared together,

knowing the ensuing silence was more than enough

to attest to the truth of it like a secret that wasn’t meant for words.

Just as this isn’t, after so many lightyears

of remembering you like one of the great joys of life

that cast the longest shadows of the most poignant sorrow

to haunt me for the rest of my life like a wound

even the scar tissue of the moon can’t keep me

from flowing out of like the source of the Nile before Egypt.

God, how I wish every time I reached out for you

the stars didn’t burn my hands like snowflakes and doves.

There must be some other way to kiss the spirit

of evanescent things without putting your lips

to a sacred fire in an ice-age as if you were kissing

the head of an oracular snake like the eyelid

of a lover you were trying to wake from a dream

that lasts forever like a garden you’ve been shut out of

because you’re still alive, and foolish enough to love

what can’t be helped or forgotten because it’s gone.

After the storm surge, in the gleaming facets of sunshine,

death dries its outspread wings like a turkey vulture

at the top of the totem of a pine that’s been broken by lightning

and you lose your faith in the thunderbirds of aquiline evergreens.

At least, I did for awhile, looking up at the stars alone

at twenty below, impossibly trying not to accuse the gods

of anything they didn’t mean, as I grew

colder than liquid nitrogen on the inside, and my tears

shattered like crystal stalactites in an ice storm,

or sublimated into wraiths of dry ice I exorcised

too dead inside to be haunted by your memory just yet,

than any void I’ve ever tried to fly through like space

as it was turning into glass. This, too, will pass is not always true.

Eventually the wind stopped snarling like a barnyard dog

as I began letting go of you, and the pain thawed,

and the hawks were unlocked from their aviaries of ice

in one long shriek of liberation that tore my heart like a talon

because my grief was the last of you I had to hang on to

and I couldn’t use the permafrost as an excuse

not to properly bury my dead where they’d asked me to,

as I did you, facing east toward the lustreless black pearl

of the new moonrise of my heart on the threshold

of a black hole as if I had nothing left to lose but loss itself.

And who could have imagined that time would cling to me

as it has, a habit that distinguished it from eternity

like fresh water from the salt? Or I could be so exalted

to that palace of stars your spirit took up residence in

like a squall of fireflies the wind played with like chimney sparks

from the dead furnace of this house of life we once lived in together?

The morning glory’s overgrown the gate. The palings

of the fence I built are down like nights and days

crossed off in a calendar. The window we looked through

is smashed. The housewell lost in the rising tides

of the wild grasses learning to write on the wind.

And that last painting of yours you gave me,

all those truncated trees, lepers and amputees

grotesquely gathered on an island in a bay

you lavished in soft placental violets and greens,

Persian silks, and auroral saris for mutilated mannequins,

I left on the wall of your studio like some kind of seal

on the place breaking up like Pangea into

continents of plaster. I pried it loose from the ice

of a snowbank slumped in the corner opposite

that small open window you stared out at the world through

like a portrait in a picture-frame I’m still trying to get right,

and I hung it back up counter-intuitively as I imagined

you would have done, something incomprehensively beautiful

and strangely evocative of a gesture suggestively perfected

like a long misunderstood labour of love, masterfully abandoned.

PATRICK WHITE

I'VE GROWN OLD REMEMBERING YOU WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG

I’VE GROWN OLD REMEMBERING YOU WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG

I’ve grown old remembering you when you were young.

How much wiser we were then though we didn’t know it

than I am now, or you would have been, had you lived.

Ignorant of the outcome of desire, sometimes it’s better

to drown, than learn to keep your head above water, or swim.

I made a liferaft of my bones to get to the other side

of my heart. Like the moon, one half bright, the other, dark.

I’ve knocked on so many doors the past left ajar,

but for a long time you never answered.

Looked into so many eyes so far from home,

hoping to catch a glimpse of your shadow

moving past the window like a waterbird backlit by the moon,

and though some of them had your mouth, some, your hair,

some your earlobes hung with silver chandeliers of rain

falling from your wings like a broken rosary of waterdroplets,

none of them had your soul, none were as lost

and inimitable as you unanswerably were.

