Monday, December 31, 2012

THE WORDS ARE MERELY THE PERFORMERS


THE WORDS ARE MERELY THE PERFORMERS

The words are merely the performers,
the jugglers and the acrobats, the fire-swallowers.
The fat lady with a moustache behind
her flap of tent. The Parsifals, the mottled clowns.
The Crips and the Bloods, the red rose and the blue,
the Mafia dons. Thought is not verbal expression.
The word, tree, can’t read. And clever’s a boor shy
of being intelligent. Keats was right when he wrote
how much superior humour is to wit though
he didn’t live to see very much of it.
And Whitman, too, when he made his exit
from the learned astronomer to witness the stars
as if the beauty of reality could speak for itself
and the science of shining had nothing to do
with starmaps. Things are words, labials of the moon.
Abstractions merely the ghosts of the senses
trying to get back to the earth before the dawn comes up.

Things teach us their names like a dynasty of kings
on the stairs of Incan temples. Generations of stars,
the demotic of light, the patois of their mother tongue.
And the way they relate to one another,
in a thousand different grammars, river reeds rooted
in tributaries all flowing into the proto-nostratic
of the one mindstream like sacred syllables of the rain.
The rain says wave, wet, water, and everybody
goes skinny-dipping in the womb of W
hanging on for dear life to an umbilical rope
at the local watering hole. Ever measure the red shift
of a consonant to determine whether it’s going away
or coming toward you? Are your vowels truly edible
or just the wax fruit that pose for your still lives?

In the Beth Luis Nion Druidic tree alphabet
apple trees ask the most questions about how
when, who, why, where, taking their Q from Latin
like a suggestion from a patron of poets. Horace,
perhaps, like a quarterhorse in the stables of Maecenas.
I can hear the windfall that drops from the tops
of the black walnut trees. I understand the semiotics
of the diadems of the stars setting fire to the hair
of the willows in winter plunging their burning tresses
in the river to put them out like matchbooks
in the hands of delinquent boys. Cruel arsonists
of their prankish joys. The fire gods come
looking for fire. The water sylphs hiss like sibilants.

Point is. As long as you’re alive there’s a conversation
going on all the time that you alone are privy to
even when you’re listening with your ear pressed hard
like a seashell to the walls of your skull. The silence
is riddled with the voices of things like space
is saturated with the red wavelengths of the heaviness
of our eyes, dying like the memory of old stars
that once considered us friends, after we finished crying.

The silence is startled by the sudden outburst
of a nightbird and the dark is seized by a longing
to step out of the shadows and reveal itself reciprocally
like a lighthouse calling out from its widow walk
to an empty lifeboat in the fog, drifting aimlessly
without the oar of a verb, or the rudder of a participle
trailing in the wake of a maritime moon, mute
as the bells of an unmoved sea to say three bells, all’s well, all’s well.

PATRICK WHITE

BRIGHT BLUE WINTER SUNDAY IN A SLOW TOWN


BRIGHT BLUE WINTER SUNDAY IN A SLOW TOWN

Bright blue winter Sunday in a slow town.
Eclipsed by the vivid contrast of light and dark,
watching the carcasse of a sabre-tooth in a tarpit,
cellphone by cellphone, being replaced, no app for it,
by younger minerals with an ice-age attitude
less flexible than water about finding their place in life.

Keep your Smilodons protean. Your fangs
deep and lunar as if you were the beginning
and end of things, and all phases in between,
parentheses around the full moon with a smiley face
if you don’t want to grow old plastering starmaps over a window
with one fixed star in the same place every night.

I’m not wallpapering space with wavelengths
of ticker tape in a blizzard of statistical genomes
falling like snow-globes on the triumphs of the past.
This slum isn’t riding a golden chariot past the bank.

