Sunday, December 25, 2011

I WANT TO TAKE THE MOON OUT OF THE SKY


I WANT TO TAKE THE MOON OUT OF THE SKY

I want to take the moon out of the sky
like a cup, like a rose of black wine
and drink it down to the last shadow of a mountain,
the last, lost eyelash of the light
that floats on the surface, the final crescent.
If I could inhale fire, or snort the stars
like a rail of radiant coke on a black mirror
and pull the darkness up around me
to keep me warm in the night
against the cold drafts that barge through the window,
if the darkness were a woman
I could throw my arms around
and hold her back against my chest in the bay of my body,
a shore I liked to wake up on
still drunk on the moon
and walk in the morning as she
dazzles me with her nakedness and veils,
the litter of the broken jewelry
she arrays in the sprawling waves, I would, o
believe me I would. I would
take this paint rag of a life
this hard, dirty smear of leftovers on the plate
of so many paintings, this injured towel
that has wiped the blood and tears and clouds,
the wounded sunsets from so many faces and rivers,
from so many brushes and knives and tongues
leeched off the rotten rainbows, the flags,
the bad water in the dark well, I would
take this skin of dirty flowers,
this Joseph’s coat of colours,
this blighted, blotted pelt of soiled skies
and corrupted trees, eyes that have dried
into blisters and scabs, lips
that crack like dry peonies, I would take it
and give it a decent burial, already
the poor, leather shirt
of some archaic Indian from the book of changes
lying in the yarrow of his scattered bones.
Or maybe I could acquire the thunder
of a large, rusty oil drum and burn it at night
in the backyard, cremate it and smudge
the evil spirits out of the house
of my prevailing stars, smoke
the adulterous virgin’s disease away,
like clothes after someone’s died of the plague.
There are days, and this is one of them,
when life seems kinder than I thought
to everyone else but me;
mornings and afternoons, but seldom the nights,
that seem like dead dogs
lying at the side of the highway,
ants in their eyes dissolving like soap
and turkey vultures unravelling
their organs and tendons
like the yellow and scarlet yarn of old sweaters
that will be reknitted into something else
that doesn’t fit, days
when I realize I was born middle-aged,
how homeless my heart is,
and how my voice,
though it’s been hurled into the dawn for years,
is such a lonely bird, not even an echo
disappearing into the silence
of the vast, unanswering spaces that overwhelm it.
I write in the air with the wind for a pen
like a madman who gestures at things
no one else can see, believing against belief,
he’s doing his part to better the world
though it comes with asylums
and bills to his door, demanding
mechanical birds on iron boughs,
and revisions not his to give.
I feel like a cinder in someone else’s eye,
a crumb of sleep shaken out of a dream,
a thread of smoke that stings people
into rinsing me out with anger and tears,
the stone of the new foundation cast away
though all I wanted to do
was astound the blind with stars,
make the dark flower with the wild orchids
of a more luminous fragrance,
arrive with islands of wheat and roses and wine
and lay the cool sage of the moon down
like a silver herb on a scalded heart.
I’m a brilliant hoodlum from the late sixties
as one of my ex-wives called me, leaving,
and we thought we could heal the world
with love and music and art.
Hearts change, times change, and maybe
I’m the casualty of a slow accident
and this is my coma, these days I spend
witching for water in hell,
for signs of life among the corpses
that fell en mass from a terrible height,
going from one to another,
lifting up their pale arms,
the limp necks of broken swans, looking
at my watch to time the indifferent heartbeat
of the pulsing cursor on the computer screen.
I’m a habit of buoyancy
drifting through dense fog,
an empty lifeboat crying out
to a ship that may have gone down years ago:
“Is anyone out there, is anyone alive?”
And no one answers
but the gargantuan vacuities
of the atomic distances between us.