Street rose, how is it my tears are still pierced by your thorns

after all these years? Out of the midnight blue,

without warning, idling among the river reeds,

or rooted in the wavelengths of the mindstream, some star

spears me through the heart like a fish on the barb of the moon

and I have to sit down among the rocks at the water’s edge

with a vision of beauty and love and the passage of time

too unbearably immense for flesh and blood to carry

like so many other empty buckets and sad bells back

from the abandoned wishing wells where the ghosts gather

to recall what it was like to want something once.

Long for someone so badly you would gladly

have endured a thousand spiritual deaths and metaphoric rebirths

as I have done, for one life of being wounded and healed,

exalted and terrified by the mystery of what or who

you truly loved like the eclipse of a moonrise in your blood

more indelibly than death itself appears in the black mirror

when you look deeply into it like a starmap of music

as your last futile hope of bringing someone back

and your eyes freeze like star sapphires deep underground

with what they see like fireflies and lightning in the sockets

of prophetic skulls whose eyes are the jewels of the dead.

Perpetual muse, you, unnamed, who distinguish my words still

with the intimacy of your absence, daughter of the abyss

I was left with when you lost your nerve and collapsed

like a suspension bridge over the moonlit thread

of your spine below when the safety web broke like the illusion

of a dreamcatcher, like the beads of the constellation

the sun belonged to when we first encountered each other

like alien planets driven out like black sheep of the solar system

and looked back at its dwindling light from a long way off

and knew of a certainty, you were, as was I,

alone in this remote space with each other,

estranged companions for life. Was it not so,

and has it not always been in its own unique way as it is now?

Between your silence and my voice have we not evolved

a dream grammar by which the living can speak to the dead?

Do I not hear you in the broken-hearted train whistle

mourning into the distance with no help for its sorrow

and in the long mantra of the wind in the aspens

and the gaping mouths of the waterlilies awed

by the symmetrical similarity of their astonished silence

to that of the stars looking ahead in wonder

at what they’ve been flowering into for lightyears.

Long after your ashes were scattered with beautiful sentiments

mingled like rose water in every one’s tears

to bless the flightpath of a fire bird’s return to the elements

from a precipitous cliff out over the sea at night

as if we weren’t saying farewell to a woman who had lived

like one of us, but were attending the sky burial of a comet

who had made a Tunguskan impact on everyone she encountered,

was it not me, when all the other listeners

thought they’d heard the whole of the message you had to say

and left you alone in the dark in an empty hall

that first perplexing night of being dead among the stars,

who went on listening to your omens as if there

could never be an end of the flames and feathers of meaning

that unfolded in the wake of your passage across

the desolate seas and annulled atmospheres of my lunar heart?

What pain, what joy, grief, loss, enlightenment,

life in death and death in life have I not endured,

what loneliness not embraced as if it were

more deeply exiled from everything it had ever known

than I was when I blew out the last candle of votive fire

like a broken dragon missing one its own in its reclusive solitude?

Even the ashen sages weep like urns of wisdom

for the extinction of the light that taught them

to see in the dark with a compassionate heart

that insight walks the same path delusion does

and attachment, too, is another paling of moonlight

on an open gate that all humans must pass through

to pay homage to the fountains and watersheds

love brings to flower in their gardens and cemeteries alike.

Many times I’ve sensed your tenderness in the sensitivities

of the carillons of wild columbine that rang

discretely in the silence like rain chimes in the spring

and I came to understand it was you, whenever

I wandered along the river like a troubled sleepwalker

through the mystic cults of the woods at night

into a clearing like the third eye of the torrent

that roared all around me like a wounded black hole,

it was you in the sanctuary of your concealment who revealed

that thoughts and emotions like the unsanctified oceans

of tormented stars I wanted to drown in, weren’t

static states of mind where space turns brittle

as the looking glass you get locked into,

but dynamic events of the heart that shatter

our crystal skulls into unknown configurations of light

rising like new constellations out of the regenerative chaos

that watered the old gardens of our starmaps

with the splinters of broken chandeliers that cut our eyes

like tears in an early spring thaw. It was you

as surely as it was the clear light of the void within me

who whispered to me that night I was on the verge

of liberating the past from the future of a bad precedent

that we don’t live separately from the dead,

that each of us is the embodiment of the longing

of unnumbered myriads who released their hopes

and dreams and prayers like smoke and birds

and cedar boughs of incense on the wind

knowing they probably wouldn’t be there

to hear the answer if one ever did come back again.

