Saturday, June 2, 2007

EXCELLENCE

Excellence in the midst of agony; the only protest that tears the heart, not the flesh, that binds as no chain can, no violence can corrupt. Not to overcome, but to transform, to be the lily in the swamp that breeds it, not the weed that crowds the water out. It’s a deal you can strike with pain; an embassy you can open up in hell with full diplomatic immunity. Make something beautiful and true that can churn the black fallout of a radioactive heart into a star. Shape a piece of wood and fix the broken paling on the gate. Turn a pot. Walk well. Master the art of extracting honey from a funeral bell without disturbing a bee. Show up with a bucket and mop, or pen and bottle of ink, brush and palette, and lend your lustre to the clarity of everything you see. There are horrors in the world, murder, starvation, suffering, inequity, hatred, war, disease; there are teenagers hanging from the limbs of ironwood trees, and children seeded in the salted soil of unbearable perversities, lambs gathered and sheered like clouds in the sky by the new shepherds who walk through the valley of the shadow of death with a rifle and a cock and an ideology, an incubus of the eyes, that sips the light from the face of a child and desecrates flesh to blood its crazed abstractions. Shock, grief, revulsion, and even the silence astonished into the deepest reserves of itself, and the light honed like a razor to slash back at the tragic derision that looks up from the mess of its ravage, and grins for the vision. And you say the world should end like a man condemned for unspeakable atrocities, and then you cringe in the apocalyptic shadow of the thought that it might. You sit in the ambiguous electric chair that’s wired to the chakra circuit-breakers of your own serpent fire like a spinal cord that’s about to pull the switch, and you die without a twitch. Martyred by your own party-line. Not death enough to till the grave, nor silo in the seed to save. Even the worm gathers the lumber of its chrysalis, its house of transformation, its cradle-tomb, from the rubble and the wreckage of the wounded seasons that wash ashore, and inching its way in like an hour hand or a threshold, emerges a black dragon unfolding its scintillant wings like the gilded diplomas of time. Why do you shuffle your doubts at the door? Do one thing well and all things out to the furthest star are elaborated perfectly. If you don’t know what to say, no word could abide the day, bury your voice in your wound and arise from the blame and the shame like the theme of a sweeter eloquence. Let the sun and the moon weave a finer sky than the auroral silk of your windproof illusions, a tent of fire, a water mirror silvered by its own tears, a palatial space where the comets and the peacocks open the eyes they trail in their wakes as if the inconceivable vastness that confounds them were urgent with stars and rain falling to find them. Life delights in itself when there’s no one on T.V.; the practise and the practitioner, an alloy of light and water more inseparably supple than the blade of the moon when it’s drawn from its sheath of blood and laid like a truce at the feet of another provisional answer. And you’re right. There really isn’t a choice because there’s no need to choose. All things by their very nature outgrow themselves creatively to advance the loss of themselves like a river in the night. Suffering is the mercy of the left hand that bleeds like a dark joy for the roses smeared on the palatte so they might flourish like seeing itself in the eyes of those elated, spontaneously, by the grace of their fallible excellence. Because it’s not the cut of the eye in the polished gold of the finished ring that shines; that’s a flower without a root; it’s the jewel in the stone, the pearl in its nacreous dream, the moon in its cloudy ore, the human in the aftermath, that adorns the blood on the thorn with a rose that congeals like a holy book in the heart of the fire.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT A THING TO SAY

