IF THE BREAD GOT ANY HARDER

If the bread got any harder I’d be buttering stone,

and it’s morning again, cooler than yesterday

that licked my face like a dog

with the mosquito-breeding breath of a reeking ditch;

and maybe there’s a cabal of stars or confidential angels,

a thirteenth house of the zodiac

that no one’s ever heard of, with a garden of black suns

overrun by weeds, blooming along the walkway

up to the sagging porch, a place

where the dispossessed gather to own each other, a hidden harmony

that manages my affairs along with the stars and the ants

and knows with the confidence of a nightwind off the sea

that I am supposed to be here, broke, aging, alone,

dreading the landlord at the door like the beginning

of another ice-age, cataract, polar cap,

the shifting of a continental plate

as I wait like a fault in apprehension

of the final jolt that will tear me down.

And all of this in the name of poetry in a world

that holds the tail of the new moon like an old black bull in one hand

and guided aimlessly over the unfurrowed fields

sows microchips and seedless oats, breeds featherless chickens

and patents animals and diseases, pierced by the swords

of seven mad lucidities with no known antidotes.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not crying. I’m not pleading for anything.

I’ve got the pride of a pearl in a scabby oyster about me,

the indefensible dignity of a pyramid built on quicksand,

the air of an exiled king of shadows

living in patrician poverty to uphold me in my solitude,

and this ruinous occupation of deriving an earthly excellence

out of my sinking like a mine, always deeper, in search of the ores

that glow in the night like marrow in the bones of buried constellations:

that’s enough of a labour to keep me dancing in my ashes,

enough of a continuity to believe I might still be a road.

I do it for the crazy, vicious, ignorant, greedy humans

whose lives are only a ribbon of blood in the water

that boils them into a feeding frenzy, cannibals on crack,

tearing themselves and the world apart because

even they sense, wincing into solutions like straitjackets,

they’re a prelude to disaster. And I sing for the rare orchids

that are never seen, the wild asters at the edge of the garbage dump,

the green flame of the blade of grass,

hotter than acetylene, that burns with life through the concrete

until it parts like the Red Sea for an outlawed prophet of one.

There will always be people

who know how to break their hearts like bread

and I write to be worthy of them, to remember them

the way the genes recall, however faintly,

the genius of their last selection, the first time a flower had sex,

and everyone’s eyes have been the colour

of stars and olives, earth, sky and leaves ever since.

There is something in me that grieves like a fire

for the passing of everything, that bleeds like a rose

on the blade of the moon for everything

that is cut down in its path without fury or malice,

and the children broken like windows

that were never installed in the house, and the poor,

and those, mute and silent, but for the look in their eyes,

their voices shattered bird cages plundered

by the cunning and savagery of ideological fangs;

the lifeboat of my heart swells like an ark

caulked and pitched by thick nights of sorrow

when I consider these swept from the table like crumbs

and open my mouth like the borders of an outraged country

to scream undiplomatic obscenities

at their virulent persecutors frothing like breakers of rabies.

Even drowning in a snake-pit of oilslicks,

I want to throw the world a strong rope

like the umbilical cord of another planet

braving the ferocity of the storm, a lighthouse, to haul it ashore,

or lift it like a fly from a toilet-bowl.

And if you were to ask me why,

when I can’t even save myself, I’d have to say

there’s a cruel folly in the wisdom of the word once,

the sum of all knowledge, all compassion,

a fountain and a tree of blood beyond reason

that drives me to cherish even

the slightest crack in the cup by which life leaks out

as if it were a wound of my own. Born a lost cause,

how could I not squander myself

on the beauty and truth and suffering of others

who are not? Poetry looks at the stars, at the world

through the eyes of a blind messiah

led out of the desert sun by a childless eclipse,

and every saint owes his salvation to a sinner somewhere.

Invited to the feast of life,

whether above or below the salt,

who doesn’t offer themselves,

their blood, their heart, their mind

like swaddled bread and wine

or a grateful guitar to the host at the door?

Who, so devoid of grace, they wouldn’t honour the gate

they came and went by, every footstep

an exit and an entrance to themselves? And something deeper,

I don’t know what it is, that draws me down into it like a woman,

a curvature of space that yearns to be filled

with the honey and sugars of bees and apples

that have ripened their gold and silver dreams

in the light of the sun, the moon, the stars

and taste of the earth and the rain, and the shadows

of birds and butterflies, of sheltering leaves;

of pilgrim orchards that passed their way

only a moment ago as long as the lifespan of water

with festal cities of love and peace on their mind.

When I lie down beside her to make love

it’s like returning to an ancient, native language

that’s been forgotten in the literalism of the day,

an elemental tongue that everyone once spoke

spontaneously enthralled by the eloquent mystery of her beauty,

urgently moved to praise the world into being again and again

like the falling of light and rain

on the softening eyelids of seed-words

that have lain dormant in their visions for years

in the scorched gardens of a volcanic brain

that doesn’t know what any of it means

when every whisper and kiss

is an embossed grammar of blackberry dreams

and the decrescent wake of her nails on my back,

a way of ploughing the moon with a ship,

an analeptic shudder of delphic bridges off the bow.

Never two flowers the same in her garden,

and even the thorns of her black roses,

an enigma of panthers, I never know

what germinates like oracles in her caves;

but more absolving than the youngest of dawns,

I have always believed because

I can taste her sacred mountains in my blood,

that there is in the deltas of the language that she seeks,

the alluvial silk and gold of a way of seeing

that helps us recall ourselves as we were and are,

prophecy and recollection, an ancient future

like the light of a healing star,

the face we wore like an orchard

in the dreamtime of learning to be,

something crucial and redemptive

about our essential human nature

that is only forgotten,

like the ability to play, terminally.

Of all the freedoms I have ever endorsed

she is the one I live; chicken wieners

and beans in tomato sauce, night after night, let it be

this bedlam of money and thin-skinned heels,

the swarming humiliations that orbit my distracted skull

like deerflies and invigilating satellites,

the dark thoughts that buff the wine with bleach

and boil my morning doves in battery acid

to turn their ashen quills into asps and arrows.

What mountain ever rose higher

than its valley was deep, what victory

if there was never a chance of defeat, and if

in the eyes of men crazed with forgetting themselves

they think they recognize in me some kind of bad joke,

my pillow stuffed with nettles, let it be;

because even in the lipstick on the cigarette-butt

I pick up out of the gutter

I can be a wild poppy in a field of August wheat.

PATRICK WHITE