Where else but now is the future made manifest

by the summons of the past in a voice

we recognize as everyone’s including yours and mine?

Just as I see your eyes in this insight like the occult bliss

of the dawn at midnight writing immanental love lyrics

in the journals of nocturnal wildflowers confiding in the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU AS YOU WERE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU AS YOU WERE

If only I could remember you as you were

for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible

as light in space and not as time would have it

the way things have changed. To see you

lingering in the doorway on a winter night,

the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades

over your shoulder descending below the treeline

as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,

and o how I loved you for it. If only I could

remember that lonely ghost of a mirage

that hovered over the watershed of your tears

and looked at me like the first lifeboat

you’d seen in a thousand years respond

to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember

the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin

as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers

and how I used to like wiping your tears away

with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time

like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.

Not likely I’ll ever see you again in this life

but if only I could remember you before circumstance

underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance

of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.

But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird

transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

And this moment, too, though it’s endured

a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,

always saying good-bye to some aspect of you

that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life

in metaphors that buff the open wound

like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies

welding living insights into the dead brain coral

of this encyclopedic coma life

can sometimes seem without you, even after

all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire

and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about

if only I could remember you as you once were

like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss

as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight

wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose

out of the unknown into the unknown

and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown

far from the tree that was lovelier

than the whole orchard to me, though angels

attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,

you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns

I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood

on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart

like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential

for creative destruction that got the light out of the way

long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.

If only I could remember you as you were

when we both made eye-contact with each other

like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously

it wasn’t going to take much of a wavelength

for either of us to understand this immediately

as if we could read each other’s shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes

the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,

but seldom have I ever regretted

that I lived through you for awhile,

when the stars raged in my heart like a madman

obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman

who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon

but knew enough about compassion

to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her

all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life

and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead

like the fork in the road that separated us,

like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what

we actually relive again as if some moments in life

are illuminated by a different light than that

we read by in bed late into the night

looking for translucency in the windows of insight

that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream

like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT AN IMPASSE, QUIET MOMENT, COME TO THIS

WHAT AN IMPASSE, QUIET MOMENT, COME TO THIS

What an impasse, quiet moment, come to this

deeper than a bell in the dead of winter. Grime

on the grey windows as if I were living inside

a sooty lantern, consuming the flesh of my body

in fire that will make me indelibly invisible

for generations to come, to each, the prelude of a ghost

that produced abundantly out of nothing

windfalls of the imagination that shook me like a tree.

I lived like a slag heap of ore for the sake of the jewels within.

Amino acids in a meteor with a genome

falling out of the abyss like a star you could wish upon

and risk getting what you really wanted

though you weren’t honest or courageous enough

to believe it at the time. Starwheat for the soul,

bread massaged by human hands, black pearls

with the lustre of a thousand new moons

you’d forgotten about your life, the dark beginnings

of something splendid that died inside of you

like creosote on the chimney pipes that creaked

like the arthritic boughs of tin trees in a firestorm.

The snow outside draped over the phantoms of buildings

like ragged cotton dust covers over the furniture

of the abandoned town as if the owners

always intended to come back one day. Time

squatting on the property like juniper and thornapple

in an overgrown field returning the way it came

like a prodigal that made it home lightyears too late.

Leafless municipal trees stripped of their legends.

I know more about being alone at night

than the moon does when everyone’s asleep

grinding their teeth like millstones geared

to the endless waterwheels of their mindstreams

going round and round without a stop, a top

or a bottom as if it were crucial to be homogenous.

Everyone trying to stand out in the crowd

like a retinal response to the black hole

in the middle of their moondog iris like a pupil

they’ve never put up to their eye to look through.

