O Igneous Rose
O igneous rose, are you the furnace or the urn of the butterfly?
Or should I ask the vatic wind which pyre is mine?
Will I be be food for the stars again, will I mulch
the dark matter of the roots with my remains
or will my ashes retain some semblance of the light
like the ghost feeling in the heart of a spiritual amputee
or linger among archetypes like fossils in the Burgess Shale
that haven't reached their full potential yet?
Not Hell, not Heaven, not Hades, Sheol, Tartarus
Dis, Avernus, Jana, Jahannum, Nirvana, Samsara,
or the great abyss where nothing is even in the slightest,
and presence, and absence, and time aren't even
anachronisms of their past lives. I'm not going
anywhere when I die, because death is not discontinuous
from life in the known universe, though one's a lifeboat
and the other's what you need it for to stay afloat.
Wherever your mind walks in unison with your heart
deep in emotional thought without too much attention
to where you're going, you break trail like a river
and the stars start flowing into your alluvial fields
and the green mountains you left walk with you
all the way into the pyramids like the source of the Nile,
not tombs of death, but tombs of life pointing like starmaps
to the indelibility of your afterlife in Orion
as the scion of a great house of mystic hunters.
I'll be here. Just behind your eyelids. Like a dream
I'm having until things come true again for the sake
of distinguishing my extinction from one bone to the next
like yarrow sticks throwing away their crutches
like the hands of a clock to read the Book of Changes
to see what's bubbling up like the multiverse from the bottom
and every eye of air, each a complete science unto itself
or an occult art, where it's been fully realized
chaos is the root of all imagination
even when it's writing Horatian odes and haikus.
Chaos is as smooth as Hermes writing his own flightplan
with his heels, and where he arrives, is as much of a message
as the word he holds in his mouth
like coin for the ferryman in his moonboat
at the end of the long wharves that are the last to see us off
to the other side of everywhere. O come now
surely you didn't think life was going to let you off
its prophetic hook that easily before it got
its last crescent snagged like a koan in the mouth
of the golden fish that thrives in the dead seas of the moon
that reels it in for questioning, only to throw it back?
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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