Thursday, December 22, 2011

AWAY WITH LANGUOR, I'M SWIMMING THROUGH TAR


AWAY WITH LANGUOR, I’M SWIMMING THROUGH TAR

Away with languor, I’m swimming through tar.
The room is still as winter. The plants are stalled.
Their roots are dry. The walls
are made of fossil calcium carbonates.
My fish has died. The air outside is cold and mean
and the sun shines fruitlessly on red heritage brick
with windows that look more like empty stages
than the last curtain call
at a red velvet small town funeral.
Faces of the people on the street,
novellas of erosion,
holding out little white flags of surrender
like patches of snow looking for someone to surrender to.
My poetry’s gone into semi-hibernation,
comatose as a red-blooded thermometer
that’s dropped below zero
and I’m trying to smoke last year’s bats out of my attic
with nothing but a wash pail, cedar bough, pack of matches
as if I were smudging the evil spirits away
like the low hanging fruit of temptation.
I need fire. I’m gathering up the dead twigs of lightning
that struck the heart wood of an oak tree
like the ice storm of a cold-hearted prophecy
that killed the messenger for being true to his word.
Madness. Enough of this. Winter, a fist.
Summer, an open palm. Neither of them
can get a handle on a weapon or a tool.
Where’s the pen, where’s the paintbrush,
where’s the dirty keyboard grimed
with sweat, dust, ketchup and ashes,
that can make a poet who’s been writing
three years shy of the last five decades
feel at least as useful as a window?
All the books I’ve published
nothing but empty doorways
that have left the door ajar
so the light can get in and out
like a cat that wants to go howl in the night
or come back in from the cold,
having accomplished what drove it outside
to do what it had to do.
I see two leaves gusting through the gutter
like companion halves of the same map
and I think how lucky they are to be so
irrevocably lost together with enough hope
to approach things as if they were still green.
And they’re probably right. There are
more chances of being found together than alone,
but solitude isn’t the occupational hazard of what I do
to destroy any chance of making a living,
it’s the black hole at the core of the galaxy,
it’s the golden ratio that turns like a starfish
or the pinwheels of sunflower seeds,
whorled seashells, the Hox gene
of the moon in a landscape painting,
it’s the sine qua non, the axiom, that article of faith,
the truth we must hold to be self-evident,
that plunges me into intense states
of creative visualization
that thaw my heart out in an agony of hot water
to keep it from getting frostbite
and get my blood flowing again
like a poppy weeping down a white canvas
because it’s used too much Georgia pine gum turpentine
instead of just lying there like blood on the snow.
Solitude is the mother-tongue of a polyglot silence
that doesn’t have a mouth or ears of its own
but who can count the voices it’s inspired
by its perfect lack of response
to speak up on its behalf
as if anyone were listening to what they said?
Three chord wonder pop-tarts on the pop charts
and whole symphonies of regret.
La Brea tar pits like sabre-tooth tigers
who had their fangs pulled like crescent moons
and went down into history,
dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark,
like toothless Smilodons.
And, yes, the sound of the bees in the locust trees
returning like ghosts in the spring
to the seance they liked best
to pick up where the flowers and the thorns left off.
But you can’t impress an abyss of solitude
with your radiance. The wavelengths
just keeping going on into forever
looking for something that might come to life
in their light. A crocus. A planet.
A cryonically frozen fly on the windowsill.
You walk alone with the Alone long enough
