Something Continental Within Me Rising
Something continental within me rising.
Atlantis, surfacing. Pangaea coming back together,
synarthritically, after diversifying its sentient life forms,
from the preludes of the Burgess Shale
to the double-beamed diplodeci of Patagonia.
I can feel the shoulders of an ancient ocean
heaving up beneath me like a Leviathan of life
with the power to smash headlong through
the hull of the lifeboat of my psyche, or tip me
like a seal off this last ice floe I'm clinging to in the Arctic
with four polar bears, Henry Hudson, and a terrified tern.
Sublimely underwhelmed, everything I once transcended
crossing a burning bridge of stars in a long firewalk
now subscended like the underside of a leaf or a starmap
as if my vision of life, and this thread of blood,
this small mindstream at night I am in it, is being
woven and unravelled by the moon I'm giving birth to
in a fire womb of an underwater fumarole
umbilically connected to the magmatic core of the earth,
hydrogen sulphide mythically inflating the scale of life.
I'm heading into a bloodstorm with a ragged poem
like a flag of surrender for a sail on a life raft I lashed together
from the available driftwood that washed up on my shores
like the contorted corpses of those who had drowned in agony,
trying, as I have, for light years, to get to the other side before I die
in this tidal pool of shore-hugging ego that esteems itself
the third eye of the great nightsea beyond it
and when it's full of stars, the parabolic mirror
of a reflecting telescope in orbit around itself like a deer fly.
The earth is turning into quicksand under my feet.
O, earth, gape! A touch Marlovian, perhaps,
and a sound magician might make a demi-god,
but demi-gods don't always make the most sound magicians.
My skyscrapers are loosing their footing
like needles skipping grooves across an old fashioned record
of the celestial spheres, striated by retreating glaciers
trying to revive the last word of their literary careers,
like fireflies with enfibulators come to jump start their art
too late, too late, to go south with the other birds.
The mourning dove flees, but the crow winters with its heart
like a continent of coal deep freezing into diamonds
when a dark muse seizes it by the throat like an eclipse
and it cries out in the starless night of the uncomprehending abyss
across the ice-glazed eyelids of the blood-stained snows,
I am the ocean in the eye of a black rose.
I am the prophetic passion of fire in the skull of a dragon.
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poem by Patrick White
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