Estrangement Yoked To The Incompatible Poem by Patrick White

Estrangement yoked to the incompatible, is it
some kind of heartless joke? Surrealistic, surely,
don’t average out the crucials and tell me
it’s a compromised oxymoron. I’m twisted enough
to see further than that. My imagination
can remember things that haven’t happened yet,
and equally forget the past wasn’t possible.
A labyrinth of wormholes in the hull of a shipwrecked moon.

A snakepit of incisive perceptions. A unified field theory
knotted out of stray wavelengths into the flying carpet
of a cosmic hymen that makes a big bang
beating on the membrane of a drum of water,
jazzy butterflies practising rimshots with their antennae
on the third eye of another bubble floating in hyperspace
that feels like a kiss on your forehead from your daughter
for something you haven’t got the slightest notion of
except there’s something quantumly entangled about love.

Since I was sixteen, in a first year astronomy class,
I’ve always thought you had to add a factor for mind
to Einstein’s energy, mass, light equation if you want
to see the whole of the big picture, not just the postage stamp
field of view of a careerist visionary writing haiku
he hopes to get published in a journal of cherry blossoms,
but the Bayeux Tapestry, Monet’s waterlilies in the Tuileries,
thinking if life and death can open their eyes that wide,
how long would it take a comet of thought to cross
the abyss of the nightsky of the mind before I’m
expansive enough to accommodate the many in the one
like a dimension of intelligent awareness beyond
the other eleven, for the moment, we’re circumscribed by.

Where’s the element for mind in the periodic table?
Am I just a shadow of my own constituents,
or did someone spike the waters of life with a star
on the sly to lead me into believing that mind
was more luminous than mere light and I wasn’t
just glassblowing the hash pipe of an alternative universe
in the land of the cosmological lotus-eaters
dreaming like Cambridge brahmins in deep sleep
that I’m the quantum aura of a dream figure
that got sucked down the black hole of a trap door spider
waiting like the singularity of a predator inside
to weave me into the flatlining mandala
of a new cosmic web that drips like silk
and embalming fluid from its hourglass abdomen.

My body a bag of water with nine holes in it
I’m always paying tribute like a feudal river
on its way back to the sea like an imperial bloodstream
with spoils of oxygen and protein led in chains
like the dna of slavemeat by the triumphant legions
behind the throne of the empire that’s risen like Rome
from the pagan dead within me like a lion
reborn in the blood of the lamb on an altar in the Forum.

I may be mad, quantum foam frothing like the sea
with hydrophobia of the mouth, contrails
of white phosphorus like jellyfish in a cloud chamber
but I’d rather be included in the picture-music
of a nightbird with a communal sense of solitude
than be excluded like the retinal circus
of a cameraman circling the earth like a telescope
he never turns on himself as if it were his head, not mine
under the shutter of the guillotine every time I blink
and a new world issues from the void in my absence.