I Don't Want To Have My Eyes Glazed Over Nacreously
I don't want to have my eyes glazed over nacreously
if I were a grain of sand, a diamond in the rough,
living in a pearly world. Cataracts in the eye,
flowers in the sky. I don't want to live in a spiritual trance
blissed out like the first crescent of the moon
smiling down upon everything as if I weren't
attached to any particular atmosphere and all
the waters of life were frozen like tears in a jewelled locket
I kiss once in awhile in a rush of gushing devotion.
I love the mystic details of the concrete specifics of the world.
The stylus of the birds that can write with their beaks and feet
like cuneiform on the skin of an apple,
and wormholes that burrow even deeper
into the sweetness of the flesh, neolithic barrow tombs
aligned with the vernal equinox, and that soft blue talc
as if the dew had turned to powder that clings to the autumn grapes.
I like the spelling errors fate makes
on the staves of our foreheads where it writes
the picture-music of our destinies in such a way
that everything that's written there, over the course of time,
our eyes will live long enough to see.
I don't want to turn my spirit into a cosmic perfumery
and extract my essence from the ambergris of my presence.
I don't want to transform whale vomit into an alluring fragrance
that isn't naturally its own. Or suggest to certain flowers
they gargle the rain like mouthwash, or smear
the eyelids of the rose with a snailtrack of stars.
What did the Zen master say? The stone is lustrous,
but there's nothing inside. The ore is different
but from it comes gold. Why hide the bruises and scars,
sunspots like black eyes, or the pitted complexion of the moon
from the third eye of Galileo's telescope trying futilely
to show a Vatican cardinal the mutability of the firmament?
Things are rough out there, and happenstance is neither fair
nor unjust. Things pass into their return like the earth
going around the sun in a five billion year old roulette wheel,
and every asteroid might dream it could grow up to be
the cornerstone of a planet, and then come down
on the dinosaurs like an avalanche without sin
that threw the first rock at Mary Magdalene.
I don't want to disperse every breath I take and exhale
aurorally like veils, as lovely as they are, over the face of the sky
as if it had something indecent to hide like snow on a dungheap.
I don't think the dung needs to be dressed up like a festering virgin
that needs to be purified. Snowflakes on a slow methane furnace
I think the dung and the snow go the way of all flesh
though some walk, some run, some flow, some evaporate
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poem by Patrick White
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