PATRICK WHITE

I WAS A BOY IN CAMPBELL RIVER


I WAS A BOY IN CAMPBELL RIVER

I was a boy in Campbell River, six years old,
and my mother was crying because
she had been abandoned by my father
and had no food for her four children. I told
the strangers my mother was crying,
she had no food for her children,
my father was gone, and in the morning,
boxes of food, while we were sleeping,
stacked high on the wrap-around verandah,
not a gift of the fairies, though it could have been so,
but of the people, the good townspeople
who had come in the night, giving,
to spare my mother’s pride. I hoped
I was my mother’s hero
when she stopped crying. And secretly,
deep within me
as if I’d found a power jewel
I didn’t know I had:
the mouth, the sound, the word, and the heart
that listened: how utterly amazing
that I could do this, that I could speak
and things just happened, good things
for good people who needed help,
for good people who could help:
my mother stopped crying. And again, older,
with a passion for stars
because no one could soil them,
telescopes, because they’re women,
Egyptian mysteries, E.J. Pratt,
model aircraft, and Keats.
I’d write at sunset up on Heartbreak Hill,
where the old prison
that hung seven men
and buried them in the yard once stood,
the bones smothered in yellow broom.
I want you to understand this.
I’d write at sunset up on Heartbreak Hill
where “a thing of beauty
was a joy forever,”
and I was alone, as the night approached
and the hurtful world withdrew,
with myself, a telescope, and the stars
that nobody could touch,
that danced in the lens
like fireflies in a canning jar,
other worlds that knew better than this one.
I was published at ten, and then
awards, highschool, the emotional molasses
of big, sticky feelings that were real tears
but took hours to fall from the eyes
of the ages that groaned like my mother;
the usual tarpit depressions, lavish praise
from the unimpressible English teachers,
my hard, surrogate fathers,
and a lot of golden futures and abalone dawns,
but my best themes
were always wounded animals,
the underdogs, the ones with no voice but mine
which I honed on the stone of the moon
for war, justice, love, wonder.
These were my adolescent centuries
and I used them well, erecting
profound obelisks of thought
scrawled with immortal feeling,
the tragic graffiti of spring,
without forgetting I had a body
and two lives, one on the street,
and the other in my room
where blood and knives reverted
to roses and thorns, a chrysalis
for dragonflies. And the word had eyes
long before it grew a heart
that mattered. Until university, and a woman
who was an apostate madonna
with grails, a Magdelenic muse
who brained me with soft stones
that hurt like lilies, an Irish girl
I married for her white fire
and green eyes. Grails aren’t cauldrons
and cataracts in the eye,
flowers in the sky,
but the word learned
the triune identity of existence,
longing, celebration, lament.
And I lived everything in the name of poetry,
fucking, funambulism and fury.
The word made itself a god, a shrine,
and raised an idol to itself
and forced itself to its knees.
Only my daughter
was a grace beyond the creed. And these
were the decades of another darkness
deeper than night.
And then I met the black angel Aztec
who killed me, in a distant city
far from the sea. I buried
her knife in my wound, and the fire was hot,
blue, acetylene, and I was humbled by the word,
by the voodoo of her beauty
and without even realizing
I was dead,
truly learned to sing, doves
in the ashes everywhere, oceans
in the rose, stars
that struck like spears
and a long night that was not a reward.
And then the books and the prizes
they laid on my grave
to honour someone I didn’t believe in,
as if the word had disappeared like a bird
into the bright vacancy,
the dark abundance of the sky
with the thread of my blood in its beak
and I could never heal,
and haven’t. And these were the years
black lightning
used me like a filament.
But I moved to the country
with a noble witch from Westmount,
a private thorn with heart
and kept watch in a sacred grove,
King of the Wood
with a rubber sword
for a lightning rod. Paradise awhile
and then I fell again
without a parachute or poppy
to ease the descent. And the women came
with burning ladders
in negligees of gasoline
and tried to turn the phoenix green
but I knew too much about ashes
to dream for long.
For one, the moon was a scythe
and I was starwheat, for another,
a double-bladed ax
that had to fall
on the sons of the sins of the fathers
and didn’t care
if I were an execution or a sacrifice,
and still another, a cougar of desire,
spread her crescents into claws
and mauled my heart like a robin,
but the last, and the youngest,
the final dismemberment
and the worst, drank blood from my skull
when the moon went into eclipse.
And I bless them all forever
from the bottom of a well
where the stars walk on water
and the night is a fractured bell.
And these were the months
that drowned like middle-age,
and the word was robbed of its feathers
and learned to fly like a snake.
Now weeks, days, hours,
bring me their honey and lilacs,
and the old wars I fought for others,
the artillery of my books,
the fuses, the explosives
are matches in the sun,
the abandoned armories of hell,
my blood flagged at half-mast
as the skeletons of strange constellations
that litter the field like legends
unmarrowed by the changes,
mint new medals
for a black farce
that haunts me like the shadow
of the happy crow
that plucks the stars from my eyes;
and now the word is not a word,
and poetry is not a poem,
and the moon is not a widow
who waits by the sea
bruising her heart with gray roses,
but a moment of life, longer than death,
that sings to itself in the starless dark
in a language all of its own.

PATRICK WHITE