But it’s impossible to be anything but confessional
in the twenty-first century, now my eyes change
the nature of anything I’m looking at, the observer,
the observed, no subject, no object, no experiment.
Just this dynamic equilibrium of creative experience
building bridges like oxymoronic metaphors flying in unison
like two wings on a waterbird, or labouring like an ox
to yoke both sides of the mindstream in a single pair
of lunar handcuffs. A new layer of skin has been added
to the bubble of the earth’s atmosphere like a mind
laying its reflection down upon the water
like a chameleonic simulacrum of the moon inseparable
from the undulance of the thought-waves that perceive it.

An inhumane aloofness can never justify
giving birth to Frankenstein ever again.
Things of the world are things of the mind.
Tat tvam asi. You are that. How can you tell me
you poured yourself out of the universe like a window
looking at the stars from the outside in
like an objectively flat goblet that’s never tasted
the flavour of the wine in the dark cellars of its own heart
as if there were an emotional life behind the shining
that can’t be ignored anymore than the mind
can be left out of a unified field theory inexplicably incomplete?

Add a little love to a little understanding
and wisdom’s back in vogue like a literary technique
of going without knowing where the road ends
with the whole universe as a travelling companion
as close to you as your seeing is to the stars
though you’re both lost in the mystery
of just happening to be here with no fixed plans.

My voice is the mother tongue of esoteric nightbirds.
The stars speak in the sacred syllables of my deepest secrets.
Even in the homelessness of the unknown, I am declared
a changeling on a threshold no one’s dared to cross yet without me.

You who think of yourselves as a dirty word
that has to be expurgated like a sunspot on the heart,
the womb scrubbed out by antiseptically surgical hands
that have yet to deliver you like the windfall
of the low hanging fruit of the earth, let me reach
deep into the matrix of your conception of yourselves
and turn you around so every moon rise isn’t a breach birth.
Let me return an eternal flame to the candle
that went so cold it stopped crying sincerely
after you left, like a wax mannequin in pursuit
of a more trustworthy clarity than the ambivalent probabilities
of your provisional humanity trying to take
the focus off itself like the studied indifference of a telescope.

Didn’t you notice its legs unfolded like an easel
so you could climb up on it like a scaffolding
to paint a yard of wet plaster a day until even you
stood in awe of your own creation myth
as an allegorical explanation of your troubled magnificence?

Unchain yourselves from the protocols
of an objective delusion and cultivate a starfield
of subjective correlatives that correspond
with the inexact science of remaining indefensibly human
in the name of deeper accuracy, a sweeter intimacy
with the Cepheid variables and creative singularities
painting haloes around the black holes of yourself
like the moondogs and moodrings of a tree in the rain.

How much you’ll miss about being alive
if you make the same assumptions as a windowpane
that clarity is necessarily sane. Your starmud
wasn’t meant to be squared with every other brick in the wall
even if you’re lacquered in lapis lazuli beside the Ishtar gate.

If the rivers are polluted on the outside
and all your aqueducts taste of the Via Cloacum,
what’s that if not plack on your own arteries?
All our passports are the democratized peers
of our own lack of identity in arrears to everyone.

No one’s asking you to burn your bridges like equal signs
between light and mass. It’s ok if things come and go
as they’ve always done in the absence of a mind
trying to befriend a camera as a more reliable way
of remembering things you can’t help being back stage.
Life isn’t a photo-op of fixed images and neither is poetry.
Adding a little humanity to what’s meteoric about your origins
doesn’t mean you’re going to end up kissing the Kaaba
like a black stone that’s been worn down by millions of lips.

It’s equally conceivable you’re as aniconic as an eclipse.
You’re lustrous with nothing inside. You’re rough as ore
with a gold girlfriend. The stone draws the sword out of you.
Vulcan walks with a limp like Jacob and Richard III
like the iambs of a waterclock, one leg shorter than the other.

It’s time you learned to celebrate your own creative absurdity
like a child playing intensely with her own imagination.
It’s time you got brave enough to risk your own creation
without asking someone for a starmap to misguide you.

Put the delight back in being a lighthouse full of fireflies
or a foghorn that doesn’t heed its own warning
at the mere sound of a voice clearing its throat
of a nightingale covered in creosote to say nothing
a decent chimney spark wouldn’t want the stars to over hear.

