I SHOULD LIE IN THE SUN AND MELT INTO THE GRASS I should lie in the sun and melt into the grass. I listen to the bikers throttling up like chain-saws. I sit here urgently trying not to pollute time. A poem’s got one foot on shore and one in the boat. Let Atlantis rise or sink as it will. I can wait. Even when it’s calm, my heart is an idling storm and every third thought is a voodoo doll as it sees itself on the inside behind the eyelid of a visionary eclipse. Nothing to worry about. I’m not going to put the eyes of the telescope out for looking at Lady Godiva. Look at me tracking myself all over this paper, mouse and bird letters in the snow at the base of a juniper. How human it is to forgo yourself for a future that doesn’t exist. God, I wish there were more fireflies in my life than street signs. Do you see the lack of meaning in how things are understood? Thought will get you as far as a frog on a lily pad but once you get there it’s easy to see it’s the lily that shines in a whole other realm of language that everyone understands but no one can speak. I watch the honeysuckle burn the gate I came through. I note the blue eye shadow of the damselfly applying herself like a cosmetic pencil to the heavy petals of the wild roses tangled in the fallen birch. What a shock it would be if I were to take off my lifemask and you were to discover me infinitely closer to you like a dimension you hadn’t detected in your awareness than the light is to what you see when you’re sitting up in bed alone in the dark at three in the morning. What a world, hey? What do you make of it? The marvel and the horror and the mystery and the way destiny manifestly unrolls like a lottery for every living thing on a planet that occasionally plays Russian roulette with the asteroids, and our tiny part in it all, this mere speck of nothingness that can embody in its formless spaces within, the superclustering of galaxies? And the pain and the anger and the sorrow and the fear and the way things change and disappear as you look for the forms of your expectations everywhere and everything’s either an approximation or consolation of what you can see so clearly, it burns the air? I should lie down in the sun and melt into the grass, but forgotten among buildings here, I am unbound and not even the dead are as free as I am right now. The whole universe is one big solid insight where inanimate things are just another mode of motion sitting in the room like Latin, dogpaddling in space and time, and I’m tucked under your eyelids like a loveletter you weren’t expecting in a language that could read you like any one of the seventy-two scholars of the Septuagint. I’ve been listening to you for lightyears like leaves listen for the wind and the rain and the moonlight and what you have felt about being alive to say hello and sing farewell, has been my feeling, and when you have wept at the intransigence of angels and the generosity of their expansive interventions, I have been humbled by the eyes of my own exaltations. And my feet swept out from under me like an undertow of shadows on the moon. Sister Lunacy, who can stand in the light of these intensities and immensities for long this vertigo of stars and skulls, bells and scars without reeling in the delirium of simply being here to witness them as if they somehow depended on us to embody them in our hearts and minds and voids as if they were no different from us than we were, all waves of awareness the wind blows up on the ocean. The imagination transforms everything in to us. The stars reek of the eyes that have gazed up at them like pyres and telescopes and censers, it’s in the hair of a comet like the smell of a lover, it’s what makes the meteorites as kissable as the head of a snake to the lips of a gentle enemy. Sister Lunacy, my heartfelt muse, my dark-side dakini, what have you been dancing for all these years? Have you been pearldiving among the castanets for a moonrise in the mouth of a seashell that could sing to you like the ocean you’re lost upon? You’re the station every seeker gets to on a pilgrimage he doesn’t know he’s taking where he damns the consequences and blessings alike and enters into the spiritual life as a rebel of compassion as he addresses himself to what’s arrayed before him as if there were only one voice between himself and another like a bridge that flows, like a star that doesn’t drown in your eye like a firefly. And if there were anything I could ever say I was it would have to be this just as it is, this endlessness I keep being poured out into as if my heart were the only waterclock I could live by and disembodied space the only medium that could accommodate my shapeshifting adaptations like goldfish coming to the surface to feed on the stars. Sister Lunacy, the moon reaches down to the roots of the river reeds and the catfish thrive among the wild rice in the shallows, and eyes in the darkness high overhead, as if someone shattered a mirror into a billion bits of awareness see you standing on your barren precipice and long to know what it is you’re thinking. In order to understand you must become the thing itself. You must abdicate your own presence to be remotely at peace with the world, it’s a strawdog anyway, and it burns too fast to be much of a lighthouse. And o my darkness, there are so many skins you have yet to shed like the moon trying on a wardrobe of water laying her gown across the lake like an early frost of sequins. I shall come to you at first as a premonition as lightly as a cloud touches the mountain, an aberrant insight, a synchronistic intuition of our simultaneity, and in your breath my breath shall be an atmosphere and in your eye my eye shall lavish the most intimate of stars, and in your blood my blood shall be the poppy and the rose. Sister Lunacy, even after the house has burnt to the ground my passion stands like a blackened doorway in the rain and though I look at you through a broken window, the moon is whole, and the sky is not torn or bruised. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 15:19:31 +0000
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