Saturday, November 21, 2009

SPARE ME

SPARE ME

 

Spare me the inky, thinky glue

and matchstick rafters of your philosophy

piled like a pyre to proposition a corpse

or I’ll show you what a snappy Zippo can do.

And don’t pour honey all over my head

trying to turnpike a tarpit

into an asphalt highway with a toll booth

when you know there are all kinds of extinct species

I like to keep like memories to myself

and I don’t have a sweet tooth for candied stars.

There are dark truths in the night

that keep the light to themselves,

occasions of insight

whose light has never fallen upon anyone

who could see.

The sun at midnight

isn’t blinded by its own lucidity.

And when reality sits down to play with me

there are no eyes or mirrors up its sleeve.

Average out the crucials as you wish

and believe whatever you want to believe,

order the trees to pull themselves up by their bootstraps,

conceive and be conceived by life

like the dawn of a book you haven’t written yet.

Wash the night off your butterflies like soot

changing shifts at the small factories

they’ve adapted to like pollen

or pin them like poppies and medals

to the chests of the fallen as loss requires.

Who knows?

You might make a choir

out of the orchard in winter yet

and raise all that roadkill like a messianic vet

alone in the wilderness

listening to the bush wolves and racoons

like angels and demons

howling in the bowels

of the maggots and turkey-vultures

attending to caloric conversions of their own.

But you can’t add to the lustre of the dark mirror

whose clear light is the eye of the void

by washing mud off with mud.

It’s one thing to see things in the light

but it’s wholly another

to see them illuminated

by the light within the light

that is their dark mother.

Anyway, it’s not really crucial

whether you have the eyes for it or not,

because the way things come together here

where we stand in unknowing wonderment before the stars

like rootless trees still swinging from our own branches

of feeling and thought,

is all ways at once.

So it’s as good a medium as any

to express yourself

by going into hiding.

Deus absconditus.

Gods do it to conserve energy.

As it is to go off like the Big Bang

and squander yourself like atoms

on the minutiae of creation.

There are infinite centres in the eye of the void

falling through space

like uncradled angels of rain right now

to give birth to the boundless circles

that are growing you like a tree

by expanding your radii

all at once in every direction

like a pulse, a star, a wave, a snake, an insight

riding its own sentience like the sea

that finds it one and the same

to walk on stars

without burning its feet

as it does to walk barefoot on water like you

leaving your shoes on land

where all journeys end in their own beginning

like mangers of fallen fruit.

Whether you’re looking for God

in the spirit’s lost and found

or the the true undemonized nature

of reality and mind

behind the veil of a faceless dimension

that mans and unmans the measure of all things

in the lightmirrors it takes a thought to cross your mind

from the perennial beginning,

haven’t you noticed how the needle of the compass

you’re using to grope the curbs of your own coasts

like a blind man witching his way with a stick

across a street when the lights turn

keeps pointing back at you

like a crosswalk following the maps

you’ve laid out to explore the topography

of your own used thresholds?

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


YOU NEVER BECAME A MEMORY

YOU NEVER BECAME A MEMORY

 

You never became a memory.

You remain as you are in my life.

A living compassionate presence.

I have forgotten more of me

than I ever could of you.

Whenever I want to see beyond the light

I see through your eyes

everything you wanted to show me

that was not petty or tragic or cruel.

I was a profound fool

but you taught me how

to add my darkness to the night

to enhance the shining.

And even now

when things aren’t flowering well

I still reach out for you by deepening my roots.

As if I could touch your face again

like a muse of water

lost in her own reflection.

As if I could ignite the same fires again

that blossomed on the dead branch

of the witching wand

that inspired the stars

who thought they had seen everything

to marvel at their own perfection in you.

Inspiratrix of the blue waterstars

that burned like chandeliers

among the constellations of the lilies

pluming themselves like swans

in the feathers of the moon,

how I long to be eclipsed and enlightened again

like a chameleon reflecting the mood of your beauty

as I did before these windows came

like glass-eyed calendars between us

to prove that time isn’t space. It’s pain.

And change is an absolute

that doesn’t like its relatives.

My angel misses you.

My demon misses you

so badly at times

I can’t look into the abyss for long

without impeaching my mind

for its awareness of an emptiness

that aches like an existential absurdity

to be put out of its misery

for being born blind deaf and dumb

about whose wind on the waters is rocking

the cradles and crucibles of creation.

The Medusa holds her tits out

like snakepits and grails

and I never know which one to drink from

or if the poison and the antidote

are just the opposite fangs of the moon

as it grows through its waxing and waning

as if a physician found a way

of healing herself

by sloughing her wounds like skin.

The mindstream weaves its way at night

like a garden snake

through myriad blades of grass

like the shuttle of a loom

that doesn’t know what theme of life

unspools in the flowing.

And my eyes miss you like light.

I’m a lighthouse on the shore of a dead sea

trying to walk on water like the moon

as the waves chip away at me

like shale flakes off the cold stone

that edges slowly through my heart like a thorn.

And it may make a king of me

to draw the sword out of the stone

but that doesn’t close the wound

of having first to fall upon it

to vacate my throne with honour.

If life is the truth

then lying is the only way

to describe death to a god

who doesn’t understand it.

What’s a church without gravestones?

Aspiration without an expiry date?

And so many different kinds of death

not enough generations of humans

have been born yet to know them all.

Death tries to trivialize the relative

as if the things I miss most about you

had never been.

But your mindwaters are mingled with mine inextricably

like the shoreless starstreams of space

panning for planets in our flowing

we might live on

and have our being and our breath

unblighted by loss. Separation. Death.

And there is no more of the sadness

I used to see in your eyes

as if they were my own

that I still see everywhere in the eyes of all living things

when I know as you would have had me know

as clearly as you did

that even though the neverness

of implacable circumstances and lost last chances

may have separated us like the threads of the rope

you used to climb up to heaven before me

like one who took the short-cut

and one who took the long way home through these starfields

taking his painful time

like the unfulfilled hope of a child

he’s not alone when he opens his eyes

like a dream within a dream

that looks but can’t find him,

you can polish the missing into a mirror

and wait like a fox by a black hole for things to appear

that will never be the same again

or you can open your tears like windows

and let out the birds of pain

that I have kept as close to me

as the whisper of your voice

in this cold, dark chimney

telling me to let you go as I do now

to rejoice on the dead branch and the green bough

like the flower and flame

of what became of us.

We cannot be the song or the singer

for very long

as our voices dim like candles in the darkness

that have given it all away.

And as you used to say

as if it would always be today without you

and all we have given is all we could keep of each other

like water returned to the river

we raised to our lips to taste

the sad, last drops

of these eyeless elixirs of the moon

that linger like vapours

in the empty goblets of the morning glory,

and I need  to believe you more than I do

in this neverness of now

that has come before me without a beyond

or a word from all that has irrevocably gone.

Yes. But the singing. That goes on.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PATRICK WHITE