I Drag On My Cigarette
I drag on my cigarette
and pull the coffee up to my mouth
as if I were officiating at a sacrament
and it were some holy bell
extolling the black wine of the bean.
I am always more in the morning
than I will be again all day
and the light is creative until precisely noon
and I am at peace in the impersonal intimacy
of flowing along like a star or a man or a leaf
in this great dynamic that never goes anywhere outside itself
like a bloodstream, a mindstream, the nightstream
that flashes in the woods like the eyes of a beautiful woman,
and yet all these worlds within worlds move with it
as fluently as thought and feeling
in a mind that is not divided by decisions
or trying to locate itself like a constellation
on a starmap in the rain,
insanely fitting every dropp
with the axis of a pin
to divine the source of the shining.
And it's always been a mystery to me
how I can be so ignorant and all-seeing simultaneously
but what keeps me alive, breathing, beating, baffled and alert,
a gust of awareness, of wheeling air and images
in a moment of joy and dispersal
where the light touches the dirt like a lover
and the dirt rises,
is this infinite instance
of an inconceivable intelligence so intimately close
the flame leaps from the fire,
and the moon falls from its flower
like the petal of an hour that overslept
and the birds are swimming in the shadow-waters of the trees
like elegant, inexhaustible pens in ink
that leave no trace on the sky of anything
beyond what the mind can think
until it stops turning the days like the pages
of a journal only the wind keeps
like autumn leaves and mindless sages
and learns from the seed-mouth how to sing
of the abundance that flows from its undoing.
Stop trying to prune the rose with its own thorns.
You can't put serpent fire out with water
or grasp a question by the neck
to milk the crescents of the moon for an antidote.
Would you put a bit in the mouth of the wave?
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
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