Sunday, December 18, 2011

I WANT TO DRIFT OFF INTO THE STARS


I WANT TO DRIFT OFF INTO THE STARS

I want to drift off into the stars
without really knowing what that means.
Down by the Tay River, deep in the darkness
off Sunset Boulevard and the light pollution
of passing cars, there’s a fallen ironwood tree
with the skin of an elephant I sit on
and the horn of a black rhino
where one of its boughs was broken off.
And it’s got half its roots in the air like I do,
or Algol, the ghoulish head of Medusa in Perseus.
I come here when I’m sick of dealing with the world
like a game of snakes and ladders,
when I know I’m a crosswalk
or maybe even a train track
that’s never coming back this way.
I brush a frosting of snow off my log
as if I were making a place for myself
on a bench at a bus-stop that hasn’t come yet
and I gawk at the winter stars
like a junkie trying to shoot the Milky Way
into his bloodstream
so he can o.d. on all that radiance
as soon as it reaches his heart
to humanize the mystery
of how impersonal life can be to all of its own.
I sit in this small nook of cattails
that make me feel I’m an artillery officer
in Napoleon’s army, surrounded by cannoneers
waiting for me to give them some kind of order
to begin firing on the birch grove battlements
across the perennial strategy of the intervening river
that wanders through wars like a Druidic scholar
at peace with himself and the moon
like mistletoe in the tormented boughs of the oak
the river’s trying to decide
whether to let live or not.
I’ve made a pile of muskrat, raccoon,
squirrel and bird skulls
I’ve collected over the years
and I look long and deeply
into their eye-sockets man to animal
in sympathy with the fate of all that lives
however they met their ends,
however their deaths are justified
as a furtherance of the living,
and I swear the way the snow
rimes their eyes in the moonlight
they’re weeping prophetic visions
as hard as diamonds distilled
from the brutal clarity of their own fate,
sudden, cold, and indeterminate.
Translucencies of insight
that can slash your eyes
like scalpels of light
that have just finished decapitating the flowers
like Robespierre the debutantes of Paris
and notice you sitting there
with your head still on
and say what’s wrong with this picture.
But I grow obdurate in the midst of brevity
like a protein molecule
in the core of a flashing meteor
or gold in a nugget of black ore
that knows one day it’s going to be poured
out of the darkness where it used to abide
like a honey-tongued nightbird
that didn’t so much hide
as hesitate to reveal itself.
I gawk at the stars
and it doesn’t make a wavelength’s difference
to much that I can see,
and the way I am so sublimely ignored
by everything that intrigues me
I am split by the perennial
optical illusion of human consciousness
into feeling simultaneously horrified and blessed.
I comprehend the depths of the solitude
and the enormity of what I am
that can include the river, the stars, these skulls
and share in their passage
as a measure of the way I change.
And I ask myself how can they not know
what hour it is
when I’m sitting here like a nightwatchman
staring out into the eternal stillness of space
on an ironwood log, participant and witness
at the nexus of time and forever
realizing on a cosmic level
I embody in three pounds of starmud
like any other unimaginable dimension of the human brain,
there’s only been one fate for all of us
since we entered this world of forms
when eternity sat still and time began
as if there were any difference in reality
between ice and water
or between the emptiness of the mind
and what that emptiness contains.
Call it dark abundance, bright vacancy,
Call it the plenum-void if you like.
They’re all just fingers
pressed against our lips
like the silence of the stars
pointing at a no thing we can’t say.
And they’re pointing in all directions at once
the way a star shines down upon everything
as if each and all in this realm of forms
were the sole source of its illumination
from the inside out.
The first word
in the mother-tongue of sentience
to break the silence
like a blossom of light
in the dead of winter
on a bough of dark matter
that ripened the echo-less echo
of its sacred syllable into our eyes,
the fruits and seeds of seeing
by which it knows us
like the river knows what it mirrors,
like joy knows what’s behind our tears.

PATRICK WHITE

A SILENCE DEEPER THAN WORDS


A SILENCE DEEPER THAN WORDS

A silence deeper than words
roosting in their groves for the night.
Stars the way the darkness sings until morning.
The moon shedding its petals like windows
to show what it’s been dreaming behind them
like the withered stars that crown the rose hips
with jester’s caps.
Life burns like a long cremation
just to keep itself warm on such a night
as cold as this
when breath freezes like music on the air
in a failed attempt to shine like stars.
The intimate human lullaby.
The symphonic paradigms
of impersonal celestial spheres.
The butterfly in the blizzard.
The mind huge as the silence.
The heart dark as the night.
The wind a homeless voice
when the leafless trees
and the frozen streams
and the empty fields have nothing to say
that can be articulated.
The red berry is withered on the snow
like the third eye of an old woman
who cried drops of blood to the very end
until the wound grew too deep and cold
to bleed out anymore
and she left the broken window
in the abandoned house
and the open doorway with no one in it
to speak for itself.
An old woman seeks her own ghost
the way a young mother
dreams of a child to be.
Two doves of the same prophecy
released from both hands at once.
The ingathering and the unravelling,
the breath taken in
and the breath let out,
Atropic filos of life and death
woven on the loom of the moon,
a berry of blood
on the black lips of the rose
as if even in death
it spoke from the heart
like a woman destroyed by love.
And off in the distance,
across the brittle moonlit fields
armoured in jewels,
starting and halting to look around,
against all odds, a fox
that’s managed to keep its flame alive
even in this breathless moonscape
of loose ends and lifelines severed
from their roots like umbilical cords
or the wavelengths in the seeds
of new stars scattered
all over the ground of being
like the notes of a love song
waiting to be finished by the birds
who will search for them like composers
when the sun comes up like inspiration
to arrange them like five-piece constellations
to greet one of their own
as if you could see the picture music of night
and hear the starlight
in everything they sing.
Even now, even here
before the blazing fades
like the passion
of the young mother
in an old woman’s heart
into this desolate dawn of creation
like the Pleiades descending in the west
into a plume of smoke rising from a remote farm house
where the children are just waking up.

PATRICK WHITE