The Dark God Flow Of Our Circuitous Blossomings Poem by Patrick White

The dark God flow of our circuitous blossomings,
the hourglass lips of two bubbles kissing
like membranes in a hyperspatial multiverse
where everything is possible ad infinitum,
the creative crossroads of contradictory energies
whirling like prayerwheels and dust devils
in all directions at once on the heels of our gnostic vertigo.
Are these wings or propellors? Or dizzy starfish?

Anybody know where I’m going with this?
Enlightened and lost. Guided by chaos
into shapeshifting modes of order? The mind
as it is. No table of contents to alert you
to what’s coming next. Or did we take
too much acid in the sixties? One too many
amoebically galactic lightshows with strobe lights?

So immersed in the algorithms of my intuition,
no reversing the emergency exit signs now,
I move into a deeper darkness, enlargements
of space, the stars separating in the vastness
like wildflowers at the end of autumn, grains
of pollen all that’s left of the garden. Always,

sorrow, anger shouldered as a responsibility
to people who can’t fight back, the moral legacy,
until recently, of having been born Canadian,
opportunistically trusting, healing, just as happy
to be overlooked as I am elated to be recognized.
My scars smile. My self-sufficiency, differential.

Good, good, so be it, but beyond the pale
where the moon is chopping wood with a double-bladed axe,
its light frosted to the bark, fingers aching
as if I’d been playing a guitar without callouses,
death’s brutal lack of preference in the night
that puts me on an equal footing with the animals
the birds, the people, and even the flies and spiders
that are trying to keep a little life alight within themselves,
why is it I always cut a solitary figure standing alone
staring up at the enormity of the stars, longing
for a larger frame of reference than a pink dominion
in a nineteen fifties’ atlas that asked permission
for its independence? I feel the inexorable onceness
of it all, remote, aloof, uncaring, yet wholly inclusive
as an extinction event in the awareness of being a witness
to it, a mere firefly of insight, no more than can be seen
in the drop of a dream in the galactic waterclock of the Milky Way
before death wakes us up to what we’ll never be again.

Unredeemably cold and immaculately beautiful as a knife blade,
the aesthetic horror that freezes in the blood
like some kind of polar ice cap that says, this far, but no further
engenders the poignancy of a wounded love in me
for everyone and thing that lives, and I sometimes think
even the rocks and the stars suffer the same fate we do,
that everyone is so rarely unique and irreplaceable,
so mystically specific and cosmically incomprehensible,
as crucially intimate as a stranger we met on death row,
as much in pain, and hope and joy, lost like a wandering starmap
in the labyrinth of their own fingerprints as I am,
I can’t help but cherish everyone as a revolutionary act
against our inevitable extermination. Once, for everything
and then decapitated zero like a reign of terror
we pass through like a nightmare of liberation
into a being so utterly free, like the stars on the growing edge
of invisibility, we’ll never see each other again.
At least not in these forms we so blithely assume are our own.

It can only make a fool of you to go on loving humanity,
life of all varieties, your own included, despite the evidence,
but there you go. So be it. What did it ever have to do
with me? Given I was born Canadian enough not
to want to belabour the issue. Given I can’t be any other way
than I am revealed to myself and interpreted by others, each a star
like Gemma in the northern crown of my abdicated
will to power, to move among the peasants and the paupers
as if crude ore and coal were the nature of all that lives
but once you accept you’re over your head in it like a nightsky
you begin to see, as your eyes adjust to the dark,
there’s diamonds and gold within everyone. Motherlodes of it.
Perseids of shining panspermically across the universe.
Zodiacs of the way we arrange the stars to accommodate our fates
without leaving a lasting impression upon anything
beyond the occasional Burgess Shale or Library of Ashurbanipal.
Ciphers of meaning neither real nor unreal,
watercolor starmaps of the paths we take in life
bleeding into one another like bloodbanks of roses
we dance with in our teeth awhile as our hearts and bodies
move to the picture music of our mindstreams, and then
throw in our graves as if the beauty we once danced with,
were the least perishable of the flowers we had to offer
the unanswerable brevity of knowing the silence
that follows indelibly in our expanding wake lasts forever.