Saturday, December 31, 2011

AVIOMANCY


AVIOMANCY

And the grace of the returning Canada geese in the night,
the sentinel response of their approach
in the high volumes of the moon-soaked night,
the plaintive creaking of an ancient hinge
at the slow turning of the urgent planet in my hand
undoing the door and the threshold
of another spring night on earth, the ghost of the willow,
a resurgent fountain among the black geometry
of the tumultuous roofs of Perth,
and the luminous fleets and crucifixion kites
of the emergency eyes of the window-glow in the darkness,
almost museums from the outside, an archives
of compendious fates from which the curtains seldom part or rise.
And the glorious, more concentrated stars of winter
now the ragged standards of a remnant army
in organized retreat, as the rustic proclivities
of the shepherd moons of Jupiter approach zenith, my blood
scored by the silver ploughs of sudden valleys
monitored by the demonic laughter of barbaric echoes,
I cherish the exotic pathos of my urbane exclusions of joy,
neither young in the shining prospect of the greening mirror,
nor old in the bellweather of the ascendant. No longer summoned
to the seditious beauty of conspiratorial orchards
that whispered to me like women complicit with the wind,
no longer driven to madness by the veils of promissory assassins,
my heart is yet a habit of freedom, the unmantled ashes
of a vagrant phoenix in the urns of inflammable sanities.
And though the dead pass me around
like the souvenir and rumour of a single heartbeat,
the curiosity and relic of a maverick wave of life
that once broke like the shadow of a man
on the immaculate shores and igneous chastity
of the imperturbable moon, I am not haunted
by the lascivious curiosity of their cold fingers
nor swayed from my abject apostasy by the suave prophets
of a spurious exhumation. What is dead within me,
the burnt offerings of pagan autumns deposed by a change of stars
does not entreat an untimely season to rise
but confides in me the courage
to risk it all again, all the faces and the hearts
and the exquisite transformations that sometimes
saw me born without eyes, and the dangerous sorrows
that turned into the sullen dragons of a slow agony
sowing terrible visions in the wake of their pain,
and the pornographic solitude of godless atoms,
and the chronic doubt that could only be countered
by doubting the doubt that obsessed me:
I was irrelevant, purposeless, vain, alone;
do what I will to divert the course of the river, achieve, attain
anything, long eloquently for the best, drunk
on the moon’s reflection, or curse the stone that bore me,
I lived to be worthy of a salvation that didn’t exist.
I founded a religion on the utterance of a clown,
and of all that followed me I alone was damned,
the ferocious heretic of my fanatic interdictions, confounded by the grave
without a firefly, while everything else
rose from the toils of death like a heathen rose.
And nothing has changed but the acceptance of myself
as the nothing by acclamation
on the other side of assent and denial. I sat
like an amputee on a throne in the middle of a crossroads
that led nowhere, that offered no departures or escapes,
tighter than a straitjacket, an armless compass and clock
alarmed by the approach of forever and the improbability
of waking up from the dream with anywhere to go.
In my own eyes, I was the sad visitation
of a black comet in shallow summer skies
that portended no good, without a will for malice,
to anyone befuddled by shadows down below.
My radiance, uranium, I burned to be someone else
on more intimate terms with oblivion, someone
on a lower rung of the ladder of emanations, below the salt
at the elemental table, less catastrophically alive.
In my search to turn gold back into lead,
I had gone too far and the oceans that confronted me
were shoreless virgins that had never known the wind,
waveless expanses of immaculate silence
that sang deeper than sirens on the only bloodrock
in an infinite sea colder than any conceivable tomorrow
that might be born of the view. Unbelievable
even to me, the eras of alienation that fixed me there,
the depths of my immersion in the void, the terrible harmony
of my lifeless actions as I planted a standard
in the name of nothing known to me
but the fame of a useless conceit. My utter defeat.
And now this afterlife of returning geese in another spring
that divine their way from star to star
only to disappear like a passing enthusiasm
into the unanswerable recesses of a damaged heart
that doesn’t run to the window to look up. And it’s late,
already a delinquent solitude beyond hope, and there’s release and fear
in the serenity of waiting among the unborn dawns of a world
that never happened to anyone but me
as forbidden mystics look for their eyes in the ashes. There’s peace
and an astounding abundance in the empty hand
that grasps at nothing, and a wisdom that can’t be learned
in the vision of a madman who knows he can’t return
to any aspiration of the prodigal year
that absurdly flags him down to ask for directions.

