Thursday, June 3, 2010

BEGIN

BEGIN

 

Begin anywhere.

Topple fall jump stumble plunge

into the eyeless abyss

into the roadless homelessness

of not knowing where you’re going

or who’ll you’ll be by the time you get there.

Slash your way through the stretched canvas

of a painted sky

like a rogue star

with the blood of Betelgeuse

dripping from your brush if you must

perform your own Caesarian

to get out of yourself like an egg

into the Big Abide Beyond

and stretch your wings from dusk till dawn.

Don’t hover like a cloud over starmaps

trying to work out a flight plan

waiting for the weather to clear for take-off.

In an infinite universe such as this

wherever you are

in this spatial lost and found

you’re always the center of everything.

How could you not know where you are

or who

when there’s nowhere to go

and no one to be

that isn’t centered in its own origin eternally?

But it helps to get a jump on your own light like a star

now and again

if you want to stay in the game

long enough to turn your farce into a legend

that isn’t hard on the eyes.

So begin.

Like a surprise.

Like a leftover birthday you found in the attic

you were saving for a special day that never came.

Get it on.

Begin.

Break the mirror.

Throw a rock through your own reflection.

There’s no countdown 

for a firefly or lightning bolt

no fuse on the Big Bang that became the universe

so let’s just have ignition

spontaneously timeless and complete

go off

get out

get down

like the primordial atom

with your own expression of yourself

before the arising of signs

teaches the flowers

they mustn’t colour

outside the lines of themselves.

Don’t let the Lilliputians tie Gulliver down again.

Don’t imperil Pauline

by tying her to the tracks

like a rehabilitated junkie

to wait for a train in vain

on the same old beaten path

your thoughts tread like cattle

back to the barn of your brain at dusk.

Or horses when it’s burning.

Begin in your aftermath.

Shoulder the world that weighs

like a rock in your grave

meant to keep you from rising

and blow it off like dust.

Come down on yourself like a meteor

and begin a new species of life

among the bones of the dinosaurs.

Get lost in this desert of stars

like the Rosetta Stone

of a new language of scars

no one’s ever spoken before

around a fire in the night

and be the first word of your own light

to give names to things in the garden.

The happy genius of your own beginnings.

How many nights must pass?

How many days?

How many full moons wane

and ice ages come and go

and trees turn into grasslands

and continents shatter like skulls

that grind their teeth in the night

before you finally let go

and begin.

Mercury had wings on his heels

when he took off on the wind

but look at you

standing there

at the edge of the world

with parachutes on your shoes

like a medium without a message.

Take them off.

Go barefoot over the stars of your firewalk like water.

Take off that used straitjacket

you bought at the Salvation Army

like the larva of a dragonfly

looking for a hand-me-down chrysalis on the cheap.

You can’t read your fate like dna

in another man’s fortune-cookie.

And there’s already enough sky around us

for everyone to share

like a planetary cocoon

without anyone running out of room

for worms to turn into butterflies

wolves into whales

raptors into birds with feathers and scales.

Where things end is where they begin.

They’re Siamese twins

you can’t separate like a loveletter

into before and after

because they’ve only got

the one birth

the one breath

between them both

and the same is true of their death.

So if you’re already over before you begin

why hesitate?

What have you got to lose

when there’s nothing to choose

between lying in wait like yesterday

for what you think you know

will come along in its own good time

and what you can’t anticipate

that comes up on you from behind

like eyes to the blind in a dream

and says it’s later than it seems.

Where have you been?

You’re on in the next scene

right after the death of the old queen.

Let the lines memorize you for a change.

Friends fall apart

when they stop being strangers to one another.

Babies stop turning solitude into single mothers.

You can gnaw on the bone of the known for years

to get down to the marrow of things

and still not be satisfied when you do

and then the hunger you never taught to hunt

begins to eat you.

So jump.

Like a fish in a still pond.

Like a frog from a lilypad.

Go mad.

Go ballistic.

Go beyond that place

where even to say you’re lost in space

doesn’t make any sense

and nothing’s ever moved in a straight line

that wasn’t a special form of a curve.

Why wait for the apocalypse

to come down on you like an old rafter

that breaks with every firecracker that goes off

when your own explosive potential

makes that look like a firefly with a wet fuse?

How long have you lepered your stars in the sun

or your constellation paled in the dawn

like a tatoo you had taken off your arm

like an old love affair that’s over and gone?

Live on.

Jump from the top stair.

Slide down the banister

in the opposite direction 

like a double helix

in the southern hemisphere.