Not a thing to say about anything and I don’t know what it is that I’m feeling so hopeless about but I’m trying to be intrigued enough by the misery that I might find the cure in the heart of the disease and shoot one fang of the moon into me to undo the death in the other. And there are macabre bruises on my solitude that I can’t explain and ways I hurt that I suspect are suffered in vain. And the lies tell me to the lies that listen, and the biggest lie of all falls for the truth. Or, the big lie eats the little lie and the little lie better come clean. Weary. The pain, dull. The longing, acute. For what; for whom? I’m dogpaddling in my own enzymes, my amygdala and hypothalamas in idle, no dopamines overloading my neurotransmitters as I send out sparse messages from my face that always end with a digital smile, just in case the aliens take offense easily. Though that’s a little slimey and facile. Just the same, what use would I be to anyone if I weren’t worthy of some of the blame some of the time for the great cosmic crime of being me, the rag I use to sop up my self-pity when I pour too much of myself into the empty looking glass, hoping a face will appear in the flash of the lightning that shatters the seer, that isn’t the understudy of mine. But the muse gags on my ashes everytime I burn for her in the crematorium of another star and when I do her portrait in blood, she pyres the painter like a chimney-sweep to burn off the karmic creosote in the chains of the lives I’ve dragged through hell like a comet for her before. Prehistoric artists sprayed carbon over their hands to invest the cave with their presence; people around here shatter the dry plaster like a skull and jam their feet into the walls, leaving treadmark icons in their drunken rage that prove the jest of unimpressed Neanderthals. Torn down. Depleted. Thinking every bell of early columbine that rings on the mossy rocks, will later swing back like a wrecking ball through a wedding cake, I stay down; heaping the floppy arms of the dead around me, I pretend that I’m dead until time stops fixing the hour hand like a bayonet to probe the corpses for life and walks out on the opening night of my pantomime among the silent transports of the ghouls who swarm me. I’m not much of an actor, but among the shadows of the dead, anything that moves is a hit.

PATRICK WHITE

I HAVE GROWN

I have grown significantly to understand that every throne I’ve ever sat upon was quicksand and that I am living leniently on the match-head of a planet waiting for the thumbnail of the moon to ignite it with one quick flick of crescent. Equine and apocalyptic as hell, and the irony is, more than possibly accurate. I’m running out of doors where I can billet my assassins; I keep giving my heart to women who reject it like a bloodbank without an overdraft. I’m a diffraction pattern in the twilight zone, in media res, between this world and the next, and that’s not the one where the herders and the hunters are having it out in a range war of religions. Like a page torn out of the multiverse, I’m just a zone of local cooling, a sunspot, and my neighbour is another, though we know we’re both just fooling when we call each other brother. Forty-three years a poet and a painter, intoxicated by the picture-music threading the fog of the sirens like a theme I couldn’t resist. Foolish, I suppose, not to have tied myself off like a lifeboat and rowed and rowed for years just to stay where I am, but I had to jettison my landing gear to achieve cruising altitude in the oxymoronic abyss that the sirens demanded, saying, live this, if your poetry isn’t just the romantic bloodletting of a rose from a vein that you’ve slashed on the moon, prove you’re not a lie to us, and conduct yourself like a terrorist, prepared, are you prepared?---to die for us. I cut the eyes out of an eclipse and wore it over my face like a ski-mask, and walked around in the busy market, weighing the world like a tomato in my hand, the original primordial atom, packed with explosives, ready to detonate on command, to delete and improve the world by splashing myself against the wall like a bucket of paint and see what I could make out of myself in the mess of the ensuing vision. It’s amazing how suggestive a real siren can be when you’re lying in an ambulance without any legs. So I learned to swim like a fish among the stars; the last archon of an extinct species from Mars, evicted when all the water went south, and I had to come up with a completely new medium, new atmosphere, new idiom, out of myself, ingeniously, given what I had to work with. I adapted to the solitude and silence of my own vast spaces within, and vowed like a candle, to root my flower in the dark like lightning. Now there’s a squad car outside the candy-store and a swan that barks like a god. Make of it what you will. The pebble doesn’t enquire after its ripples. I write without feedback, without telltale bubbles of meaning rising to the surface like survivors who want to crawl back up on land and start it all again. There’s not much point in panning for gold in an asteroid belt when the only way to tell one nugget from the next is to break your teeth biting into them like fortune-cookies enshrining the haloes and the horns of the prophetic comets that dash by like bunting on a campaign tour. Elect me your fate, and I promise to find a place for your dayold reflection somewhere on the plate, and a way to flag the fools down for easier detection. But I won’t tweak your mountainous erection like a gunshot when there are avalanche warnings all along the road, and the echoes return, born again, rehearsing their own names like fleeing refugees on a rosary of boulders that were left overs from Soddam and Gommorah. Better to write this way than to lie buried like the last laugh of a kingly line in the barrow of a dunghill, pleading like a seed for an upgraded resurrection. I may well be the last extant defect of a fallible perfection, and all the mistakes of the bruised morning glory are mine, and the snakey tines of these tendrils of blood get tangled up in the twine of my thought and no one knows how they got in nor how to get out, and the homologous combs of the mentally coiffed are useless against the love knots that have coiled into nooses around the neck of the wind that’s run out of excuses for inciting the spring to riot, but at least I don’t snitch my way through a poem like a hydrophobic divining rod rooting out the terrorist wells of the watershed in order to secure some heartland in the back pastures of God. It’s dangerous wherever I am. And flawed.