PATRICK WHITE

CONSTELLATION


CONSTELLATION

Even in spring, the night is old, and the rising moon, fool’s gold.
Maybe I’ll go on believing this darkness is the harbinger of light,
and even if life be proven random and absurd
there is still beauty and significance in the word that says so. These days, aging,
love is elusive
as the abandoned heart grows crude and abusive
and mistakes that were made and never mastered
return like the last word of a parting sleight that chilled the stars.
Within me the wines of being still dream of becoming blood,
and there are still angels in the mud trying to fashion a man
whose life is more than a passion of decay. Forsaken as folly
the dark clarity of the holy, I am yet a candle and a planet
that runs before the sun. More time behind me than ahead,
and the silence sadder for all the things that were said,
tonight I remember friends and lovers who once burned
with all the insatiable fury of life to be wonderful, wild, and free,
extraordinary in the turmoil of eternity,
and I bless the light by which they lived
through blossom, leaf, and fruit back to the deep root
that makes apples of the rain. Human, they were worth their fate in pain
now that none of us can live those days again. And though
it’s hard to dispute that life is a house on fire where you can’t stay long,
there are harps of night and voices and soft winds
that even the stars have not fingered to commemorate
the faces and places where we lingered awhile
to explore the immensity of a vagrant smile
that opened like a gate and a garden
or fell through the bars of our mortality like a file. From those
who were wounded by the furious rose of my youth, who were lashed
by the sudden squalls of an afflicted heart, I ask pardon
for the nights their eyelids closed like scars and offer
this silver herb of the moon they watered with their tears
until something grew in the salted soil of those punishing years.
Though late, I lay it gently on the stairs I’ve descended ever since
like a star reflected on water or a face in the black mirror
that never lost its innocence. It was the light that fell,
not the darkness that everyone is convinced is hell, the dove, not the crow
that plummeted below. But that’s a sail for another horizon
to keep its eyes on. The moon takes refuge in the window,
a stone swan rippling the dirty winter glass, the eyes of an old man,
the ruses of time, thawing to let it pass. More mercy
in the righteous fire of the forgiving liar
that tells himself that he is still young
than in all the grime of proven facts
vented from the chimney-mouth into the night
like refugees or fingers of smoke reaching for something they’ll never grasp.
And are my enemies satisfied, and the women who came and went,
ingots of hot honey poured into the mould of my bones
that formed them into roses and knives and keys to mysterious doors,
thresholds of pain and joy, dark and light, mountains and valleys
that led me like a stream down from my idealistic heights
to the great seas of being that encompass
the enchanted dream of this island seeing? I was a poor student
of the solitude they tried to teach me, but at this remove,
knowing what I know of love and agony,
I offer them my gratitude, and making a sword of the hour-hand
that once slashed at my heart
lay it gently in the wound that never healed, believing at last,
slow but thorough, I understand. They were the dark masters
of a lost art that bronzed the plaster cast of my spine
and long since all the blood and tears that were spilled have turned into wine
and all that was killed has risen again like a forest, like a green phoenix
out of this igneous delirium of time.
I was the first draft of a shadow I read to the blind.
Too early to make my peace, too late not to desire ease
and freedom from the long calling of my intensities,
the hollow of this blue guitar, this abundant emptiness
is crossed by power lines
attuned to the hidden harmony of heretical black stars
that have formed a constellation of their own on the back of my eyes,
and there is a name for it, not said by anyone,
not even the wise. And only the dead and children can see it rise.

