Friday, December 30, 2011

I'M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES


I’M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’m learning to dance with eclipses
and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows
weeping rivers of acid rain that hang
like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains
or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life
is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,
and the wolf that came once a week
to teach me to sing underwater grew old
and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.
I don’t know what I want from the walls
I’ve designated heritage battlefields
with an array of awards and degrees
and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,
but everything I ask for seems to make
terrorists of the lamps
and the single moth
knocking himself out trying to crash into flames
against the vanilla fez of the shade
is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter
my eyes have congealed into a still-life
with antique ax-handles, a menagerie
of scarred paint, the landscape of the moon
humped and bubbled in contaminated crimson,
I haven’t seen anything for disposable eras
I wanted to drink from a skull. While the shadows and ashes
discuss what they have in common, hoping
for a marriage of convenience,
the blue night sifts my constellations through a spider-web
looking for the penumbral tear of the last life I shed
longing to avoid this one
like black shoe-polish on the pillowcase of a swan.
Even the absurdities have looped into platitudes
and petty thieves have stolen
the mask of the mouth in the imperial mirror
that keeps telling me
I’m the slumlord of my own ambition,
the blighted rind of the moon withering in the garbage,
the sloughed skin of a serpentine condom full of stars.
And how am I to understand my loneliness
and the fools I deploy to deface it
except as one more yearning octopus
with arms like hollyhocks
trying to cross the highway without a line of credit?
I should be bolder, smarter, more mineral
than light, my bones recast in gunsmith plastic,
and my heart a leaking hand grenade, white phosphorus,
unpinned and ready to hurl like a violent dove
through the slutty dreamcatchers in the windows
of strategic brothels, I should stand up
to the apostrophes of Armageddon
and handcuff my voice to a pair of quotation marks
and send all my friends bouquets of radical placards
until my voice is released from isolation, my blood
from intensive care, my mind from death row,
and I’m paid all the back wages I’m owed for the use of my innocence.
When the wind decides to defeat the leaves with poison
and the charcoal women burn their tongues
like meat on the grill of their dinner-bell smiles,
their charms all smoke and cocktail tears,
I should have the metal to drop
depth-charges on the willow cruising the shadows for convoys,
and depose the cult of scorpions marching south
that tried to brainwash me into believing
I’ve aged like wounded shoes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MOON A BLADE OF STILLNESS


THE MOON A BLADE OF STILLNESS

The moon a blade of stillness honed on the heart
of a cold, dark night
without lunacy, love, or forgiveness.
Indian tobacco and milkweed pods
like the fossils of shucked clam shells
in the middens of the Neanderthals
or the twisted wombs of fortune cookies
that were long ago cracked open
to spill their good fortune on the wind.
The morning dove of the loveletter flown
they’re left with nothing but the envelope.
The wind gathers and swirls gusts of snow
across the ice-glazed fields
as if someone were about to rail coke on a mirror
like the Milky Way
and blew it big time into a gust of stars.
Venus and the moon,
perfume on a wrist
with a wound and a scar.
The cold air slashes my nostrils.
Only mad dogs and Englishmen
go out in the midday sun.
This is the light-deprived Canadian version
of the same thing
at midnight when everything
is frozen in space and time
like the numb desolation
on the face of a lost Arctic exploration
as if we were all wearing the same death mask
because whether you’re a nationalist,
a naturalist, or just winging it on your own,
when it’s this cold and birds
are dropping from the sky
like words and notes from the lyrics
somebody forgot to mime,
one size fits all.
Lethal the burning clarity of the cold
when it rimes your mouth
with your own breath
with the salt of the earth
and the lime of the moon
as if it were just one big celestial grave pit,
the cold stone of the crone
that buries people in her heart
like a locket she can’t open from the inside.
Life in these brutal windswept fields
desolate as a used calender
or a losing ticket in the lottery
of predictable apocalypses
that didn’t even remotely come true
like Mayans in igloos at the top of the temple stairs
one for each day of the year
that went on living without them.
Or the astronomical catastrophe
of nuclear winter in Puerta Vallarta,
according to a pyramidal sun dial
that got it wrong
from the late Triassic and beyond.
Fire and ice pulled like a blade
that wouldn’t be bound to a heart of stone.
Light pours out like gold and honey
from the dark ore of a new moon
opening its eyelids for the first time
since it went into a coma
like a temporary eclipse of its sanity.
Everybody obsessed with death in the end-times,
forgetting from the universe’s point of view,
there’s thirteen ways of looking a blackbird
and fourteen in reverse
and they’re all as true
as whole numbers on a clock
doing a sword dance with time.
Life lines unravel like the frayed ends
at the delta of a river about to enter the sea.
But what could be so terminal
about returning to the source
of where everything begins
like the universe with a Big Bang
that has continued
like an executioner’s drum roll
ever since the moon rose up
like a two-bladed ax in the east
and learned to cut both ways
by the time it fell in the west
on the white napes of the birch-groves
swanning with their arms outstretched
like a constellation who’s time has come
to kiss the crucifix like a vow of silence
and have done with trying to maintain the peace
like a truce with the truth of severance
as if it were their last best hope for deliverance.
And if not deliverance, then at the very least,
to let their branches pile up at their feet
and let the infallible stars set fire to them
like self-immolating heretics
or Joan of Arc in the inferno
of her martyrdom
among treacherous friends
and Burgundian enemies alike
as history neglects to write
into the hagiography of trees
the black stake she was burnt at
and suffered as much as she
for things it never meant to stand for
like the backbone of a saint
when her heart and her legs
gave out under her
like the rungs of a burning ladder
propped against the windowsills of heaven,
her feet grounded in the snake pit
that bound her to the earth.
But enough said, or too much,
or too little, or nothing at all.
Jupiter returns retrograde to Pisces
at its stationary point in the west
for thirty-five nights
and then returns to the Ram
to disappear behind the sun in Taurus.
Castor and Pollux in the Twins
and Capella and Nath and the kids
in Auriga the Charioteer.
Orion holding its club up like the glyph
of the mythically inflated victory truce
of Ramses the II’s battle with the Hittites
at Kardesh, his figure
ten times more imposing than the rest
as he puts his foot on the chest of his enemies
and hopes like stars, snow,
blood and flesh, fire and ice,
his few sparks of life will last.
I’ve always seen it that way somehow.
What hunter would go out with a club
to beat a wild animal to death
unless his prey were human
with a skull that was easy to hit?
Ergo. Kardesh. Forensic mythology
on the few bones
of the original fireflies that are left to us
like the prehistoric vertebrae
of great whales that died in a bay of the desert,
or the skeletons of humming birds
as delicate as the stalks of wild oats
encrypted into the snow
like a hieroglyph for help
frozen into a bottle of ice
that took thousands of light years to get here
only to discover
that we’re as helpless as they are.
That imagination and wonder
are the mind’s way of making sure
in the desolate immensities
of these starfields overhead
and this glacial acre
of hard ground beneath our feet
impervious to the coffins
and roots of our solitude,
we’re not estranged
by what we’re looking at.
That the emptiness of the mystery
is the source of all our metaphors.
The dark mother. The muse.
Our last recourse.
Our only hope of rescue from ourselves.
Interactive similitudes in a void with no likeness.

PATRICK WHITE