PATRICK WHITE

RAIN IN A SMALL TOWN

Rain in a small town at the beginning of spring and some of the trees are wondering if they might need a root canal, while others are putting their shoulders to the sky that’s stuck like a wheel in the road mud of the same old equinoctial revolutions that lengthen the day at the expense of the night and call the adjustment even. Brides are mostly boring, but the bloom on the cherry-bough, and Venus in the foam, leave me breathless. And, yes, the young women are restored to the forms that got bundled away like astronauts for the winter, and, no doubt about it, my blood runs to the window quicker should one walk by a little slower than the rest, smouldering like an eclipse of the moon I’d be crazy to plant seed under, but there you go; not everything’s covered by the farmer’s almagest, and there are some prophecies that are easily mislaid. But mostly, the cocked hammer falls on a wet cap whenever I squeeze the trigger of the moon from my shamanistic, sniper’s nest high in the new branches of this visionary tree. Though the whole tree flare like a struck match in the shadows, it seldom proves the prelude of a star, and even less, the genius of a smokeless fire intense enough to endure its own clarity that it casts the lamp aside like a shoddy avatar and grants itself to itself as the only wish worth making. Whoever we are. Grass and grazer alike. Or something more urban like the crucifix of a televangel razor fixed in its pulpit to thresh the nations like wheat should they deny the blood of the lamb inks their book of blades, Jesus stabbed in the ribs by a pleading microphone. Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani. And the news crews gathering like shepherds. And the analysts come like wise men to parse the death. And the web sites sincere as a credit card. And in the last days of Al Dajl, the red-haired liar, remember, your God has two eyes; the liar, only one: Muhammad. When women dress like men, when sex is savagely free, when the shepherds of the black camel build tall buildings in the desert, and a tree is planted in Israel in which no birds sing, the last man shall be Chinese and he will grovel in the dirt at his sister’s feet. The bells have not sweetened for all the autumns they’ve hung on the tree, for all the windfalls of doom that have thundered in the garden only to be absorbed back into the earth like rain. And the voices that call us to prayer from the nibs of their towers, haunting as a childless swing, befall us like the pollen and seeds of a dark flower without the likeness of a lover. Lemming climacterics of apocalyptic rapture, a place in the lifeboat of belief, mercy packed like a parachute, and the rest of us hurled into flood, fire, off the cliff, hurled into cyberspace, out the dazzled windows, into the kitchen middens of the Tapeian rock. Google it if you haven’t the Greek. I’m leaving the room. Outside the spring. The down of maple buds, baby grackles, supple women, and the rain, small violets under the duff of the grove. Not the feeble flame of salvation flickering behind the lampblacks of doom, not you, standing on my threshold like a spiritual broom, or an eager vacuum cleaner salesman, throwing dirt on my flying carpet, to suck it up like a grave. Rain falling in a small town, and the leaves like poets rushing into print. On every tree, a billion pamphlets declaring my afterlife in paradise is not delayed. Heaven meaning concisely, no one to save. And later tonight, walking from encounter to encounter with the earth as it keeps its ancient places, out to the far fields alone, to bathe my eyes like birds in the light of the last watch as it changes constellations, the great guesses, the great myths, I will not know who I am or why I was born to wonder why I was born, to eat to be hungry, to walk, sit, sleep, love, wake, dream, defecate, and die. Maybe the mind makes this place and everything I’m looking at is my own face elaborated into stars and birds and willows in lemon lingerie, the way I suspect a poem is, or maybe, there’s no one looking out through the history of my masks that fall away like blossoms and poems without ever knowing the fruit that came of what they conveyed, but walking out like smoke that has strayed too far into the solitude of its candle, I shall gaze up at the stars, silently elated, washed in cool flames, and think that my life and the night and their gesturing light are all well met and served, if I should remember their names.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MOON SMEARS ITS WAY