PATRICK WHITE

Friday, December 30, 2011

I'M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES


I’M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’m learning to dance with eclipses
and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows
weeping rivers of acid rain that hang
like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains
or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life
is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,
and the wolf that came once a week
to teach me to sing underwater grew old
and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.
I don’t know what I want from the walls
I’ve designated heritage battlefields
with an array of awards and degrees
and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,
but everything I ask for seems to make
terrorists of the lamps
and the single moth
knocking himself out trying to crash into flames
against the vanilla fez of the shade
is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter
my eyes have congealed into a still-life
with antique ax-handles, a menagerie
of scarred paint, the landscape of the moon
humped and bubbled in contaminated crimson,
I haven’t seen anything for disposable eras
I wanted to drink from a skull. While the shadows and ashes
discuss what they have in common, hoping
for a marriage of convenience,
the blue night sifts my constellations through a spider-web
looking for the penumbral tear of the last life I shed
longing to avoid this one
like black shoe-polish on the pillowcase of a swan.
Even the absurdities have looped into platitudes
and petty thieves have stolen
the mask of the mouth in the imperial mirror
that keeps telling me
I’m the slumlord of my own ambition,
the blighted rind of the moon withering in the garbage,
the sloughed skin of a serpentine condom full of stars.
And how am I to understand my loneliness
and the fools I deploy to deface it
except as one more yearning octopus
with arms like hollyhocks
trying to cross the highway without a line of credit?
I should be bolder, smarter, more mineral
than light, my bones recast in gunsmith plastic,
and my heart a leaking hand grenade, white phosphorus,
unpinned and ready to hurl like a violent dove
through the slutty dreamcatchers in the windows
of strategic brothels, I should stand up
to the apostrophes of Armageddon
and handcuff my voice to a pair of quotation marks
and send all my friends bouquets of radical placards
until my voice is released from isolation, my blood
from intensive care, my mind from death row,
and I’m paid all the back wages I’m owed for the use of my innocence.
When the wind decides to defeat the leaves with poison
and the charcoal women burn their tongues
like meat on the grill of their dinner-bell smiles,
their charms all smoke and cocktail tears,
I should have the metal to drop
depth-charges on the willow cruising the shadows for convoys,
and depose the cult of scorpions marching south
that tried to brainwash me into believing
I’ve aged like wounded shoes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MOON A BLADE OF STILLNESS


THE MOON A BLADE OF STILLNESS

The moon a blade of stillness honed on the heart
of a cold, dark night
without lunacy, love, or forgiveness.
Indian tobacco and milkweed pods
like the fossils of shucked clam shells
in the middens of the Neanderthals
or the twisted wombs of fortune cookies
that were long ago cracked open
to spill their good fortune on the wind.
The morning dove of the loveletter flown
they’re left with nothing but the envelope.
The wind gathers and swirls gusts of snow
across the ice-glazed fields
as if someone were about to rail coke on a mirror
like the Milky Way
and blew it big time into a gust of stars.
Venus and the moon,
perfume on a wrist
with a wound and a scar.
The cold air slashes my nostrils.
Only mad dogs and Englishmen
go out in the midday sun.
This is the light-deprived Canadian version
of the same thing
at midnight when everything
is frozen in space and time
like the numb desolation
on the face of a lost Arctic exploration
as if we were all wearing the same death mask
because whether you’re a nationalist,
a naturalist, or just winging it on your own,
when it’s this cold and birds
are dropping from the sky
like words and notes from the lyrics
somebody forgot to mime,