Start a fire the size of a big-hearted furnace
that can hold all the stars in and out of place at one time
like a space that embraces everything trivial and sublime
whether they mythically deflate or shine like a weather balloon
candling at high altitude like an emergency parachute
entangled in its own life lines as if that were the only way
you’re ever going to understand the afterlife of a dandelion
air lifting a time capsule to root sometime later in the future.

Surrealistic town, all eyes at the window as if
you were staring into a crystal ball while your ears
are listening to the blind prophetic skull of the moon
predict the return of a nocturnal atmosphere
bluer than a star sapphire in the eyes of a twilit peacock.
There’s not even so much the measure of an eyelash
in the distance between you and the next star.
You’re the nightbird perched like an arrow
singing on the green bough of the centaur.

Gap the abyss a little closer than you do your spark plugs
and not only your soul, but your body will achieve ignition
like two tines of the same tuning fork coming together
like two fingertips of what’s humanly divine
creatively collaborating with your own mind
like choirs of picture music on the Sistine Chapel ceiling
or the wind in the dry leaves clinging to the black walnut trees
while the stars rise in the east like the patriarchs of the fireflies
transcending their sobriety with the creative spontaneity
of burning their imaginary exemplars like effigies and strawdogs
in the gleeful heresy of making constellations up
out of the gusts of the stars that fly like enlightened dragons
that take you by surprise like the fires in their lucidly munificent eyes.

PATRICK WHITE  

Sunday, December 30, 2012

LONG-LEGGED REFLECTIONS OF FORESHORTENED STREETLIGHTS


LONG-LEGGED REFLECTIONS OF FORESHORTENED STREETLIGHTS

Long-legged reflections of foreshortened streetlights
plunging their daggers like great blue herons
waiting with the craft shop Inuit, harpoons in hand,
above the man cover blow holes
for the occasional asphalt fish to swim by
or a crosswalk orca coming up for air
unmindful of the bleeding revelations
hemorrhaging like the tail lights and chokecherries
of baby seals being clubbed to death
all over the ice floe like a work by Jackson Pollock.

The day’s divinity. First thing you see.
But what if you wake up at night fall
as I just have, and open your eyes
like bi-valved, goose-necked barnacles
to the incoming tide of consciousness
and you’re not especially looking for miracles
but peering down through a grimy apartment window
you see this small conservative Ontario town,
with its clocktower too slow to keep up with time
and the spindly green insect of its spare watershed
elevated like the space program of a tall sputnik on stilts,
has been slumming in the Garden of Eden on mushrooms?

What kind of a sign should I mistake that for?
Is it me? Or a random paradigm of intelligent design?
Or maybe Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and the moon
are not aligned with the traffic lights
and old fashioned lampposts like nightwatchmen
glowing in the snow like the candled lanterns
they hold up on nineteen fifties Christmas cards
to show you everything’s just fine among
the beautifully snow blind and intellectually dutiful
trying to teach amputee fire hydrants
how to climb siege ladders up to my room
as if there were anyone awake enough yet to put out
like an unseasonal moonrise that went out on a limb for me.

First thing I see when I open my eyes at night
and I’m the unexpurgated prophet in the belly
of a beached futon, is the atavistic polymorphous perverse
trying to manipulate caesuras like green stick fractures
along the fault line of a zodiac that breaks
like an earthquake shaking its fieldstones of bad verse
into the emotional quicksand of stars in the eyeless dark.
If I ask for slim lifeboats, don’t send me
to the book launch of an ark after a first few
drops have fallen like dew on thin-skinned crocodiles.
Apres moi, le deluge. And the moon rising
to the surface like a white beluga through the clouds
after four hours of swimming in the brain corals
of a deep sleep dreaming of three stage harpoons
on a take off gantry for weather balloons
huffing laughing gas like dragons in dentist’s chairs
trying to put a brave face on all the mirrors in the house
that show me breaking down into tears at the sight
of the spoon running away with the moon
being cooked like moonrocks in a meteor shower
by a lab rat in a white coat that makes it look
like the plain white envelope of a loveletter
that lifts the moon’s spirits like the bubble
rising to the top of the Seattle Space Needle.

