Wednesday, May 27, 2009

YOU READ MY POETRY

YOU READ MY POETRY

 

You read my poetry

and you need a locus,

something to hang on to,

a familiar milieu, a focus,

right ascension and declination,

a starmap and astrolabe,

and the usual pictures painted

on the lense of the usual telescope.

If I had wanted you to follow me

I would have dropped breadcrumbs,

I would have spray-bombed the trees

an adolescent cadmium red

to show you where the road goes.

I may have been pulled like a weed

from the garden of Eden

and tossed to the wilder side of things,

a meteor among boundary stones,

but that doesn’t mean my darkness is tar,

or all these stars are a kind of quicksand

youre sinking through like a sculptor

swimming through stone

with a chisel in your hand.

Maybe you’re just the wrong tool for the job.

Maybe you’re trying to follow the music with a map.

Maybe you haven’t come to terms

with eleven dimensions yet

and you’re still standing at the gates

of your own singularity, hat in hand,

waiting for a passport

incommensurably as pi

hoping for refugee status.

Maybe you don’t know

the whole universe

begins with a kiss

between the lips

of two membranes

in an ocean of dimensions

beyond the reach of your sensible wave

and the big bang

is not the beginning

but the afterbirth of the matter.

It’s hard to believe that your mind is free

when you’re standing there

with chains in your hand

counting rosaries like vertebrae.

It’s hard to know what to say

that might amuse you

outside of convention,

but that doesn’t mean

I’ve spent my life

trying to find

a new way to confuse you.

If I revel in the simulacra

like a kid in the fall playing in leaves,

if I kick a stone down the road like the earth as far as it can go

or use the moon to plumb the well

of my raindrop depths,

or try to walk on fire, stars, water,

hoping my feet are better lifeboats

than my migratory reasons are

birds for all seasons,

or I’m kind to the illusions

I had to leave along the way

like roadside flowers

closing in eclipse,

it may well be

the playful compassion of fools

that exempts the wise man

like a hard rock on the mountain

from the avalanche

of cornerstones and schools

you keep bringing down upon yourself like an echo.

You might hear a pair of morning doves in the trees

and the bee in the burgundy ear of the hollyhock

and all the key frequencies of string theory

and know how to finger them masterfully

leaping from fret to fret

like balance beams

and well-worn thresholds

up and down your neck

like serpent-fire through your open chakras,

but to judge from the way you look at me

you’ve never once

cupped your hands

like a lifeboat in the mindstream

and washed your face off in the music

so you could see.

 

PATRICK WHITE