Tuesday, December 20, 2011

BORN BELOW


BORN BELOW

The rich will eat the poor like the krill of the sea
and grateful there is no real estate among the stars
flowering in the furrowed branches of the willow,
I stand in the backyard parking lot,
and look up with the wounded longing
of a man whose questions are older than his eyes,
knowing nothing will answer the agony
of being alive awhile to bear
this incredible burden of stars
to a grave that gapes without wonder, without sky, without light.
The night is a whisper of God to the dark minerals
composed in the vastness of space
to be humbled by the exaltations of time and mind.
Mercy and healing the radiant view
that expands like a universe within
when the heart grows tired of reading the braille of its scars.
Those lights, ferocious hawks shrieking in their wheeling heights,
the shattered glass of their unsoiled scintillation
thrown down like a goblet they only drink from once,
were my first teachers, the legends of their fury,
ancient, transformative fire imbibed early
that raised me up out of myself like a face
from the boat of my hands
or a passion I couldn’t return.
Are they changed somehow from the stories we tell of their shining,
the laws by which we divine their mysterious origins,
or enhanced by the thousands of years of gazing
that first raised ziggurats and pyramids on alluvial plains
to witch the will of the gods with lightning rods
in a chaos of mutability, civilization
the delusion born thereof, do they burn blindly
above the brutal business of the world, unconcerned
with the politics of extinction that rages below,
the flaring matchbook of nuclear powers
held to a page of apocalypse
that shadows the cowering earth
with arsonists and Armageddon?
Is all that flare and fury, the creation
of the very letters by which the worlds are said,
nothing but the afterlife of a sterling moment
in which, like us, they can’t in the present be seen?
Do the stars that shone on Babylon
shine on us; shine down on nothing,
or have they been humanized even slightly,
as they have been reputed to urge our own blood into fate,
by the view of love and carnage down below?
And gods, each to themselves,
have we become as they are, indifferent to our own glory,
random debacles of accidental intent
weighing our lives in the same purposeless breath,
the same hollow heartbeat
as moments of no appreciable account
in the grandiose obscenity of a loveless creation?
If a star could speak
would it curse or bless the dream
that adorns and torments it,
these eyes of mine that search it out in the darkness
a petal of light in the orchard of dendritic space
to give it a name and ask
for mercy from the bone-yard of the world awhile
by staring into the cool fountains
of its self-purifying mystery,
grateful for its unattainability? Given a voice
that even a child could understand
would it consider what we’ve been,
what it’s witnessed of what we’ve become
over the last five million years
and scream eureka or shriek;
or would it break down in tears
and put its own light out,
disgusted with the embodiment
of its own elements, the issue of its fire-womb?
Iron rises up against calcium
in a war of murderous siblings
like a sword against a skull,
a bullet through the brain,
the chain of bestial beatitudes
that enslaves us in our cities to the ethics of steel,
and destroys on the whim of a few
for the advancement of a few
iron in the form of blood,
the millenial millions slaughtered and wasted
by the extravagant progress of metal
crazed against metal in a robe of red. Ferrous cannibals
in executive suits, in uniforms, in rags,
we eat the brains and drink the blood
from the planet’s fractured cranium, the orthodoxy
of our overly-vaunted evolution, the structure
and inhuman elaboration of civilization
after civilization nothing but the enforced order of our eating.
The big fish eat the little fish
and the little fish cry.
If the eye by which I see this star
is the star that eyes me, could it be
the stars have gone mad
over uncountable nights afflicted
by the same recurrent nightmare
of our astounding savagery,
the gigantism of our capacity
for agony and mutilation,
the brutal depravity of our deepening ignorance
exalting in its consciousness of new modes of murder,
our societies, organized theft,
the flowers of our culture
rooted in the bone and blood meal of a garden
planted in the shadow of an abattoir,
Auschwitz with daisies? Atoms join and separate,
their annihilations, edicts of light,
amalgams and almagests of matter,
mind in the fire-womb
mastering the art of water,
the elixirs of life drawn alchemically
from destruction and putrefaction, the water-lily,
the water-star that opens like a hand
that would give something back to the stars,
transforming the muck and mud of the swamp into light.
Is there any flower a human
can offer up to the night
that has come of all our killing, the suffering
we have enforced upon one another
as if, insane, we despised our own species;
is there anything we have made
of the tragic waste in large and small
we could hold up to a star, to ourselves,
to the moon in the willow
and say, yes, of all the blood we have spilled,
of all the minds and lives
we have brought to rot and ruin
there is this great, black rose of wonder,
this light by which we know the light
born of the billions who have lived and died
in the course of our conception, the countless exterminations
to show you this, just this,
one flower, one incorruptible efflorescence
worthy of the fire that engendered us?

PATRICK WHITE

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