Saturday, December 17, 2011

EMERGENCY NOCTURNE


EMERGENCY NOCTURNE

The moon breathes its own reflection
on a late night windowpane
then watches it shrink, a tumour
or a civilization on the wane. A needle of light
draws from an inkwell of night
and signs an arm.
The stars go off like a fire-alarm.
A tomcat howls in the alley,
an agony of evangelistic hormones,
while the poet in the upstairs apartment
ponders suicide like a rose
he wants to give his bride.
Spring is a peacock in a chimney
that longs to bloom
stuck like a heart or a word in the throat.
Love is an empty lifeboat
crushed by the fractious thaws
and icy faults of March.
Across the street from the hospital
in its memorial garden of tungsten lights,
its parking meters and streetlamps,
perpetually budding daffodils,
metal madonnas with luminous faces
peering down on asphalt,
industrial pietas of aluminum and glass,
a living man returns to his ghost
like any other Tuesday
with proof of nothing on the other side.

PATRICK WHITE

O BABY


O BABY

O baby, you’re an upper middle-aged man’s Disneyland sexually
and I appreciate the cleavage
and the tight jeans that look like
they were sculpted by Praxiteles
putting flesh back on a wishbone
to break it with his pinky finger
and his eyes shut
to ask for dark rapturous relations with the sea
when you put it up to your ear
like the vulva of a fortune-cookie to listen
to the mermaids whispering specifically to you.
Older, you grow more circumspect
like the rings in the heartwood
of a second growth forest
and more than fire
you begin to fear the women
who smile like chainsaws with lipstick on.
Especially when they’re as deliberately
dependent as you are
like a third world country
opening an embassy in a shopping mall.
The wolf hasn’t forgotten how to howl at the moon
but it’s been shot at enough times
by the sheep-herders in the valleys
to know enough to stay above the timberline
with its tail between its legs
like a broken pine bough
and its ears pricked like needles
for the posses of little Bo Peep
with automatic rifles and wolfhound helicopters
that make a sport of running it to ground
until its heart explodes.
Older and more autumnally wary
of your appetites growing more ferocious
as you sense the cold coming on,
like smoke from a distant fire
you begin to think
people fuss too much over the spring
and give more weight to the blossom
than they do the fruit,
more substance to the desire for union
than the solid yokes
that can grow from fragile wishbones
like two sides of the river
paper-clipped like a bridge
across a wound that never stops flowing.
Heinrich Heine said that young women
were oceans of commotion
when he’d drowned enough to know
the moon isn’t as romantic in Atlantis
as it is to the pearl divers
who hold their breath on shore
to see who survived the shipwreck
of the lunar landing module
that settled in the dead seabed
of Mare Tranquillitatis,
trying hard not to red flag its footprints
as if they could still mean anything anymore
to anyone into space exploration
and making first contact with the Selenites.
And yet you can still have sensible shoes on
and walk dangerous roads
you hoped a change of footware
would help you avoid
when your wanderlust
set out before you barefoot
on an easy starwalk along the Via Galactica
not caring whether
it’s a short cut through hell or not
or the long way home
through some kind of hot paradise
making apple sauce of the windfalls of Eden
because when it comes down to lust or love
virtue and vice are even Steven.

PATRICK WHITE

CRUCIAL DELUSIONS

Thinking sometimes I may have gone in too far
and rendered myself mad on metaphors, thinking sometimes
the river’s turning has degraded into a metaphysical noose
and I’m the prime candidate for some kind of exotic extinction,
with or without enlightenment, and considering too
the exponential myriads of incommunicable interpretations,
as many as the radiant directions of a single shining, though even that
is saying too much, too little, or nothing at all,
I sit here in front of a computer screen,
smoking, drinking black coffee, priming the morning
like an eerie stranger to spring, even the willow
under the church spire, exalting
in its being poured out of something into something
like a waterclock. Over my life, as far back as I can remember,
even in daylight, even in the green morning,
I have always walked under a dark shadow of sky, a long night
that has fallen like a palladium, or radioactive dust
from an ancient, nuclear winter I must have survived
to wonder what food-chain I’m part of now. Who
can understand the myriad selves in a single moment,
the thousands of temples
whose foundations are sapped and torched in a blink of the void
when slavery changes masters and one by one
we become part of the new linkage, precisely
where we are most empty, most apprehensively free,
contriving a bond we can belong to, something
proportional to our courage to be, to create
a delusion that might convince us for awhile that understanding
is not beyond our capacity to make things up
and forget it all began as a kind of play.
In the brevity of always, I am the dark clarity
of the unnamed witness who is and isn’t me,
and I am the actor cast into the stage lights
of the dream and the dreamer, not the thread
of the tiniest spider between them. What
I see of myself, when I’m the cowled observer,
is a long night alone with time and the stars
among the vast indiscriminate deserts
that particulate our despairing monuments and distinctions.
I drink from my own muddy well of wisdom,
looking deeply into the perversion of my reflection
for any sign of love, for any
sign of assent in the light of my glacial seeing. Never
have I been assured of anyone or any part
I’ve ever played to the single occupied seat in the house
that neither applauds nor condemns
from the cold intimacy of its throne
the antics of these crucial delusions, deliberate or spontaneous,
that adorn the mental marquees, the garish neon
of the all-night feature that is me.
The same appalling silence greets the hero
as commends the clown, the theater itself
the owl of an inconclusive afterlife
enacted alike in a brothel or a shrine. No word
from the other side
has ever flowered here, no
ground of being ever sprouted keys to unlock
the efflorescence of this urgent spring, to liberate
the farce of my unknowing
from these straitjackets of affirmation and denial
and let me live sufficiently beyond both
on the nothing I am and the nothing I am not.

PATRICK WHITE