AWAY WITH LANGUOR, I'M SWIMMING THROUGH TAR

AWAY WITH LANGUOR, I’M SWIMMING THROUGH TAR

Away with languor, I’m swimming through tar.

The room is still as winter. The plants are stalled.

Their roots are dry. The walls

are made of fossil calcium carbonates.

My fish has died. The air outside is cold and mean

and the sun shines fruitlessly on red heritage brick

with windows that look more like empty stages

than the last curtain call

at a red velvet small town funeral.

Faces of the people on the street,

novellas of erosion,

holding out little white flags of surrender

like patches of snow looking for someone to surrender to.

My poetry’s gone into semi-hibernation,

comatose as a red-blooded thermometer

that’s dropped below zero

and I’m trying to smoke last year’s bats out of my attic

with nothing but a wash pail, cedar bough, pack of matches

as if I were smudging the evil spirits away

like the low hanging fruit of temptation.

I need fire. I’m gathering up the dead twigs of lightning

that struck the heart wood of an oak tree

like the ice storm of a cold-hearted prophecy

that killed the messenger for being true to his word.

Madness. Enough of this. Winter, a fist.

Summer, an open palm. Neither of them

can get a handle on a weapon or a tool.

Where’s the pen, where’s the paintbrush,

where’s the dirty keyboard grimed

with sweat, dust, ketchup and ashes,

that can make a poet who’s been writing

three years shy of the last five decades

feel at least as useful as a window?

All the books I’ve published

nothing but empty doorways

that have left the door ajar

so the light can get in and out

like a cat that wants to go howl in the night

or come back in from the cold,

having accomplished what drove it outside

to do what it had to do.

I see two leaves gusting through the gutter

like companion halves of the same map

and I think how lucky they are to be so

irrevocably lost together with enough hope

to approach things as if they were still green.

And they’re probably right. There are

more chances of being found together than alone,

but solitude isn’t the occupational hazard of what I do

to destroy any chance of making a living,

it’s the black hole at the core of the galaxy,

it’s the golden ratio that turns like a starfish

or the pinwheels of sunflower seeds,

whorled seashells, the Hox gene

of the moon in a landscape painting,

it’s the sine qua non, the axiom, that article of faith,

the truth we must hold to be self-evident,

that plunges me into intense states

of creative visualization

that thaw my heart out in an agony of hot water

to keep it from getting frostbite

and get my blood flowing again

like a poppy weeping down a white canvas

because it’s used too much Georgia pine gum turpentine

instead of just lying there like blood on the snow.

Solitude is the mother-tongue of a polyglot silence

that doesn’t have a mouth or ears of its own

but who can count the voices it’s inspired

by its perfect lack of response

to speak up on its behalf

as if anyone were listening to what they said?

Three chord wonder pop-tarts on the pop charts

and whole symphonies of regret.

La Brea tar pits like sabre-tooth tigers

who had their fangs pulled like crescent moons

and went down into history,

dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark,

like toothless Smilodons.

And, yes, the sound of the bees in the locust trees

returning like ghosts in the spring

to the seance they liked best

to pick up where the flowers and the thorns left off.

But you can’t impress an abyss of solitude

with your radiance. The wavelengths

just keeping going on into forever

looking for something that might come to life

in their light. A crocus. A planet.

A cryonically frozen fly on the windowsill.

You walk alone with the Alone long enough

and you begin to realize

even when you pour your heart out

like white gold out of crude ore

you’ve been talking to yourself all along

and what you hear is the sacred syllable

of your own buzzing

resonating in the deaf ears of the hollyhocks,

as if you were rubbing your finger around the rim

of a Tibetan prayer bowl full of nothing

or a tower of hydra-headed microwave dishes,

though snakes don’t have any ears,

listening to the humming bird, the butterfly

the bee, the black beetle that looks

as if it were designed to pull paperclips out of paper,

the red ant chafing firesticks of formic acid,

a different voice in every different ear,

as if one wavelength per flower were a bellyful

of the same cosmic background hiss of radiation

I’ve being trying to write

like a symphony for a snakepit in B minor

with nothing but a bird bone flute to play it on

at twice the speed of sound

on the moon, people, on the moon

trying to replace the old dozy cow bell

in the firesteeple next to the local library

with a sonic boom, people, a sonic boom

well outside the oral tradition of lightning.

What kind of a dove would it be

if it were merely the echo of a loveletter

I sent out to look for land

instead of the real voice

of the wind in the winter chimney

lamenting the passage of the birds

that used to bear and raise their young in it,

and though the wind says as much as it ever did,

its vocabulary is being reduced

by a few more words every year

and there are longer silences between the stars

that make it look as if

someone’s finally got a fire going

that’s more light than smoke

and nothing, not even the stone pillow

of this luckless day can smother.

Because I’m going to cradle it

like a young bird I found in my hands

and I’m going to blow on it ever so gently

so as not to blow it out

and mentor it like a dragon

until it grows flames for feathers

and learns to fly like a phoenix in winter

with my breath under its wings.

Muhammad ascended to seventh heaven on Buraq

to see the angel of light as it really is

and Perseus has fallen off the milk wagon

it hitched the Great Square of Pegasus to,

and Einstein rode a beam of light

all the way from the Swiss Patent clock tower

into a continuum of time and space

in an oscillatory electromagnetic

charged particle field at rest,

and Hermes the Thrice-Blessed

has got wings on his heels

and one where his tongue used to be

as beautiful and eloquent as the parabolic trajectory

of an arrow whose medium

can’t help but be true to the message.

Something that’s lost upon

all these mythically inflated weather balloons

drifting like Medusan jellyfish among the stars

as if inspiration were just a matter of elevation

and if you got high enough on yourself

you could turn your farce into a legend

and run with the dragons

like a circumpolar constellation

that doesn’t know when to leave the stage.

Alcor and Mizar in the handle of the Big Dipper,

Horse and Rider, stars for spurs,

I’m going to ride

my tiny unbroken seahorse bareback

like a Zen cowboy reincarnated

from an unsaddled Cossack

into a Pacific sunset

face-painted like a rodeo clown

with the constant smear of a grin on my face

and my feet on the ground

and an old whiskey barrel for pants

that keep falling down

to reveal my red rapper boxer shorts

to get a cheap laugh out of the bullshit

that keeps bringing me down

like Don Quixote at Sancho Panza’s expense.

Taurus tilting at the winter solstice

when sun and moon, fire and ice

stand still as the unhinged windmills

in the Tiffany china shops of the zodiac,

I will risk my life like a Chaplinesque matador

or Mithras Tauroctonus

when the sun shines at midnight

just to poke fun like swords of light

through the voodoo heart of the raging bull

that takes itself way too seriously

to be the sign of enlightenment that Capricorn is.

PATRICK WHITE