Or as Rumi said somewhere in an hallucinogenic trance
of self-annihilation, the bird of my blood
is rising into the sky of my brain. In my case,
the ecstasy of a hawk whose eyes have never
been trained to wear even so much as the night for a hood.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES I LISTEN TO THE WIND


SOMETIMES I LISTEN TO THE WIND

Sometimes I listen to the wind
as if it were trying to call me home again
though I don’t really know where that is anymore.
Sometimes I hear the chatter of water
exhilarated by moonlight dabbling its feet
in the birch groves and I’m possessed
by the uncanny notion I’m listening
to my own mindstream as if
I were privy to some ancient secret
about myself I were the last to be let in on.

More than likely I don’t exist except
as this protean emptiness that insists
I look upon my own formlessness
as that which was naked now clothed by the world.

Good to go skinny-dipping in your awareness
once and awhile, resilver the mirrors of your skin
in water and moonlight, swing from your spinal cord
like an old rope over a childhood swimming hole
when rapturous simians were still as innocent
as their laughter at getting away with risking it all.

I recall the night I stopped thinking in the past tense
about memory, and she proved how creative she was
by introducing me to her daughters as if
I were a member of the band on stage at the moment.
I love wandering in a labyrinth of insights
the only way out of is to devote yourself
to being as lost as a gust of back alley stars
in the space-time discontinuum of your imagination.

I trust the dream grammar of my mother tongue
to find its own equilibrium like water
left to its own resources. There’s a logic
of associative metaphor that doesn’t dispel reason
from the genetic code of the irrationally inspired.
I look out on a cold night at the stars
and I’m wholly intrigued by the messages
I’ve been asked to deliver like future memories
to the ghost of what I’m becoming. There’s
a second innocence about the world that makes
the return journey even more beautiful than the first.

So when you show up out of the void
like the fragrance of a burning rose
shedding its petals like inflammable deathmasks
on a pyre of bird bones at a sky burial
I never conceive of you as separated,
gone, dead, unfeathered, or alone, anymore
than my heart says farewell to the passage of my bloodstream.

You’re not unravelling in my mind
like a stray thread of smoke from a wick
that put out the fires of life to follow a more spiritual path.
You’re as intangibly here in every breath I take
as a poem without line breaks is to me
when I’m listening to a visionary wind
like the sound of my eyes jamming with the stars.

And there’s nothing about your true features
that are any less real than I am even after
all these lightyears of trying to repatriate
this avalanche of asteroidal Orphic skulls
to a home planet that wouldn’t tear us apart again.

O what a joy it is to still love you as if
I’d never stopped sword dancing
with the thorns of the heart life strews on the paths
we do and don’t take sowing the past
with the first and last crescent moons
of the long nights we spent together
like lovers opening and closing their eyelids
at dawn and dusk to reassure themselves
the mystery of the other was still there,
Venus lingering in the darkness long after sunset
or getting up in the early morning
to turn the curtains back like the pages
on a calendar of last year’s constellations
as you are now, your eyes rising to the astonishment
of an old nightwatchman of the zodiac
spotting you looking out of a window to the east.

PATRICK WHITE  

Saturday, December 29, 2012

TOO INTENSE, TOO DEPRESSING, MY THIRD EYE


TOO INTENSE, TOO DEPRESSING, MY THIRD EYE

Too intense, too depressing, my third eye
the monocle of a Cyclops, a three hundred year old
methane hurricane rose exfoliating on Jupiter,
a gravitationally warped contact lens
that fits like a jellyfish on the mirrors
of the Hubble Telescope in a decaying orbit.

I’m willing to put up with a few thorns
to kiss a rose wearing black lipstick to mass
or sit under a blooming locust tree in the morning
that’s got bigger stingers than the bees that swarm it
ever thought possible, and from a crucifix
so forbidding, watch the honey humming sweeter
than the mellifluous light of a thousand sunsets
that alloyed themselves to copper back in the Bronze Age.

