Sunday, July 26, 2009

YOU'RE AN ORCHARD

YOU’RE AN ORCHARD

 

You’re an orchard.

You’re the flower that sweetens the dark

without being seen.

You’re the first shadow of a cloud on the moon.

I’ve seen your face. A photo.

It’s beautiful.

But I’ve never touched it

and the things you write to me

almost make me afraid

of being the man

I always hoped I could be

even if it were just to remain true

to the farce of the illusion.

So many times

I’ve been poured out of my life

like blood from a wound

shocked to find itself suddenly out in the open

without a way to get back to its heart

and the worst was to realize

the deepest wounds

had thrust the poison tips of their spears

through me from the inside.

There was nothing else to do but die

and hope I could learn to master myself

like a new medium without a message for help

from a lifeboat that never rescued anyone.

I learned to bluff my way through experience

like a gambler who sits down at a table

without any money

or witness over his shoulder.

I balanced my constellations

like a house of cards

and slowly over the eras

of life in the igneous snakepits of hell

where the night smells like coal

I squeezed myself out of the darkness

like demonically enlightened diamonds

that flowed like water out of a stone

as I felt the weight

of one of the robes of life

fall lightly across my shoulders like a sky

like grass on a hill

like the moon on an unnamed lake.

A sword in the sewer

that took me back

like a mortally wounded dimension

or a dragon among the firefly angels

that came to me like words,

I was equally at home in all the mirrors

that I wore like scales and skin.

But sometimes it’s harder to wake up

from a dream you’re not having

than it is the one you are

and the blades of the crescent moons

in the ferocious eyes

of even the most estranged dragons

eventually turn into scars.

It may be the greatest of follies

to endure the agony of longing

for what you know you can never attain,

and not at all crucial

that you’ve never been crucial to anyone,

and love’s no more than a bone

that’s been unmarrowed,

and a heart unhinged by desire

isn’t the makings of a bird,

but the phoenix, the salamander,

the dragon, the demon all know

how to grow in the fires of illusion

like a burning ladder of thresholds

up to the stars 

or the themes of homeless lamps

you can’t put out.

That’s why you’re

the black kissing stone

before it fell from heaven,

the peerless window

before it’s been looked through

and made heavy over the years

by the glass tears that crawl

like eras of sorrow

across the wastes of the brutal clarity

of the pain and confusion

in so many eyes.

Time is the true temperature of the world

but I have always lived critically

in the slums of a fever that is about to break

into a whole new world view

laid like a cool night sky across my forehead.

When I conceive of you, when

I summon you from far away

like a tree on a hill where I’m buried

to be close to me awhile in all this solitude

I don’t know what gathers out of space

but I always see a discarded veil

of startled stars 

before I see your face

in the black mirror of one my scales

like an apparition in the fires

of the mystic auroras

a dragon breathes like colours

nobody’s ever seen before

when he’s dreaming on his own.

And it never fails

that when I go out digging for fossils

on the alien planets

I used to call home

I’m always shocked to find

my own constellation

huddled in a darkness of bone

trying to divine an explanation

for the strange radiance

that shines out even underground

like uranium without a half-life

that’s affixed its dark star like a gene

to the shapeshifting chromosome

that dreams of all the things that might have been

even as it makes you

the new colour of my eyes.

There’s a light that illuminates.

And there’s a light that clarifies.

And then there are all those billions of stars

that shine inwards

like destinies that somehow

got turned around

like black Kaabas in the night

to face in all directions

without a needle in the compass of insight

to say where they’re going.

But I’m not looking for dawn in the west

or shells in the mountains,

or starmaps in the Burgess Shales

and these days the grails

I hid like Easter eggs

all over the garden

can find their way back to me

as far as I’m concerned.

I’m bored with the old devotions

that sent my native intelligence

to finishing school

to deepen my grasp

of their primordial ignorance

beyond reproach.

I’ve returned like water

to the crazy wisdom of my senses

by leaking out of my own hair

like a comet out of a coma

or the long breath of a waking dragon

in the cold, night air

whose seeing

is older than signs.

I’ve come down from my constellation

like a painter climbs down

a scaffolding of dots and lines

where he’s just finished

a masterpiece for the blind

like a permanent eclipse of the moon.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


THE ABSTRACT MUSES OF FRAUD

 

THE ABSTRACT MUSES OF FRAUD

 

The abstract muses of fraud

sluffing their skins

like inspiration

in the dry wells

of a mountain spring

trying to clear their voices

of the world

to sing about nothing.

It’s as if a tree

were to kill all its birds

in order to speak for itself

in flightless words that fall from their lips

like naked fledglings

from treacherous nests.

They write all night

by the light of a candle

that’s burning like an arsonist

in a scriptorium

for a fire with more than one flame.

And even that would be a good beginning

but they think poetry

is an enigmatic, decoding machine

on a World War Two German submarine

and their own words

don’t trust them enough

to tell them there’s water in the periscope

and no one in the last lifeboat

to abandon ship

except the rats who know better

than to go down with the bad captains

true to the scuttled fleets

of the oceanic loveletters

that have broken their sails on the moon,

their hulls crushed like fortune-cookies

against the rocks of their own messages

as they try to swim with the mermaids

like dead fish in a market.

Literature is what Rilke said.

Poetry is what was said to Rilke.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


THE ABSTRACT MUSES OF FRAUD

 

THE ABSTRACT MUSES OF FRAUD

 

The abstract muses of fraud

sluffing their skins

like inspiration

in the dry wells

of a mountain spring

trying to clear their voices

of the world

to sing about nothing.

It’s as if a tree

were to kill all its birds

in order to speak for itself

in flightless words that fall from their lips

like naked fledglings

from treacherous nests.

They write all night

by the light of a candle

that’s burning like an arsonist

in a scriptorium

for a fire with more than one flame.

And even that would be a good beginning

but they think poetry

is an enigmatic, decoding machine

on a World War Two German submarine

and their own words

don’t trust them enough

to tell them there’s water in the periscope

and no one in the last lifeboat

to abandon ship

except the rats who know better

than to go down with the bad captains

true to the scuttled fleets

of the oceanic loveletters

that have broken their sails on the moon,

their hulls crushed like fortune-cookies

against the rocks of their own messages

as they try to swim with the mermaids

like dead fish in a market.

Literature is what Rilke said.

Poetry is what was said to Rilke.

 

PATRICK WHITE