Witching the abyss for water with branch lightning

is a much more dangerous calling for wizards

that have more in common with solitary dragons

than they do with the scintillant eyebeams

of magic wands chirping in fountains of stardust

that spring out of the optic fibres of whatever

they look upon, like a rosary of dew lying

about the death trap of the spider web it’s ensnared by

in the false dawn of a mandala that makes

everyone feel better by lulling them with the opioids

of the lotus-eaters who never got off the island

to see how vast and exhilarating the sea of life truly is.

When the starmaps stop at the edge of your eyes

and you’re not disobedient enough to cross the threshold

you eventually die in a cul de sac of sticky constellations.

Shore-huggers in the tidal pools of your stagnant tears.

No need to go to a war of lenses over it. The karma’s

as instantaneous as the charismatic depravity

of the electromagnetism of your name. One day

when you’ve donated it like a black walnut

to scientific research lab for tax deductible lobotomies

someone’s going to cut deep into the sweetmeat

of your brain, to see what you thought about life,

and what it was like to live for the stain

of a little bit of fame so wholly indoctrinated

like a polyp into a tradition of dead coral,

you gave up thinking lyrically about life and light

in words, and began, at the behest of a patented gene,

expressing it wholly in a grammar of corporate logos.

Fashionably unreal as the Cambrian outbreak of icons

for Exxon and Monsanto, Shell and Microsoft in

in the auto-hagiography of your Burgess Shale.

If the spirit of making a gift of a gift within you is dead,

I suppose the only recourse you have left

for the corpse you’re passing off as the real you,

is a deal and a sale and the hysterical jealousy

you can arouse like a muse in an escort service for that.

A cosmetic surgeon playing Pygmalion with his Botox wife,

not a healer that ever brought anyone back to life

by transfiguring the shape of the universe they dwell in

by reminding them it only takes a little bit of starmud

aged in their tears to mould a face of their own

to the reflection of the infinite spaces contained

by their hearts and minds, eyes, smiles, and grimaces

perfectly fitted to human flesh and blood and skin

like a mirror that looks at them from the inside

to determine the colour of their eyes,

by what they’ve seen, what they’ve dreamed

what they’ve lived for, what they’ve loved,

and what they haven’t dared to look upon before

with a passion so intensely perennial and clear

it will be their eyes that will go out of fashion

long before the stars ever realize that what

breaks out of the darkness into light above

finds the source of its shining looking up at them

from down below and gauges the lifespan

of the radiance of their seeing and depth of being

by how many new moons and lightyears ago since that last was.

PATRICK

NO HONEY IN THE HIVE OF THE LANTERN

NO HONEY IN THE HIVE OF THE LANTERN

No honey in the hive of the lantern,

no flower, no flame, no light, no people

in the warmth of the windows with a sales-pitch,

I sit at my desk in front of this computer-screen,

the snow outside a million gentle pixels of white,

and I wonder if the dead buried in this page

are sensitive enough to feel it on their graves.

And I’m weary of lifemasks trying to achieve

the desired effect while the living eat neglect

and mediocrities are trying to speak

like best-selling books where the stars are just words

and the bees have been culled for humming sacred syllables.

Numb with stasis more than a month now,

no scalpel like the waning crescent of the moon at my wrist,

muses of static electricity jumping from my fingertips

to startle a few dozy lyrics into life, my lips

cracked and cloven by the archaeological air,

I’ve been painting waterlilies and blue dragonflies

to keep something green and liquid alive

in the desperate urns of my soul on the windowsill.

I’m a ladder in a tar pit walking up the down escalator

rung by rung, threshold by threshold, foothold by foothold

feather by feather, salmon by salmon and if there’s a pool

at the top I’m meant to pay regenerative tribute to

in some eternally recurring dream of time

with my black and blue battered life,

and this bent wavelength of my crooked sword, so be it.

I’ll haul myself up like an inevitable lifeboat

to the rescue of my imminent shipwreck

though every nanosecond of the journey’s been

a crisis at the crossroads and I’ve learned to proceed

as I did as a kid with my wings outspread as if I could fly

from one thermal of a dust devil to the next in a back alley

where I used to kick stones down the road

like prophetic skulls I took for granted ahead of me.