The moon can be the blossom of an apricot.
The moon can be a switchblade. Nobody
likes a real dragon for the same reasons
the tribes were afraid of their shamans.
There’s nothing altruistic about their wisdom.
The apple tree doesn’t look upon its windfall
in late September as a hamper on someone’s doorstep.

Some days I’m as sensitive as a sledge hammer
on the horns of a garden snail. Others
I could fine tune a spider web to the stars
or charm my way out of a snakepit
with the metronomic swaying of the suspension bridge
running up my spine between mutually supportive extremes.
As above so below. Sometimes I fall
from such erotic heights it makes even
the trembling lip of a precipice feel nervous
as I plunge by like a comet with its feet
on the handlebars of a Harley on fire
trying to blow the flames out by opening it up
on the highway like the mobile pyre of a sky burial.

I see blood on the snow and a savaged pheasant.
I don’t see a scarlet ribbon falling from your hair
as if the wind were unwrapping a present.
There’s starmud clotted on the inside
of my prophetic skull but that doesn’t tempt me
to turn it into a flowerpot on a birdcage of a balcony
overlooking the hanging gardens of Babylon
and I’ve never enjoyed popping anyone’s
supersensible iridescent multiversal soap bubble
buoyantly traversing the muck of the swamp
like the spiritual afterlife of a waterlily
that’s cut all ties to what the living are rooted in.

You can stuff your pillowcase with leaking hand grenades
as far as I care if it helps you get a good night’s sleep
and keeps you intrigued with the quality of your dreams.
A hard stone under your head at the side of the road
is often softer than a wet pillow that’s been crying all night.
Too intense, you bray? You sure as hell aren’t.
Took me twenty years to learn to say that with conviction.
I know pyramids with a greater sense of urgency than you have.
Befriend your own death. You’ll wax intense.
You’ll ghost dance with lunatics under the full moon
rising like a white buffalo mother over the seance of your fires.
You can afford to lavish an emergency or two
on the onceness of your life without putting snow chains
on the ambulance in a firestorm of ice-age fireflies.

As for depressing? So’s half of every wavelength.
The valley’s as deep as the mountain is high.
The way things usually go if you don’t see me
with a nose bleed, I’ve probably got the bends
and there are little bubbles of euphoric nitrogen
breaking in my blood stream like my narcotic relations
with laughing gas that would remind me of you in a way
if it weren’t for that long wake of broken mirrors
trailing away behind you like Halley’s comet
when it fizzled in 1986, or Isadora Duncan’s scarf
caught up in the wheel of birth and death
like a loose thread of fate or a snake unspooled
from the axis mundi of a voodoo doll in the arms
of an unlucky world turning over a new card.

Depressing? I’d rather be a sincere disease
than one of the spin doctors of a breezy happiness.
The dragons are unbearable enough
but the fireflies can be just as terrifying
if they don’t understand the nature of their own enlightenment.

My eyes aren’t deranged by the things they see,
though my heart might scream and my dreams
might be painted on the inside of my skull
in carbon, blood and red ochre, my hunting magic
tucked away at the back of a cave where I bury my dead
under the hearthstones, their bones,
symbolic kindling for a fire that never goes out,
and the shadows of all this might have
a thicker skin that you do, but long ago
I discovered the best place to hide was out in the open
and the longest guarantee of making sure
no one knows what you’re up to, is stand before them naked.

They see what they see as far as they’ve
been given a light to go by. Some have optic nerves
wired to their hearts, and they celebrate
the gentle fireworks of life like fireflies.
And some have the eyes of dragons
soldered to the motherboards of their brains
and they’ve been looking at things for such a long time
from a sidereal point of view, they’ve turned
into constellations, cold, beautiful, old, and vast.

PATRICK WHITE  

A GREY MUSIC HOVERS OVER THE TOWN


A GREY MUSIC HOVERS OVER THE TOWN

A grey music hovers over the town.
No people on the streets. Background drone
of furnaces working overtime against the cold.
Space and time on the nightshift and fossils
of bootprints like prehistoric ferns
and the beautiful arcs of tire tracks
frozen into shales of brown Pre-Cambrian snow.
Unlike the stars, there’s no twinkle in the eyes
of the streetlights who just look down and stare.