and you begin to realize
even when you pour your heart out
like white gold out of crude ore
you’ve been talking to yourself all along
and what you hear is the sacred syllable
of your own buzzing
resonating in the deaf ears of the hollyhocks,
as if you were rubbing your finger around the rim
of a Tibetan prayer bowl full of nothing
or a tower of hydra-headed microwave dishes,
though snakes don’t have any ears,
listening to the humming bird, the butterfly
the bee, the black beetle that looks
as if it were designed to pull paperclips out of paper,
the red ant chafing firesticks of formic acid,
a different voice in every different ear,
as if one wavelength per flower were a bellyful
of the same cosmic background hiss of radiation
I’ve being trying to write
like a symphony for a snakepit in B minor
with nothing but a bird bone flute to play it on
at twice the speed of sound
on the moon, people, on the moon
trying to replace the old dozy cow bell
in the firesteeple next to the local library
with a sonic boom, people, a sonic boom
well outside the oral tradition of lightning.
What kind of a dove would it be
if it were merely the echo of a loveletter
I sent out to look for land
instead of the real voice
of the wind in the winter chimney
lamenting the passage of the birds
that used to bear and raise their young in it,
and though the wind says as much as it ever did,
its vocabulary is being reduced
by a few more words every year
and there are longer silences between the stars
that make it look as if
someone’s finally got a fire going
that’s more light than smoke
and nothing, not even the stone pillow
of this luckless day can smother.
Because I’m going to cradle it
like a young bird I found in my hands
and I’m going to blow on it ever so gently
so as not to blow it out
and mentor it like a dragon
until it grows flames for feathers
and learns to fly like a phoenix in winter
with my breath under its wings.
Muhammad ascended to seventh heaven on Buraq
to see the angel of light as it really is
and Perseus has fallen off the milk wagon
it hitched the Great Square of Pegasus to,
and Einstein rode a beam of light
all the way from the Swiss Patent clock tower
into a continuum of time and space
in an oscillatory electromagnetic
charged particle field at rest,
and Hermes the Thrice-Blessed
has got wings on his heels
and one where his tongue used to be
as beautiful and eloquent as the parabolic trajectory
of an arrow whose medium
can’t help but be true to the message.
Something that’s lost upon
all these mythically inflated weather balloons
drifting like Medusan jellyfish among the stars
as if inspiration were just a matter of elevation
and if you got high enough on yourself
you could turn your farce into a legend
and run with the dragons
like a circumpolar constellation
that doesn’t know when to leave the stage.
Alcor and Mizar in the handle of the Big Dipper,
Horse and Rider, stars for spurs,
I’m going to ride
my tiny unbroken seahorse bareback
like a Zen cowboy reincarnated
from an unsaddled Cossack
into a Pacific sunset
face-painted like a rodeo clown
with the constant smear of a grin on my face
and my feet on the ground
and an old whiskey barrel for pants
that keep falling down
to reveal my red rapper boxer shorts
to get a cheap laugh out of the bullshit
that keeps bringing me down
like Don Quixote at Sancho Panza’s expense.
Taurus tilting at the winter solstice
when sun and moon, fire and ice
stand still as the unhinged windmills
in the Tiffany china shops of the zodiac,
I will risk my life like a Chaplinesque matador
or Mithras Tauroctonus
when the sun shines at midnight
just to poke fun like swords of light
through the voodoo heart of the raging bull
that takes itself way too seriously
to be the sign of enlightenment that Capricorn is.