one size fits all.
Lethal the burning clarity of the cold
when it rimes your mouth
with your own breath
with the salt of the earth
and the lime of the moon
as if it were just one big celestial grave pit,
the cold stone of the crone
that buries people in her heart
like a locket she can’t open from the inside.
Life in these brutal windswept fields
desolate as a used calender
or a losing ticket in the lottery
of predictable apocalypses
that didn’t even remotely come true
like Mayans in igloos at the top of the temple stairs
one for each day of the year
that went on living without them.
Or the astronomical catastrophe
of nuclear winter in Puerta Vallarta,
according to a pyramidal sun dial
that got it wrong
from the late Triassic and beyond.
Fire and ice pulled like a blade
that wouldn’t be bound to a heart of stone.
Light pours out like gold and honey
from the dark ore of a new moon
opening its eyelids for the first time
since it went into a coma
like a temporary eclipse of its sanity.
Everybody obsessed with death in the end-times,
forgetting from the universe’s point of view,
there’s thirteen ways of looking a blackbird
and fourteen in reverse
and they’re all as true
as whole numbers on a clock
doing a sword dance with time.
Life lines unravel like the frayed ends
at the delta of a river about to enter the sea.
But what could be so terminal
about returning to the source
of where everything begins
like the universe with a Big Bang
that has continued
like an executioner’s drum roll
ever since the moon rose up
like a two-bladed ax in the east
and learned to cut both ways
by the time it fell in the west
on the white napes of the birch-groves
swanning with their arms outstretched
like a constellation who’s time has come
to kiss the crucifix like a vow of silence
and have done with trying to maintain the peace
like a truce with the truth of severance
as if it were their last best hope for deliverance.
And if not deliverance, then at the very least,
to let their branches pile up at their feet
and let the infallible stars set fire to them
like self-immolating heretics
or Joan of Arc in the inferno
of her martyrdom
among treacherous friends
and Burgundian enemies alike
as history neglects to write
into the hagiography of trees
the black stake she was burnt at
and suffered as much as she
for things it never meant to stand for
like the backbone of a saint
when her heart and her legs
gave out under her
like the rungs of a burning ladder
propped against the windowsills of heaven,
her feet grounded in the snake pit
that bound her to the earth.
But enough said, or too much,
or too little, or nothing at all.
Jupiter returns retrograde to Pisces
at its stationary point in the west
for thirty-five nights
and then returns to the Ram
to disappear behind the sun in Taurus.
Castor and Pollux in the Twins
and Capella and Nath and the kids
in Auriga the Charioteer.
Orion holding its club up like the glyph
of the mythically inflated victory truce
of Ramses the II’s battle with the Hittites
at Kardesh, his figure
ten times more imposing than the rest
as he puts his foot on the chest of his enemies
and hopes like stars, snow,
blood and flesh, fire and ice,
his few sparks of life will last.
I’ve always seen it that way somehow.
What hunter would go out with a club
to beat a wild animal to death
unless his prey were human
with a skull that was easy to hit?
Ergo. Kardesh. Forensic mythology
on the few bones
of the original fireflies that are left to us
like the prehistoric vertebrae
of great whales that died in a bay of the desert,
or the skeletons of humming birds
as delicate as the stalks of wild oats
encrypted into the snow
like a hieroglyph for help
frozen into a bottle of ice
that took thousands of light years to get here
only to discover
that we’re as helpless as they are.
That imagination and wonder
are the mind’s way of making sure
in the desolate immensities
of these starfields overhead
and this glacial acre
of hard ground beneath our feet
impervious to the coffins
and roots of our solitude,
we’re not estranged
by what we’re looking at.
That the emptiness of the mystery
is the source of all our metaphors.
The dark mother. The muse.
Our last recourse.
Our only hope of rescue from ourselves.
Interactive similitudes in a void with no likeness.