There’s a desolate window across the street,
facing south directly across from my apartment
I’ve been peering into night after night
like the eye-socket of a blue-black anthracite skull,
waiting to see some ghost or star or the first small flame
of a pilot light come on in the dragon’s lair
as if it could breathe fire out of its eyes
and tonight the last full moon of the old year
slowly appears like seeing out of the darkness
or the return of an apparitional apple blossom to a dead branch.

The air’s got an edge that plays like a switchblade
with the most exposed parts of me,
and the silence brazes my face in glacial acetylene
as my skin goes into shock electrocuted by the cold.
My breath one exorcism after another
I had no idea I had been possessed by so many.
I wander in a fog of exiles and ghosts
like a mystic cloud of unknowing, the rag
of an impoverished atmosphere that aspires
to break into stars shuddering with insight.
Orion and the dog star of Osiris, and Jupiter,
a little further down the road from the moon
than last night. Further into the frozen river groves
a strange, brittle quiet waits for something to happen to it.

I am too far from home to make it back in time.
I have made and unmade my own way through life
like this river whether my end is in my beginning or not
or if there’s a sea of shadows on the moon
I’m trying to make my way to by flowing upward
like the bridges of the trees that burned in the fall behind me
after I’d crossed over to the other side of everywhere.

Myriad stars and the unoccupied emptiness
that’s forms the quixotic inconceivability
of my shapeshifting mind takes them in like fireflies
through the open window of a lantern that embodies the light
the way a candle wraps a spinal cord in flesh like beeswax
then adds a touch of fire to enliven the flame of life within.
My heart gathers them together like tribes
around their council fires and recites from memory
such resplendent myths of origin they shine
like constellations on a bitterly cold night
to keep themselves warm on the inside
by banking the flames with last year’s lack luster starmaps.
Cosmologies come and go like the leaves,
turn brown and go flakey thinking of themselves
as retroactive prophecies in the canopic jars
of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran
led out of the darkness by a messianic goatherd
thinking of kindling his morning fires with them
as he would later burn an autumn of Gnostic Gospels
like portable cave paintings surrounded by hearthstones.

Was the smoke any holier than that of a distant farmhouse?
Was there a fragrance of burning loveletters in the air?
Did fiery doves descend like cherubim and ice-age comets
cast out like flawed jewels from their black halo
beyond Neptune or the aura of the dark Oort cloud
catching the sun out in the open like a sudden hail storm
in Sodom and Gomorrah? Pillars of Dead Sea salt,
those who looked back, weak-kneed birches
buckled by snow. Footprints in the volcanic ash
of the first man to set foot on the virgin moon
like the hymen of this trail that breaks behind me
like poetry putting its foot through a window of ice
on this shadow-stained mirror of immaculate misconception
breeding a second nature to replace the first through repetition.

My mind wanders off into transformations
that always take me by surprise and I let it
follow the deer paths down to the river
to drink from the galactic reflections of migrating stars
like elixirs of hunting magic that drive the wolves crazy.
Every step I take, the creature I am morphs
into the one I’m becoming by mere association.
I’m a bestiary of arcane symbols and totems
I’ve stacked up like stones and skulls
into a dolmen of self I’ll leave as a sign
of residential abandonment to the next traveller
to pass this way and wonder who I was
and much more engagingly who I wasn’t.

I wasn’t a man who wouldn’t take a risk
at some peril to his eyes to get a better view of the stars.
I didn’t stand at a window for the whole of my life
to wish it away until I was numb with longing
on one grimy star descending into a night sea
of tarpaper rooftops writing their memoirs in snow.
I survived by not taking shelter from the storm.
I propped my elbows like the legs of a telescope
on the windowsills and event horizons of the world
and got out of my house of the zodiac
like a wandering planet through a lens.
I never took direction from my aftermath.
I was as fierce and lucid and clear as a star
and all paths led away from me enlightened
from the beginning like a future memory of the past.

