And It's Not Hard To See I'm Wandering In A Dry Abyss
And it's not hard to see I'm wandering in a dry abyss
trying to squeeze tears as readily out of the stars as the desert
that turns everything that lives here into a chronic exile.
Don't know if I'm talking to a mirage, a reflection of some
aspect of the dark side of the moon I can't see from here,
an eidolon, a fractal of my self-similarity, a 3D projection
of my pineal gland emanating images into a creatively holographic space
and one of them is wearing your face like smoke from a fire
I'm sitting around like a frog at the autumnal equinox
beside a burning waterlily with a parched mouth.
Matters a lot, but that's ok. I've had visitations before
and I know this kind of seance can either go ethereal or carnate
and sometimes, though it's a lottery, not a spiritual discipline, both.
If my solitude talks to its own echo like a water sylph
in a housewell full of stars, who's to say that isn't
my kind of telescope? That some eyes can see further
than mirrors and lenses, and space is riddled with them
like the golden ratios behind galaxies and black holes
I keep throwing sunflower seeds into hoping they'll root and bloom.
I am immensely aware of my inconsequence in the world,
and the fact that there's vanity even in that. No matter.
As close to selfless as I want to get for awhile.
I paint a lot. I write even more. But the best things I see
come to me spontaneously in the early morning
before the light turns apostate at noon, and late at night
when I'm haunting the Tay River with the willows,
or watching lightning in a tantric rage above the rooftops of Perth.
And more than once I've talked my ghost
back into the grave before dawn evaporated us both
like morning stars in the mist on a lake rising
like the wild swans of the moon above the ragged elms.
Within me, where the universe lives, you're a muse
of dark energy expanding the starfields like space into the unknown,
and I'm growing new eyes like the T Tauri stars in the Pleiades,
and I'm digging up my own fossils in the bone pits
on the shepherd moons of all my most sacred annihilations,
and I'm adding a new shrine to my visual lobe
to see in the dark what shape of the universe you are,
and if you look at the moon, sometimes, as I do,
like the cold stone of an enlightened skull,
or a nocturnal scar that lucidly transcended the wound.
Right now my mouth is an occult grammar of black diamonds,
a fountain at midnight, learning to articulate your stars
like the glyphs of new metaphors that are still deciphering me
to adorn the mystery of this encounter with you
like the moon in the night mirror of the Black Taj Mahal
in sacred syllables that will leave the frogs and the nightbirds
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poem by Patrick White
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