Friday, December 16, 2011

I'VE AGED LIKE SNOW


I’VE AGED LIKE SNOW

I’ve aged like snow
rounded by my own thawing.
Something’s gone cold inside
like the grave pit of a jewel
that rose from the dead
and left this terrible absence
as if one my eyes were missing.
But when I think about it
a minute or two longer than I should have
when has it ever not been so?
Cold, but I can still burn.
And not one candle in a niche at a time
but whole constellations arrayed
to squander their radiance on nothing
as if they were showing time and space
how to party.
And I’m not deaf to the big foghorns
groaning like dying dinosaurs
on the Pacific coasts of consciousness
that remind me time is passing
like an island in the night
I might be marooned on.
Desolate assessments of what’s ahead
through a long winter of solitude.
The worst lies are the ones
people stick in their ears like fingers
not to hear the cries of the drowning.
So I don’t. I listen.
But sometimes my helplessness drives me so mad
not knowing what else to do
I start dancing with the fireflies on shore
until I’m so tranced out
for one more night or two
I feel like a great bonfire of life
that set its last lifeboat ablaze
to shout out into the darkness
at the first star I see
break the gloom
like a ship on the distant horizon,
for the sake of the fireflies, the dance,
the drowning, the island and me,
Hey, we’re here.
We’re over here.
For God’s sake, we’re over here.
But after awhile I return to my senses
and it's just one more wavelength after another
like the widening wake of something that’s passed,
washing the bodies of people
I used to know and love
like blood of my blood
and flesh of my flesh
up on the beach
like a cargo of immigrant dolls
who’d paid for their passage to the other side
where things were supposed to be more beautiful
but the way things went down
couldn’t swim for their lives.
With sorrow and anger
for what’s happened to them
not caring if it’s the right attitude or not,
only that it’s human,
I gather them up one by one
and sit them around what remains of the fire
to dry off and get their bearings again
like a zodiac that lost it for awhile,
and I talk to them
about all those trivial things I remember
I never thought would mean
more than the world to me now.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SIMPLE UNFORCED ACTIONS OF A MAN ALONE AT NIGHT


THE SIMPLE UNFORCED ACTIONS OF A MAN ALONE AT NIGHT

The simple unforced actions of a man alone at night
for hours by himself
when nothing of the world
calls upon him to be anyone but himself.
He does small trivial things
like replacing the red flint in his Zippo lighter
in preparation for lifelong cosmic projects
he’s meant to execute since boyhood.
Even the windows don’t place any demands upon him
though he looks for the occasional star
above the roofs of the buildings across the street
and whose lights are still on
in the rooms of those the darkness hurts the worst.
He micromanages his body
hair by hair,
tamps back his cuticles
to get a better view of the moonrise
over the horizons of his thumbnails
the way a man who’s read too many good books
proofreads his garden in the morning.
He enjoys a porous intimacy with the night
as it soaks into his bones
like lamp oil into western red cedar
and deepens the darkness
with mahogany poetry
almost the colour of blood.
He makes a sandwich.
He fills a coffee cup.
It’s winter and he feels
the demotic inflections of temperature
as the air gives up its pretense
of being cooly debonair
for more peasant aspirations
to turn the heat up higher.
The sublimities of three a.m.
The last streetcleaner and garbage truck have gone by,
perfecting the desolation of the deserted street.
Not quite peace, not quite emptiness,
the sweetness of the hour suggests
it doesn’t matter what it is.
Absolute solitude, thickening silence,
as if the darkness were a way
of mourning the death of stars
most people never even saw shining
so deeply into their eyes while they slept
they penetrated their dreams
and touched their hearts in a way
that didn’t wake them up.
If anyone were to ask him
what he felt like right now
he’d say he felt like space.
Unmoved somehow
without inhibiting anyone’s passage.
He’d tell you that it isn’t time that moves.
That the greatest gift
anyone could give to the world
is their stillness.
As if you were returning your cup
to the river you drew it from.
He stares at the small red Zen lamp
with its friendly infernal glow
embossed with the leaves and seeds of autumn
like fossils in the Burgess Shale
next to the recovering snakeplant in the window.
Blasting caps and fireflies of poetry
go off in his mind like images and insights
of distant lightning and thunder,
and though he feels like an empty bus terminal
he knows how stupid it is
to wait for something that’s spontaneous.
Let that live that can.
Something will sooner or later.
It isn’t true that nature abhors a vacuum
or nihilo ex nihilo fecit, nothing
comes of nothing.
Nature adores a vacuum
the way a poet is possessed by a muse.
Or some vandal
with a genius for disobedience
passing by a freshly painted wall
loves his spray bomb
just like any other Neanderthal.
He lights a violet candle
and a stick of patchouli incense
as if both were of vital importance.
The ghosts of the cigarette-smoke in the room
gravitate like gulls
toward the lighthouse like a seance
only too happy to go up in flames
and attain a state of perfect combustion.
If the world weren’t constantly
emptying itself out
like the moon from its skullcup
or a man alone at night in a small town
waiting for the next star to appear
between the slow clouds in his window
there’d be no more room for inspiration.
Even a fallen gate hanging on by a hinge
in the untended starfields
lets more in than it can pour out.
There’s an absence of people and things
that were there and aren’t anymore
and that emptiness tastes
of the inconsolable sadness
of a desert that mothers mirages
only to outlive them all.
And there’s the emptiness
of a confined space
when it reminds time
that it is also eternity.
And that can sever
and shock you like a knife
you just pulled on yourself
to keep your distance from death.
And then there’s the unconditioned clarity
of a nothingness that holds you up
like a mirror to your own nature
and says put a face to this.
And poems emerge like enlightened liars
that are true to their own
knowing that’s all there is.

PATRICK WHITE