PATRICK WHITE

Thursday, December 29, 2011

IF YOU NEED TO BE TOLD, YOUR PASSION'S IMPERFECT


IF YOU NEED TO BE TOLD, YOUR PASSION’S IMPERFECT

If you need to be told, your passion’s imperfect.
You can put the wafer of the moon
like a life saver on your tongue
and swear it’s flesh and blood, but little dog,
that straw piccolo you play like a fraud to convince
the garden snakes you’re a snake charmer
is never going to make it with the wolves
in the cold night air above the timberline
when they give up their rapture and their agony
howling at the skull of the moon
and the immensity of their longing for life to the stars.
Things not to do when you’re in love
and there’s something suspiciously dysfunctional
in the way your passion
doesn’t school you spontaneously.
Don’t neglect the details. All cosmic views
are seen through local windows
and it’s as important to know the colour of their eyes
though they change like chameleons and mood rings
or sullen mud puddles into clear blue skies with clouds
as it is to spectra-analyze the galaxies.
And if you loved the cloud at sunset and moonrise
and not the shadowless noon of her eyes
you’re not much of a painter
for all that you say you can see in her
if all the rest of the indigent day
your vision of her picture-music
is just a braille postcard you’re underpainting
on the edge of nowhere
as if you’d bought time-shares
in an imagination
that was always on vacation without you.
In love and astronomy
the eye by which I see the star
is the eye by which the star sees me.
It’s the same with men and women.
It’s up to you whether you’re a solar flare
or a book of matches in your lovers’ eyes.
You say you’re a player, but little dog,
the lions don’t lie to the lambs they lie down with,
wolves mate for life, and the female leads,
and you may think you’re in the Colosseum
with real gladiators and half of Africa
but you wouldn’t act the way you do
if you’d ever been wounded
by a woman who won’t fight back
or just as lethal, one who will
like an injured predator in the tall shadows
that knows you like the smell of your clothes.
You don’t think pimps get their feelings hurt too?
Or players never get caught at the casino
and taken for everything they’ve got out back?
In love even more than content
timing is as important as a bloodstream
or a reciprocal waterclock
between the lover and the beloved
that’s at least as accurate as the moon.
If you say you’re going to call
even if it’s just another s.o.s. in a bottle. Call.
If you say you’re going to show. Show.
Don’t let the wind blow snow over your footprints
and stop just shy of the front door.
Walk in like a revelation that keeps its word
because what kind of hick
thinks he walks on the dark side
like a sin of omission
or an anti-heroic domestic tragedy at intermission?
Little dog, there are three phases of a woman
you’ve got to keep your third eye on,
nymph, wife and crone,
thesis, antithesis, synthesis,
the triune identity of the universe,
three faces the Druids carved
as one white goddess
on the cold stone of the moon.
They’d take their golden lunar sickle
and cut the mistletoe off
their sacred oak boughs
like the medicine bags
of the balls between their legs
crammed in the case of mistletoe
with a lot of little moons
or in the case of your testicles
two full moons in October,
one pale yellow ochre, and the other, blue.
And they did this because
they knew something about women
you don’t and can’t
until one of them has killed you
and another one’s brought you back from the dead.
A woman can lay a cool poultice of moonlight
on your feverish forehead
to draw the nightmares
out of your troubled sleep,
but if you can’t feel
the mystery and the healing of this
as a gesture of grace
that even the angels envy
you’re terminal for the duration.
A dead end in a bus station.
You might fancy yourself a lady-killer,
a matador doing a sword dance
with the sun and the moon,
but, little dog, you’ve never been
gored so deeply
by the horns of the moon
that your heart bled out like a rose
no scar could ever bridge
because it was as deep and wide
as it was long
and went on like a river lost on the moon
looking for the holy grail
in a sea of shadows
with no pulse, no tide.
Syrian warriors in the Middle Ages
loved Damascene steel, perfume
water, poetry, roses
and gardens with underground rivers
and the Tokugawa samurai ninjas
wrote Zen haikus about the moon in the dawn
and seeing the whole in every part
and how if the cold
doesn’t go through your bones once
there couldn’t be apricot blossoms in the spring.
Would it be risking too much
for you to be as dangerously tender?
Not to guzzle. But drink.
Not to gorge, not to glut, but eat
as if you were breaking bread with a muse
like an intelligent savage
with impeccable spiritual manners
who knows what the moon can do
if you ever break the mirror
of the spell she casts upon you
and goes into total eclipse
turning all three faces away from yours at once.
You might replicate, abide, and die
but that’s as much as you’ll know of love
when a woman comes to you
like an open gate
and you meet her like a closed door.
Like the black dove of a burning loveletter
and you treat her like junk mail
you only read when you’re bored.
Like I said, little dog, the real wolves
who’ve tasted the lunacy of their longing
like a sailor’s tasted the moonlight
on the great night seas
of the beauty and mystery of life know better.
Tom Robbins wrote years ago
the mystery of how to make love stay
is the mystery of how to make the mystery stay.
If you need to be told, your passion’s not perfect,
but if you must be,
when she lays down her soul
like poetry before you
rise higher than yourself, little dog,
like Canis Major at the heel of Orion
and be a star of the first magnitude,
the brightest in either hemisphere,
and don’t smear it with your eyes
like two slugs on a mirror
reading a piece of dirty prose.
The eyes of a woman are the windows of God
whether you’re looking at them like a boy
or through them like a man.
Or she shows you her crone face
and all you can see is the void.
And little dog, I’ve seen you do this,
and it’s one of the worst things you can do,
when you come on like a puppy wagging your tail
and you finally catch a nymph in full blossom
in the prime of her youth
and once she’s picked you up
as something cute and cuddly
you age her so radically with your bullshit
she withers prematurely
into the apple piety of your mother.
This kind of Oedipal deviation
can make you go blind and impotent
drastic, tragic, frustrated, sarcastic and mad.
A billion stars strewn across the abyss
like the Milky Way when it drifts through the darkness
like the fragrance of a longing in lingerie,
and all you want to do, little Zeus,
is get back on Mummy’s tit on a cave in Crete.
But all that’s going to come of it
in the final analysis is
your bad, bad, Daddy, Cronos,
is going to swallow you like a stone
and time’s going to stop and dry up on you.
And then you’re going to look again at the Milky Way
and all you’re going to see
are cracks in a dry creekbed,
smoke from a distant brush fire
and a lot of toads stuck in the starmud
praying for a flashflood
as the sun slowly cooks them in a clay oven
and the kid, that’s you, little brother,
gets boiled in the milk of the mother.

PATRICK WHITE