Do something

you can get away with

that stays true to your disobedience

like evolution.

Draw a line in the sand

then overstep the bounds

like a crosswind that wipes it out.

The measure of a human is a human

without a forwarding address

that can find its way back

like an abandoned cat

to the threshold and doorway

of our homelessness

where we left like a loveletter to the world

that returns unread

with nothing to say

that would have made any difference anyway.

A phoenix might be born in fire

but it doesn’t nest in the flames.

You can’t keep what you won’t give away

so if you want to stay here

like a chameleon in front of a mirror

that likes to reflect things as they change

you have to do it like air

and grow wings.

You have to become a dragon.

Or a snake who knows

how to rise above things

like an eagle or a sea on the moon

that got caught like a fish out of water

in the first and last crescents of its own talons.

Don’t let yourself be tossed around

like an overturned lifeboat

that set out to rescue you

from the undertow of reality

and got swept off its own feet

before they could turn into oars.

Don’t be a shore-hugger

on the dunes of your own mindstream.

Go along with the flow

like the oxygen in your blood

that was conceived in a fire-womb

in the belly of a star

in outer space

and then took a meteor to this place

where it’s bagged by your lungs

and rushed to your face

like a lip transplant for a kissing-stone.

Just as every question is the prelude of the answer

so every prayer for direction

is the direction of prayer.

The Kaaba waits like a pilgrim

for the first crescent of the moon

to circumambulate you

in all directions at once

and in all months of the year

like the sun through the zodiac

when it shines a midnight

and the sky is unusually clear.

The mystery of life

that seeks you out

like its best guess at everything

is just that

is just this

a mystery

not a secret waiting to be told

like a baby without a name

that’s grown post-mature

and gummy in the womb

like matter in the matrix of being.

And when things let go of the green bough

like the singing bird in your heart

or a windfall of silver apples

shaken from a dead branch by the wind

when the moon goes down over the hills

and all that’s left of the view

is two elbows on a worn-out windowsill

watching things return to themselves for the night

like stars and dust and dew

and love when it’s over

tastes autumn on its breath

like long sad thoughts of last September

that always seem to end in death and sorrow

it helps to remember

the seeds in the green apples of spring

that are buried in their birth

as if there could never be a tomorrow

that wouldn’t open their small sad eyes

like fireflies in the orchards of earth

that age like the truth

in a purple passage

on the second to last page

they burn through falling asleep

thinking of things to come

as if each were either a lighthouse

or the evening star in the morning

or a tiny Armageddon in mason jar

as big and bright as the universe

that goes off without warning

everywhere.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


I SUMMON DANTE

I SUMMON DANTE

 

I summon Dante Milton Goethe

Mephistopheles and Marlowe

to help me dig a new ditch in hell

to bury these one-balled squalid

child-molesters against abortion

chained to the gates of creation

the gates of heaven

the gates of hell

the gates of a woman

like underfed flesh-eating pitbulls

grown wafer-thin on the blood of a wise man

who said suffer the little children to come unto him

and didn’t mean practise your perversions upon them

while teaching them they were born into original sin.

How in the name of such beauty gentleness and compassion

as that which flowed like poetry in action

from the fountain heart of Christ

and was as clear and easy as water to understand

have these black morticians of the flesh and spirit

who hate women

who hate the mother of men

who hate Eve for the mitocondrion

that traces them like a genome

all the way back to her

not pre-Vatican bone-age Adam

come like dark disapproving guests

to the house of light

to change the water and wine

into an oilslick that blights whatever blooms

of its own accord

at these weddings in the orchards of life

for the past two millenia?

I’m thinking of a specific Catholic bishop

who just recently excommunicated

a courageous nursing nun

on a hospital board of directors

who approved of an abortion

though it contravened her beliefs

to save a mother’s life

or else they were both lost.

This asshole thinks

that two deaths are better than one

and denied her heaven

and the rites of the church she’s served

for thirty years

as an eternal punishment

for genuine compassion

while the child molesters

who got caught trying to teach choir boys

how to pray perversely on their knees before them

are transferred to another parish by the pope

to save the good name of the church

by sacrificing children to a vow of silence

as abysmal as the maw of Baal

that must sound in God’s ears

if she’s still listening

like the hissing of this black snake

in an eagle’s nest

or a manger in Bethlehem

just before it’s struck

like the last false note

of a two-tined tuning fork by the lightning

of an outraged mother defending her young.

Think about it.

