Monday, January 26, 2009

DOWNGRADING THE IMPORTANCE

DOWNGRADING THE IMPORTANCE


Downgrading the importance

of who I was yesterday

to see who I might be today

there’s no window

there’s no mirror

there’s no mind

that retains a trace of me.

I am trashed like a kite on a mountaintop,

torn up like the blueprint of a flawed constellation

that might have made things better

for anyone born under it

like a thirteenth house of the zodiac

that’s open all night to the homeless.

Time makes windchimes

out of the skeletons of young poets

and I can still pick out a few of mine

trying to untangle themselves

from the downed powerlines

of their defective voices.

Born on an island

I stood by the sea

and made choices.

I was young

and wanted to live like life

beyond my means.

And this day forty years later

is just as much a part of then

as now is,

so there’s just as much to spend

and though the features have changed

and the stars been rearranged

to marquee different names,

the seeing remains the same

and the wine is just as sweet

in the cracked

as it is in the whole cup.

I sit down with the moon

and we both drink up

at the backdoor of the asylum

neither of us could save

until we’re both hilariously empty,

knowing, the way life flows,

we’ll never run out of ourselves.

But I don’t let the chooser

talk to the chosen

in my voice anymore

and if the odd road

still barges through the door

now and then

to track thresholds all over the floor

like a painted dance for war and rain,

I’ll still shed a few feathers of light

from the black hole of my brain

to commute the cause.

It’s important to heed the blind

but a true noetic cosmology

is the heretic of its own laws

and doesn’t leave anything behind

that could be construed

as a relic, a derelict, or a sign.

No window.

No mirror.

No mind.


PATRICK WHITE