Jumped Out Of Nothing
Jumped out of nothing. The fish did. Golden.
A flake of the moon. When I wasn't looking.
Into a lifeboat cupping something precious in its hands.
The mind an old junkyard that's been collecting windows too long.
So many points of view. So many glass eyes
looking for the stuffed animals they belong to.
Death after knowledge. The silence that follows the music
after the bird has flown. Is the abyss death's rebuke
of life's dangerous proposal to let us look through the keyhole
at what's going on in the uninhabitable room next door?
To dream a little in the interim between two enormities
abstracted from the need of our perishing to persist
aeonic light years beyond anything we can imagine?
The golden fish jumps into the boat like an unsought insight.
No hook in it. And you can tell by the scales of light it emanates
it's risen from the starless darkness of its own depths
like moonrise out of the encyclopedic corals
of accumulated knowledge that's found a place for everything
like a polyp on a library shelf, calcium in a cave
shaping itself into temples from the top down.
Stalagmites and stalactites of cathedrals inspired by water
to enshrine themselves in form as an aid to the blind.
Though things along the way might change
does the journey stay the same ad infinitum?
Did you amount to everything you dreamed you might be,
or were there more stairs to climb than doors to enter,
more walls than windows in the way you saw things?
I've seen the most sublime things humbled by their own insignificance.
And I think I've heard God more than once
weeping at the stern of a sinking ship for a turn of events
she couldn't do anything about once they were set in motion.
And I've listened to people my whole life
talking in their sleep about how to put a rudder on a dream
as if there were a focus and a direction for life to flow in
like a solid, particulate thing instead of the wandering wavelength
of this exiled mirage of water that it appears to be
depending on the mood of the chameleonic mirror you're looking into.
The donkey looks into the well and the well looks back at the donkey.
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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