JUST THE STAR IN THE TREE RINGS OF MY HEARTWOOD Just the star in the tree rings of my heartwood, centred like the nave of the spokes of this wheeling mind and bloodstream the Buddhists call the wheel of life and death going supernova in a distant galaxy, let’s say, Andromeda because it’s close enough to be intimately beautiful, and besides, who needs anymore than a hundred billion stars shining radiantly like an island of light in the night two hundred million lightyears away to get their point across? Look at me, Maw. No hands on the optical Zen handlebars if this unicycle of a planet I’ve been riding around the sun on like a circus tour of gleemen, jesters, tricksters, poets and hucksters, ring masters cracking their cat o nine tails like a nervous system bundled into a spine to teach tigers who’ve been jumping through hoops of fire all of their lives, or what do think all those stripes are about, or a strong rope made out of braided umbilical cords for anchor chains, moral bling, and the fishing nets of Indra with all those hooks and jewels in it like flies, lies, lures, and spinners, bait and spiritual snakeoil salesmen trying to get you to buy into a bottle of magic elixir as if you were some kind of genie in a lamp incapable of granting your own three wishes to yourself, that’s going to sneak you in the enlightenment concert through a black hole in the fence just before you gain entrance through the gateless gate that punches your ticket like lights out forever so your eyes can adjust to the dark as you fall upon your own sword like a seppuku suicide that kills you deeper into life not death by exhuming the universe from a seed. Soma sema. So there’s nothing left to discriminate a manger from a tomb, a cradle from the grave, one womb from another, fire from water, a saint from a sinner, the Virgin Mary from Mary Magdalene, all dream figures in a dream that wakes up with you when you do. That’s my good guess. Or have you even got one? Though it’s not necessary to switch from analogue to digital, or even smoke signals, log drumming cave bears Jews’ harps, or barndance country spoons trying to jump over the moon like the Mounties musical ride, if you’re happy the way you are. If not, it’s easy to translate that synchronized keyboard of dragon teeth you’ve been playing on all your life into a guitar you set on fire so after you’ve brought down the house, can you hear the roar of the crowd as they stand up on their feet crazed by amazement, ovation, encore, and groupie ecstasy, you exit stage left in your Draculan Elvis collar studdeded with stars like the cloak of the night you wrap your starmaps up in like gnostic gospels nearly two thousand years after you wrote them some goatherd’s going to find like parchment in a cave that’s more a spiritual wine cellar for aging dreams until their bouquets are wildflowers that please you like in the starfields as you spit whiskey and lighter fluid on a voodoo Chanticleer like some cantor in a dendritic candelabra of dark matter and ask for blessings like an arsonist in a volunteer fire brigade for burning down another house of life when you leave. Depends upon what you believe, I suppose, whether you think compassion is a fire hydrant, a squad car, a fire truck, or an ambulance on its way like a screaming poppy that scratches at your windows like the tree of life in a sudden squall as if they were your eyes and death was trying to say how much she loved you like a banshee. To crib from the bible and a depressing Canadian novel that never scattered its ashes out of the urn, as for me and my house, I’ve never left a place in my life like a fire ax or extinguisher or ungrateful guest for a billion acts of hospitality I return as I should, it’s only spirtual manners, adhab, as the Arabs say, and the poets back them up, without leaving a matchbook, a blasting cap, a wrecking ball for creative demolition, a dragon, or a can of gasoline I was getting tired of lugging around with me anyway in tribute on their temple stairs where they’ll find it in the morning swaddled like a changeling among the reeds in a basket that looks more like a windfall at the feet of guillotine apple tree more than a strawdog of manger on their mindstreams that was going to be thrown on the fire any way like a deathmask that’s served its pagan purpose, and said thank you to its host in a spiritual kind of way for letting things go down like shipwrecks on the moon and catastrophic decisions that had to be made, or didn’t, whatever the occasion seemed to call for at the time as an act of liberation were no more than not forgetting in the most enlightened way you can to say thanks that feels like an embrace, a kiss on the cheek, a caress, a koan, a bullet through the third eye of a rainbow or a cosmic egg you’re just breaking out of like an earthquake to see how big, and beautiful, uncramped, the nightsky really is, or a net you just escaped like a dolphin caught in the interstices by a skeleton key that broke off in the lock it was drowning in until you came along and cut through the lines that were entangling it to death like a nightingale trying to read sheet music in the dark, a musical starmap long before it began to sing from its heart instead of the dead to the heretical choir of wild phoenixes passing like stars high overhead at midnight as if the axis mundi of the word were nothing more than an auto de fe, just another stake with a medicine bag of gunpowder hung around its neck as an act of mercy, love, not hate though I realize how surrealistically crazy this must make Zhuangzi, or Loki, or any other sacred clown, sound when you first encounter them like a truth so childlike, simple, beautiful, and playfully profound the butterflies rubbed the firesticks if their antennae together and got a bonfire going that everybody is dancing like ghosts around. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 18:53:14 +0000
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