PATRICK WHITE

YEARS BEFORE I MOVED INTO THE RENOVATED FARMHOUSE


YEARS BEFORE I MOVED INTO THE RENOVATED FARMHOUSE

Years before I moved into the renovated farmhouse,
the previous owner told me
he had to go down to the lake
and shotgun the rat snakes
that were dripping like powerlines out of the trees
to keep the campers from freaking out.
Rat snake. Biggest constrictor in Canada
found in the Rideau Lakes region of Eastern Ontario.
Black anthracite that can grow up to nine feet
when they’re stretched out like rubber
some hotshot laid down the highway.
They nest in the southern exposure of boggy fields
rotten logs and compost heaps
that have been abandoned to the wild,
water to water, air to air, earth to earth
and anchor their fangs in rats and birds and frogs
and other small mammals
they crush in their coils like vicious inner tubes.
And they’re not afraid of humans if you mess with them.
And they swim like wavelengths of dark energy
the way Nureyev used to dance.
The good farmers stop their trucks
to take a stick and shoo them off the road
like defamed angels that keep their silos free of pests,
but the morons run over them
like those hoses the Minister of Highways
stretches across the road
to count the number of cars that use it.
And if you get too close they turn into
three on the floor spring-loaded Hirsch shifts
that can bite back like a midnight special
in a game of Russian roulette.
They’re the reptile version of a black hole
when it’s acting more like a wave than a particle,
a linear eclipse that moves as eloquently
as water on the moon in the Sea of Shadows
or a loose strand of the Medusa
letting her hair down like an oilslick
to rinse the conditioner out of it in the river Styx.
Shock of black in the tall yellow grass
they can move as quick as electricity
or make your heart stand still
like the sun above Jericho in cardiac arrest.
Dark rosaries with nothing to confess
as they unsheathe themselves like the daggers
of the assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain
sliding through the darkness to seize the night
carpe nocte, by the throat, by the heart,
one tiny locket of life after another
beating on the doors of their panicked hearts
from the inside to get out.
And you can’t help associate evil with them
or Darth Vader, even though
they shine and shimmer
like irridescent boat-tailed grackles in the sun
and at night as I once saw one swimming beside me
like a parallel line of anti-matter
that threatened me with utter annihilation
should we ever converge,
I’ve seen the moon flash off their scales
like waves of black lake water
as she shed her skin like the Milky Way
just to get as naked as they are
when she went skinny-dipping
with one of her oldest totems
to renew her virginity
as the epiphany in the mirror
of a Black Madonna, priestess, oracle, muse
that can arouse the lowest
to the heights of prophecy
like black rat snakes with the wings of dragons
on sacred glyphs of the god Iawa
who reconciles all opposites
by turning scales into feathers.
Snakes always keep their secrets to themselves
and startle us with the power of myth
to embody in such as these
the tragic and the true in a species facing extinction.
I’ve always tried to keep my distance from them
as if they were some kind of mutable event horizon
and though I once saw a girl in a bikini
wrap herself in one at an outdoor art exhibition
in Bon Echo Park like a poster child of Freud,
and it just lay there with its head between her breasts
like a spent symbol on the pschent of Cleopatra,
the oracle at Delphi, Alexander’s mother,
I’m too much of a warm blooded mammal
not to respect something so dangerously old
that looks at you with a wicked grin
and two black lidless eyes
its body followed like a colon
that knows everything that could happen next
because it’s seen it all happen before
like black serpent lightning shooting up your chakras
out through the crown of your head
like a lightning rod in shock
that it got all its Kundalini connections crossed.
Now imagine after the shotgun blast
snake meat flying through the air,
snake-blood gone supernova,
snake-skin bursting into shreds of black balloon,
snake-guts, hearts, lungs, eyes, tongues, fangs
landing on the rocks, the lake, the trees, the flowers,
food for ants, crows, maggots, coydogs, and turkey-vultures.
By the dozens, as the shotgun boomed across the bay
like the drum roll of an echo in an executioner’s hood
as if Jacque de Molay were being burnt that day
with the last of the Templars.
Darkness demonized into extinction
to keep the campers from freaking out
so they could play at communing with nature
for two hundred dollars a week.
A canoe. A cottage. A man-made beach.
Just you. And nature. And the shadows
of the rat snakes sliding down out of the trees
like a black veil of blood descending like night
down upon the stage of your campfire
where you’re making up ghost stories
like last curtain call before lights out
and under the blossom of your tent
you dream of the innocence
of dark mysterious things
that have been eradicated for your convenience.
You dream you see Isis dropping her veils
and you look deeply into the eyes of the Queen of Heaven
through a canvas flap in a burqa of safety-nets.
And the silence is a requiem for rat snakes.
And the death of the darkness
makes the light a little less convincing,
and the stars shine a little paler by contrast,
and the candles wane uninspired
to dance with lesser shadows.

PATRICK WHITE