Monday, June 13, 2011

FOUR AND A HALF POUNDS OF SUNLIGHT

Four and a half pounds of sunlight

hits the earth a day

like heroin hits the streets of New York.

I forget who ran away with her spoon in the lullaby

but the moon’s cooking rocks in her craters.

Madness is more of a particle than a wavelength.

A pigeon flys by my window.

I’m staring at the garish red depersonalized logo

of the Bank of Nova Scotia across the street.

It’s trying to teach me how to live

like a sexless drone in a heartless bee-hive

but it’s stolen all the gold from the flowers

and there’s no pollen

there’s no honey

left for someone like me to gather.

So I’m writing this poem to no one instead.

It’s not a Luna moth

caught inside a store-front window

fluttering against the glass to get out

and go crazy in the rapture of the streetlight.

My heart is buried in it

like an improvised explosive device

that’s been timed to go off lightyears from now

when I go supernova

like the buddha on a brainwave

that had an insight into nothing.

I’m wired for detonation like a candle

that doesn’t know when to quit.

All the stars take their light from it.

And all true lovers their inspiration.

Vegetable vendors in the souks of Tunis.

Vietnamese monks in the streets of Saigon.

Giordano Bruno at the stake

at the beginning of a new century in Venice.

Or me sitting here like a nightlight in a morgue

so the dead can find their way back home.

Creation is self-immolation

when it’s intense enough.

Burn baby burn.

Perfect combustion.

No Holy Ghost like smoke in the urn.

No holy war in the hallelujah of your hooka.

No bones in the firepit of your last cremation.

An abuse of time

in an extravagance of space

is a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich

on Dostoyevsky’s deathbed.

Unravel your rivers of lava

like a volcanic fireshed

tempering its words

like swords and islands in the sea

to give them an edge up on life.

You haven’t got both eyes open on poetic insight

if you cherish the light

and despise the ore

that carries it like life

in the nickel-iron core

of a spermatazoic meteor

to planets that have never been green before.

Standing in the doorway of your coffin

cross the threshold

break the taboo

that incarcerates your heart

like the royal seal of a blueblood

and reprieve yourself as if every moment

were one minute to midnight

for the pumpkins on desolation row.

Carve your own features

into a skull

with eyes that burn

like cosmic candles

at your own funeral.

Irony is the failure of a black farce

without enough life-force

to transcend its own poetry

by turning the immoveable mass of night

into dark energy.

Fiat lux.

Let there be light.

Nur wa nur.

Light upon light.

But you can’t see it with your eyes

because seeing hasn’t devolved yet

into the names and forms of things.

Illumination everywhere

but nothing to enlighten.

No Buddha.

No Bodhi Tree.

No Morning Star.

Nothing far.

Nothing near.

Nothing to reflect upon

in the eyeless void of the mind-mirror.

Look at this.

Look at this as if you were blind.

Look at this before there were any veils.

Look at this before God realized

what a secret she was

and nothing was hidden.

Look at this like the witness in a dream

stands on a high hill like a Druid

overlooking a war

between the names of God

and says carry on.

Or no more.

The name of your god is Bran.

There is more under heaven and earth

than is contained in your i-pod Horatio.

Once it’s fallen

even in spring

the green apple

is as old as the ripe one.

Getting back to your roots means

you disappear

you give up your blossom

your leaf

your dusky sphericity.

Root radix radish

returning to the source means

being totally radicalized by the void

by the emptiness you embody

like an empty cup

hanging like a mutant dewdrop

in empty cupboard

on a question mark

that isn’t so much a hook

or a Scythian sword

as a scythe.

Getting down to essentials means

you run out of elements before you get there

so no on ever arrives

who’s aware of it.

The extremes of chaos

are the fundamentals of a harmony

that sets you free.

Peace isn’t the leftover of a war

that cannibalized everything.

A morsel on Caesar’s plate.

It’s the creative dynamic of a ferocious freedom.

It’s living without prophets and dolls to talk to.

It’s speaking in a voice

that isn’t the first among echoes.

It’s looking into a dark mirror

that isn’t addicted to your reflection

and seeing that nothing is seperate or isolate

because there’s nowhere

the Big Bang or God

can cast creation away from herself

like a torn veil

or turn her back on the world

without coming face to face with herself

the way an old widow

disapproves of a drunken teen-age girl.

You fall in love like a hole.

You make love to a hole.