Think about the pomposity

hypocrisy and arrogance of this man

the meaness and pettiness of this man

who’s never fathered a child

who’s never made love to a woman

who’s never put bread on the table

not a fish not a loaf

though he thrives like yeast

on the crumbs of the last supper

and drinks blood from the vine

of someone else’s lifeline

like a vampiric cannibal

and then rolls the stone away

from the tomb of death

all the way over to the other side of the room

to block the womb of a woman

so he can forget he was born of a mother.

Now imagine God going Ya ya that’s what I meant.

Damn up the wellsprings of life

like an imperial Roman aqueduct

with Constantinian credal cement

and call it the rock of religion.

Think of this little microbe of a man

clinging to the planet earth

like a bacterium on a moss-covered stone

among two billion stars

in this galaxy alone

among two billion more galaxies

in an infinite multiverse

actualizing every permutation and combination

of being and non-being and beyond

in the hyperspace

of a sublime imagination

that creates without design

out of fractals of white light

in the undetectable ebb and flow of dark matter

things without form like the human mind.

And this little man’s got a rule

and a rod and a school

and a church

and a creed

and a way of life

that isn’t a search for anything

as he opens his mouth

like a polyp in the Great Cosmic Barrier reef

that tears the hull out of the moon as it passes over

and presuming to speak for God

as his collar flares

like the hood of a spitting cobra

squirting venom into the eyes of life

as if the dark mother

that gives birth to everything

were an open wound

and not the thriving sea that surrounds him

aborts her embryonic afterlife with a coathanger

in the sleazy back-alleys of his hydrophobic belief.

And what do you think?

When Jesus said to Peter

putting his hand upon his shoulder

upon this rock I will build my church

making a pun of Peter’s name light-heartedly

he meant go forth

and establish in my name

the biggest closet in the world

for child-molesters against abortion?

And should the occasion arise

like Solomon trying to decide

how to divide the baby

like the wish-bone of a harp

condemn both the mother and the child to death

to uphold the sacro-sanctity of life.

Can you picture that?

Can you picture Jesus unlocking his jaws

like this serpent

to swallow the cosmic glain whole

and disgorging the shell from his mouth

like a parachute that candled on its way to earth

after the fall

claim it’s the incarnate word

of the new master of life and death

that will hatch like a bird in the afterlife

if only you learn to hold your breath back

like the wind from the open sky long enough

to take the maggot out of your eye

and make a feathered angel fit for heaven

out of a housefly raised on carrion?

And what’s with this St. Paul guy

who said it’s better to marry than burn in hell?

How’s that for a wedding bell?

What kind of hateful reverse

of all things natural is it

that turns the eyelids of the rose inside out

and curses its own birth

like family and blood

in a loveletter to death

without a return address

by casting a spell over sex

like a two thousand year old eclipse of the moon

accusing his own shadow

of being the other face of her dark side

and then marrying his evil daughter off

like the guilty bride of a church betrothed to Jesus?

If you’re looking through a glass darkly now

here where everything is crystal clear

and spatially pure

maybe you’re not burning bright enough

maybe you were never lamp and fire

star and furnace enough

to keep from smearing the mirror

with your own dark soot

like a man who squints at the stars like a blackhole

and then goes back to reading a book

like one long last paginated look

into the secret valleys of hell

that flock like wolves in sheeps clothing

to the blind shepherds on the world mountain

groping their way into heaven

like the Oedipal children of a flawed father

who denies ever sleeping with their mother

like a perjured myth of origin

denying the laws of evolution

in the creationist confessional

of a mutated gene

fingering the beads of a rosary

like the names of God on a chromosome

as punishment for the happy sin of its own DNA.

O mea culpa! O mea felix culpa!

That I was born of a woman

who held my life in her hands

like the fruit of the earth in autumn

and the blossoms of spring in the rain

and that the breath within the breath of life

she imparted to me

like the living spirit of light

that falls freely on all of us alike

like radiant sentience in all directions

doesn’t keep a lightning rod

or weathervane on her roof

or a bishop or guard-dog

at the gate of her womb

snarling like a three-headed Cerberus

in the backseat of a hearse

that took a wrong turn for the worst

on its way to the cemetery

where the dead who think

they legislate for the living

like a Texas schoolboard

rewriting gravestones

give up their holy ghosts

like the relics of Pre-Cambrian fossils

between the pages of the Burgess Shales

as the five billion year old holy book

of life on the planet

contradicts them

like the writing on the wall.

A germinal species

whose apheliotropic view of life

like a black note in a white hymn

on American Idol

went terminal under the knife.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

for a germinal species

whose apochraphyl hymn to life

went terminal.