Saturday, September 26, 2009

WHEN ALL YOUR STARS ARE TRASHED

WHEN ALL YOUR STARS ARE TRASHED

 

When all your stars are trashed

and the mirrors are bleeding

and the water’s turning back into wine

and your heart is just another cruel event

in a vast space

where the black holes

that eat their own placentas

when they give birth to the galaxies

are not always immediately evident

and to judge from the way

they can turn the place inside out

like the features of a human face in pain,

the womb and the tomb

that consumes what it creates,

the baby and the corpse

summoned out of the darkness

by the same lure of the fire

that is the first and last breath of desire,

ignorance and enlightenment

all rolled up into one stark insight

that lays you out like the anti-Christ

in a volcano for a manger;

to judge from nullity of this,

there’s no place you can conceal yourself,

and no point to the expanding circumferences

of the way you keep trying to reveal yourself

like water to water when it rains.

When all your stars are trashed

like black dwarfs on a roll of the dice

and hope is a cowardly virtue

that won’t look you in the face,

and your sorrow is an unsuccessful séance

trying to call back a dream that died young,

and there’s nothing to let go of

because everything’s been torn out of your hands,

don’t look for illusory cures

in the heart of illusory diseases,

dipping the other wing of the fly in your milk

to counter the taint

or try to stand back from yourself

to clarify the grain of the view

as if you were a mirage of cubist pixels

hovering over a desert like a mirror on acid,

or apply hot poultices of suspicion

to the gangrenous wound

of the swollen moon

that has become of your heart

to draw your friends out like an infection,

and if you’re still a novice

dissembling in your emptiness

before the great impersonality

of the endless, catatonic space

that has freeze-dried your face,

don’t try to stand your ground

like a lonely cornerstone

when gravity falters

and you’re looking for lifeboats

in the spirit’s lost and found

because there are waves all around

but no shore,

no islands in the storm,

no continents in the offing

that haven’t already sunk

that could survive you.

 

PATRICK WHITE