You see through a hole.

You drink from a hole.

You eat and speak and breathe

through a hole

Your body is a bag of water

with nine holes in it.

Gravity’s a hole.

You dwell in a hole

and labour every day

digging holes for a living

to fill the hole in your belly

like the little Dutch Boy

who stuck his thumb

in a hole in a dyke

to keep the sea from taking back

the hole of his excavated country.

Space-time

is a blackhole within a blackhole.

Behind us the abyss of a hole

and before us

the available dimension of another.

Mommy was a hole

and every groundhog’s got two of them.

Cradle to grave.

Hole to hole.

All the bubble-brained membranes

in the whole of the holistic multiverse

are just thin-skinned holes

twisted like wormholes

into the shapes of rabbits and dachshunds

like party balloons in the hands of a clown

who’s full of cosmic laughter

at his own playful creativity.

Water looks for the holes in everything

knowing

no holes

no flowing.

And you might think

that it’s thought

that keeps the mindstream going

and that it’s thought that it’s after

but it’s the hole in the argument

that keeps it growing.

We put our dead in holes in the earth

where hell dwells.

Shouldn’t we let the birds

peck holes in them

like winter apples

that overstayed their welcome

if we expect them to get to heaven?

Seven come eleven

like eyesockets on the abacus of the dice

that only rolls whole numbers

it’s counting like grains of rice

sown on the stairs of a church wedding

that gutter like skulls

that went bowling with the bride

because they didn’t have the vigor of grass

to sprout in cement

and there were no holes in the event

through which to pass.

And that’s what I’m doing here.

I’m a seed on rock

dreaming of all the things

I’ll never need to be

that would exhaust my potential.

I’m this emptiness

channeling creation out of the void

with my ear up to the keyhole of an open door.

I’m the vacuum that nature abhors.

And I’m the bloodflower

of an ancient star

that pours long wavelengths

of red-shifted light

like a well-aged wine

into the skullcups of the two of us

until our tongues are blacker

than a fortuitous eclipse

in a liberated telescope

that drank deep from its silver mirror

like Narcissus at the water’s edge

and drowned in its own constellations

when no one else was watching.

I’m the myriad-eyed astronomer

in residence for the universe.

I’m the inquisitive physicist

who obeys the law in reverse

and doesn’t think one size fits all

the knowledge in the multiverse.

It’s not my nature to judge or curse

but if I’m mad at someone

I intensify my blessing

until it hurts.

Mass is the sensation

of the mind’s gravity

in its own presence

and time and space

are the illusion of gaps

between thoughts.

A unified field theory is dead.

But a unifying one

lives like a mind that’s never finished

converting dark matter to light.

It never goes out of date.

Time isn’t early

and eternity isn’t late.

And then there is that which shines

that the light itself is the shadow of.

What’s the cube root of love?

Sisyphus might be absurd

but he isn’t blind or stupid.

His brain isn’t the engine

of the energy of the insight

that is equal to his mind times

the velocity of thought squared.

He’s got eyes.

But that’s not where his seeing is.

He’s got more selves

than Esmeralda Marcos has shoes

but that’s not where his being is.

I’m an electronic boddhisatva

who jumps orbitals

like the wheels of birth and death

on a photonic freight train

carrying the remnants of my factory brain

like a war effort

beyond the Urals

to be reassembled again

where the bombers can’t reach it.

I’m the lead end of the Golden Horde

stabilizing my radioactive half-life

in Keeshteem in the county of Perm.

I’m a dirty bomb that refuses to go off.

I’m a homesick terrorist in exile

because I’m not fanatical about God.

It’s hard to tell the wavelength

from the particle

when the moon walks on the water

like Buddha in the Lankavatara Sutra

five hundred years before Jesus

walked on the Sea of Galilee.

I am the Dead Sea.

Everybody walks on me.

I’ve got streetlights bobbing all over me

like a Christmas tree

like fireflies manning a ghost ship

but the crosswalks aren’t in the places

they used to be

and no one can read

these s.o.s. s I keep writing

like loveletters in Etruscan linear A

for someone to come and rescue me from me.

So my works are returned to the Library of Congress

like the anonymous empties of a two-four

back to the beer-store

like Japanese fishing floats

free of their nets

to ride the tides of hyperspace

like a bubble in a world of thorns.

There’s a tender center

in the middle of my moondog haloes

and there’s a point to my horns.

PATRICK WHITE