The moon smears it way over the windowpane like a garden snail, or a human heart, and I’m weary of wiping it off the cold glass, hoping to achieve a more suggestive nocturne. And there are rusty cans of old brushes, everyone of which eventually went mad and deaf trying to conduct the picture-music that composed them and the painter. What a ride, this long wave of a life that bears itself like a bottle without a message across the night sea, hoping some island that knows how to read might stoop to pick it up. If I mean anything I mean the sea. And it’s not hard, for all that I’ve kept in the depths, to see right through me. A single drop, if your eyes aren’t clouded by the cataracts of your thought, and you have it all. You can taste the wind and the sun and the stars in me, and if you were to take my pulse like a tide, to prove I’m still alive, it’s always the moon. But tonight, ill, and in the dark alone, bored with my age, and smouldering like a tiger in a cage, all stripes and bars, I wing the cold stone of the moon out over the idling water to see if I can make it skip three times before it sinks. And I really don’t care what anyone’s indifference thinks, I’m not there; you’re not here, and the lies you told roar like an ocean in your ear when I interrogate your shells to determine if the silence is indictable. Sick of understanding, sick of the excuses and the gates I have to make up to remain open to you, sick of my blood being mistaken for an oilspill and the eyepatches and eclipses my poems must wear to walk in your light on the bright side. I thought you were a bride of fire; I thought you were the night incarnate in a woman, and everything you wrote to me you meant. Silly in a man my age to expect Venus to step out of the airy froth of the seafoam like a gown at her feet, when all you were doing was just cooking wieners on a beach, impaling them on a pen, and thrusting them into the contorted driftwood of your sexual heat. Amen, or better yet, absitomen: may no evil come of my words, as I seep back into the undertow of the sky that sprawled across your shore, leaving an archive of stars in its wake that haven’t been seen since love did a double-take and sloughed the moon like a condom on a snake. Don’t be angry, don’t be bitter, you say, and prolong the infraction. You know what you’re doing and not doing and why. Did you forget to water the lie? Why should you be crazy, and I wear the straitjacket? Absence. Silence. Doubt. Houdini’s already got one his arms out, a breached baby twisting out of the womb. And if my heart once went off like a fire alarm in a pyramid, now it ticks like a clock in a tomb, wired to an afterlife that goes boom. What do you say to yourself, after what you’ve said to me? Do you take my books down from the shelf when it’s raining, and there’s nothing on T.V., and page the passion casually? Do you read the poems I wrote you in blood and love and fire and tears, believing you might be the labial m between creation and cremation that I’ve shaped my upheaval to like a muse for years, knowing the hoax was all on me? And that was okay, because of the eloquence of the illusion when no one knew what else to say. If I were the clown, then you were the solitary flower of his gushing bouquet, and it really doesn’t matter whose eye was ambushed by the water or feigned a painted tear; it was enough to put the fire out. It was enough to leave me here like an isolated wave trying to shoulder a scuttled lifeboat on the pitted moon back to the coast of an absent sea. How like a skull without eyes it all seems, and then to discover, even dead, that you can’t shake off the bad dreams, that these long shadows that flow out of me like the lifeblood of a mountain, or a slashed wrist, are not streams, but the ghosts of an ocean no one can save, wave after wave, returning, as always, too late to the grave. And that leaves me nothing but space, nothing but time, to converse with faceless voices in the emptiness, like echoes in a dry well that repeat whatever I tell myself to haul myself up out of the abyss like an eyelid of water and see that if there was ever a message in a bottle, it washed up in a rave of poetry, tides and tides ago, the foment of a moment, and broke like prophecy against the seawalls of Atlantis.