Love was a kind of nebular confusion that didn’t last
though out of it grew the wild-eyed irises of the Pleiades
and the blue fires that bloom along these banks in the summer
when I remember some transitory detail
about the spirit of a lost lover that still haunts me
like a willow that used to rinse her hair
of stars and dragonflies in a river that passed her by.
If truth was the salt of the earth, beauty
was a dangerous sugar I was always bee enough
not to resist like a golden coke junkie dealing in flowers.

Though I didn’t indulge in happy endings,
I found it improbably possible to remain grateful
for more than I could comprehend of the gifts
I was given to lay like poppies and wheat
I’d gathered from the starfields by the heartful
on the evanescent stairs of the unattainable
as I hid like a secret I couldn’t tell to anyone else
to see who came out when no one was looking to receive them.

Wisdom when it managed to achieve me
always emanated a bouquet of seasoned ignorance
with a twist of crazy that often made me want
to smash it on a dancing floor at a Greek wedding
and dance in glee at my delinquency until my feet bled
with the blood of the grapes they tread the wine from.
Some people’s heels are winged in doves’ feathers.

Mine were spurred on by the wings and talons of hawks
plunging across the full moon like nocturnal arrowheads.
And when the time came to empty the lifeboat of my likeness
like the frozen wombs of the gaping milk weed pods
gaping as if they’d just given birth to a million ghosts
that are going to take root in the hills that live after them,
I could honestly say in words that politely ignored me
like a pyramid doesn’t make an impression on a sand dune,
even in a sea of radical pearl makers and resurgent stars,
mirages of water in the waterclock of a mindstream
in flood both sides of an imagination silting the light with starmud,
I knew the mermaids. And I knew the rocks.
I was a complete sailor. I dropped anchor
like a shipwreck in the moonset of my blood.

PATRICK WHITE  

Friday, December 28, 2012

THE STARS KEEP HAPPENING FASTER THAN I CAN REMEMBER THEM


THE STARS KEEP HAPPENING FASTER THAN I CAN REMEMBER THEM

The stars keep happening faster than I can remember them.
So is everything else, exponentially. Memory makes me
a continuum I’m always creating and calling myself.
Memory cross-references its matrix like the web of a spider
and soon I mistake the habit of the web for me, continuously.
I’m attached like a badge or a bird to the strings of my own guitar.
The seeing isn’t in my eyes. Neither is the music in the instrument.

I keep giving the stars new names every night
just to keep up with the possibilities of what they’re becoming.
Nor have they ever shone down upon the same man
looking up at them two nights in a row. I rearrange them
into different constellations and give them symbolic meanings
they never knew they had before. I step through the door
and every house in the zodiac changes. The sun
is less lucid at dawn than when it started the nightshift.
There isn’t a point on the ecliptic that isn’t the equinox
of a prayer bead that gets its way by not asking for anything.

Watching the world, I witness my own creation
as it’s happening. The star becomes aware of the eye
that’s observing it and it begins to see things
as if it had its own imagination. We celebrate
each other’s possibilities and awareness is born
of the binary of you and me, so we can dance,
not two, like a happy secret that can’t be known
by anyone else. No one has ever lifted the veils of Isis,
not even unity, which is to say, if you see her face covered
it means you haven’t opened your eyes far enough
to realize the Queen of Heaven is the shining
you’ve been looking for her with. Astronomy for fireflies.

This world is so interdependently originated
I’m the lifework of a star. I’m the masterpiece
of a bacterium. Starmud, I garden among the galaxies
that blow like the dishevelled heads of flowers in the wind.
My work done. I’m the only weed that’s been uprooted.
The pulse of my bloodstream is the waterclock of the stars.
The moon is in the corals having sex. I’m listening
to discrete variations on a theme of discontinuity
my ears are turning into music like the rain on the plectra
of the thorns and the leaves that ping like the G-spots
of the roses in heat that want to go on blooming forever.

PATRICK WHITE