Now Halcyon Seas
Now halcyon seas, the Kingfisher Star, Alcyone.
No sign of ever having drowned here. Most
are as unaware of the sentient space they're immersed in
as a fish is of the water it wears like skin
or a bird of the air it plunges through. I was
given a brain. The universe was rolled up
into a ball of starmud, a planetesimal of my own,
that was meant to receive a lot more than it
could ever transmit. The way this bursting bubble
of a multiverse gets you to listen to it
once you get sick of listening to your own voice
trying to lift words and feelings like an ant
with a butterfly wing in its mandibles like a sail
that knows more about which way the wind is blowing
than it does. I may be only a whisper
of the shriek I used to be in a much denser medium
than this when I felt my lungs being crushed like bag-pipes
by the implosions of a black dwarf. Thirteen tons
per cubic centimetre of mass. Things weighed
heavily on me back then like basso-profundo bells
with overactive pituitary glands in a shell game
of the pea in the pod. Maybe I was looking for God,
and God was playing hard to get, who knows,
but the devil, time, death, suffering and the brutality
of certain modes of oxymoronic mystic bliss
have blown like compassionate winds
on my magma ever since like a mother
cooling the burns on her only child's fingers
as if she were blowing out a votive candelabra in a church.
The river reeds are drawing maps of my mindstream.
I'm going with the flow without letting go.
Serpentine currents of picture-music playing me
like a cobra plays a flute in the sway of things.
Precisely where you run out of rope and road
to hang yourself is where the way begins and ends.
I look up at the stars tonight, and as aloof as they are,
my heart opens up like a black waterlily, and says,
without any prompting from me, after all these lightyears
of staring at each other, they in their heights, and me
in the places I had to climb up to see. Friends.
Because it's not hard to imagine them suffering
the way I do, shooting into the dark on the midway of life,
like a ray of light hoping to hit a flower or two
to let them know it's time to wake up like radio telescopes
looking for signs of extraterrestrial life
like a loveletter that doesn't have to be opened with a knife.
The dire wolves of all my Pleistocene ferocities, extinct,
I don't think Gandhi's hearing footsteps coming up on him
from behind, to bring him down like a bison on the run,
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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