PATRICK WHITE

WHO AM I WRITING TO?

Who am I writing to? Is it you in your busy day, who have forgotten me, or is it the literati who will exhume my remains after a scourging of worms? All a matter of taste, I suppose, though it doesn’t much matter now in this collusive bottle of mind, if the wine get drunk on itself. If the target is not precise enough to earn the arrow, I’d rather burn like a sign in the heavens than pour myself into the dirty cup of a slovenly ear. Cataracts in the eye; flowers in the sky, perhaps, but it takes a lot of feathers to make a bird or even a pillow to dream on, and how many skies had to o.d. on their stars when the moon railed them like a razor before a single word could divine the darkness, and raise them up from their watershed? Or maybe I write for the dead; elaborating epitaphs on the invigilating boundary stones of the gaping incohesions I have jumped into again and again to save Faustus from Rome. A sound magician is a demi-god, but that’s an old rod that keeps turning into a snake every time it’s thrown down at pharoah’s feet. Snake eat snake. Why, Faustus, this is hell, nor are we out of it. Spells I cast on myself like voices to people the silence. It’s not the money, not the broken windows of fame, not even the women anymore that urges me to map the lightning with a name. And before anyone else says it, I’ll say it. I’m the mystic effusion of an elemental confusion that has siderealized the visions that burn like rivers in my head. But now that I’ve said it, and you’ve read it, let’s put a match to it like a flag at a protest rally with a third eye. When I’m not starbread, I’m kind of crumby. And even that’s just a half-moon of self-effacement, one foot in the attic, one in the basement. So maybe my tongue’s just French-kissing its own ear, and there’s never been anyone here to listen to the wind without grass or leaves, no one who could hear. But there are times when I can hear my enzymes turning like keys and chords to unlock new sequences of exponential metaphors. And I am all doors, swinging open, to cross the old thresholds into a vastness that even my windows hadn’t detected. And the grammar of the saying changes like the laws of physics warping Euclid in deep space, a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. Time stops and the light of the stars arrives before their future, and what I had thought was history, lives pendulously in the mystery like a bell. It’s one thing to move like matter; it’s another to bend like space, and still another to pull yourself out of the stovepipe of the Mad Hatter like a halo around a black hole. Of course, there are ways I would like to be regarded, but the dark won’t shine for the seeing, until they’re derisively discarded. Just regard the extreme chaos of conditioned conciousness. And there’s more being in the world than notoriety wants to confess, though the pundits of the great rehearsal would have it, more is less. So the play goes on without me just for a lark most of the time, and I’ve blown more than one lightbulb in the marquee of an entrancing line to comply with the intrusive suggestion of a sign that lit up like an opening night off Broadway, one of the hits of peripheral vision that couldn’t find a director. Now who’s a creator if there’s no audience to divine me through my works, and is it faith or face that heeds me more? Among the unborn, I am especially fond of a nineteen year old, as arrogantly pure as I was in the heat of my aspirations, whose ferocious approval at best will be a truce, not with the truth, but with the rigorous quality of a lack of lies, an absence of eyes in the dark. And no return address on the ark when it puts to sea, and only one of every kind to reanimate the peaks for posterity that the seeking might find the one who seeks, and the seeing not draw the blind.

PATRICK WHITE