If you were born into poverty as I was

and you couldn’t afford inspiration or you sensed

it was an elitist dream that hadn’t been blooded by life

and you stood aloof from it, half wary, half longing,

like a fragrant trap, you could always rely on your ennui

to get things done just to keep from being masticated

by your shelf life as a child. As I do now

experiencing myself as a highly trained doorway

to nowhere in particular as I walk from my easel

to my desk, my desk to my easel, trying to liberate

my disobedience like a caged truant in an aviary

of peacocks and pheasants that strut the fanfare of their tails

like comets stood up like bridal bouquets

at the pale altars of their unmarriageable daybreaks.

Nothing morbid, petty, self-pitying, or vindictive

in my solitude, no secret martyrs trying to beatify

the death of art, no ecclesiastic heretics breathing

hellfire and brimstone like scripture from their matchbooks,

I listen to the rasp of the same man I heard last winter

shovelling snow off the sidewalks in front of the bank

and the first drugstore ever established in heritage Canada

as if he were scraping off a canvas down

to the grisaille underpainting to start again and again

and again, as the storms pass over like a living

and I bond with him, how could I not, no one awake

but he and I, as a self-disciplined Sisyphean familiar,

labouring as anonymously as I am to do something useful

as hauling an avalanche uphill into a snowbank

where the heads of the parking meters are protruding through

like iron daffodils and frozen rat snakes too comatose yet

to dream of the vernal equinox liberating the sidewalks.

Almost six. The quick fix of the dawn soon calling it quits

for the nightshift that lives underground, and I’m still

caught in the coils of my genomic stairwells like the coils

of oracular pythons high on the volcanic fumes

of poetic caldera preparing to explode

like the igneous flowering of a magmatic watershed

gone supernova like an old luminary withdrawing into itself

like an emotional neap tide before a tsunami of starlight

beaches me like the ark of the Burgess Shale

high in navigable mountains of nautical rocks

after forty days and nights on a frozen sea of insight.

PATRICK WHITE

IF NOT KNOWING IS A SIGN OF THE DEPTHS

IF NOT KNOWING IS A SIGN OF THE DEPTHS

If not knowing is a sign of the depths to which

I’ve penetrated the darkness with a handful of fireflies

aspiring to a constellation of their own, something

more shapeshifting than these eighty-eight paradigms

of fixed shining, and managed to lose the starmap en route,

then I’d be urged to say I’ve been negatively illuminated

by every black hole I’ve ever fallen into. How is it with me?

I’ve been pearl diving for singularities and nacreous eclipses.

I have no idea of what I’m looking for that isn’t eventually

going to find me, but I’m a hybrid of wonder

and an agitated curiosity that makes me feel

I’m wasting some crucial element of life

if I don’t go take a look for myself or listen

to the picture-music flowing through me like a mindstream

through the woods at night more acutely than my eyes

can see enlightenment right under their nose

that can tell what it is by the smell. Larkspur or sulphur.

Witness to a dynamic awareness I’m more and more certain

isn’t mine, though it bears my name, I resist being tempted

by a partial fossil of thought to lay claim to it

as if it went to all that effort just to be me. Not self-abnegation,

which is like trying to sweep a mirage out of a desert

with a broom you haven’t learned to ride, but immersion

in an abyss that dwarfs the universe with inconsequence.

I’m more intrigued by the life of meaning as it expresses itself

as a creative medium for the ten thousand meanings of life

scattered like eyelids of apple bloom by the wind

than I am in divining provisional parameters

to rationalize the superstition of reality that regards

its own unactualized potential with an evil eye

that has to be occluded for the sake of pregnant goats.

Just to be here is the most magnificent achievement

though whether you pulled it off or not is definitely moot,

and I tend to intuit when the silence is comprehensive enough

I’m participating in an interdependently originated

creative collaboration where creation is the past tense

of what we’re about to do next without knowing it.

We exit by the entrance. Even spoliation and ruin,

the withered root, the amputated stump, the delinquent blossom

that left it too late, the imaginative context, the seed bed

for the speciation of new life forms arising out of the dead

like a child with flowers in her arms who can’t imagine

what it’s like to be old and see yourself in the doorway

asking where you keep the crayons like stubby buds

in a drawer with a rainbow she wants to draw for you

if you’ve got lots of red, and, as it happens, you do.

PATRICK WHITE