Silence and Solitude
Solitude and silence. The emptiness of the living moment
subsumed in the mundane middens of the soul, clam shells
and sheep bones, the shucked content of the heart
cherished again as the afterlife of the evidence
I once lived here along with everyone else.
Before I write, this archaeological seance I hold with myself,
this ingathering of everyone I've ever been
flowing back into me where the mindstream meets the sea.
The continuous stillness of this contiguous awareness
where everything is a symbolic event in a dream
trying to wake up from itself to set the dream people free.
Emotional effusions of the moon bleeding among the coral.
Solar flares of conceptual insight returning like ingrown hairs
to the source of their deception like unwanted children
though I've franchised orphanages all over my mindscape
to shelter my rational thought from the persecutions of my intuition.
Serpent's tongues that have been struck by black lightning
humming like a choir of tuning forks half a note off
like a lie they told God, they've been living ever since.
No piety. But a natural kind of reverence for the life of the mind
breathing me in and out of my body like a bellows
trying to boil spiritual gold out of my default metal of lead
as things begin to heat up like the tongue of a sword
on the anvil of my voice. And by that I know
prophetic heads are going to roll on the growing edge
of an imaginative insurgency nothing flammable with life
can resist for long. I know anything I say about this,
if experience hasn't cooked you in the same cauldron
I was born in, will seem unpatently absurd, but then
so are thermals in the open fields just before sunset
and the hawks that ride them for the sheer joy of airing their wings
unpertrubed by what's moving in the grass down below.
Infinite grammars. Myriad alphabets. Space talks in tongues.
Everything that is lives and isn't intelligent, but intelligence itself.
Chaos the mercurial cornerstone of an order that's lost
the rhythm of life trying to syncopate its heartbeat
to the unmusical paradigms of stone-eared preconceptions.
I see crows with rubies in their beaks as if
they'd just isolated the gene for symmetry.
In this miasmic swirl of images and wavelengths,
third eyes coalescing like starclusters
out of clouds of unknowing breaking into light,
and the shadows they cast no less prepossessing,
how uninhabitable I feel as a planet hoping the night
will prove me wrong and make all things
communicable and clear as a mother tongue
I've been speaking for years without knowing it
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poem by Patrick White
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