Monday, January 16, 2012

STILL LIFE WITH CLOWN


STILL LIFE WITH CLOWN

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way,
a star without planets shining into the inhuman solitude
that receives everything without distinction or caste
like mountains toppling into the valleys that shadowed their rising
or the luminous myriads of the night
into the visionary cauldron of the dawn
that drowns them in their own beginnings, an excess of light
that drew too near to read the fading scrawl
of disenfranchised love letters
from a god fashionably unfaced. And I have seen birds
disappearing into the quiescent dusk like prayers
that fold their wings in an unknown grove
to wait for a morning that rarely comes, a song
that would hurl them back into the light, redeemed,
because the greater love unanswered,
it could only end this way. This world, a scintillance of dust
in the gaping darkness of implacable aeons
whose indifference to mind and matter alike
is worse than any judgment, grows lonelier with the truth.
A smile and a wound, one heart nudged toward another
in the frenzy of mad water
drawn out by the poultice of the moon, life is a cannibal
that wolfs its own, eats the candle and the flame
to pursue a scheme of persistence
shuffling the portfolios of proven minerals
to maximize the largesse of its living issue
with intensified affinities of blood and vision.
Bless the modern man who has sloughed his life
like a skin of chrome for an aimless longevity
that cannot grow older than the eternity he is.
The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way.
He passes away like a pore on the cheek
of someone he never met.
Without going anywhere everything passes,
spring buds on the branches and Jupiter
flashing its tiny plinths of lightning
at the cradles of the elm in the upper boughs
sweeping the sky of stars,
and love, and friendship, and family,
and arrayed in the veils of its own enigma, beauty,
the only acceptable apology
for the serial distortions of time.
Transformations of the orthodoxy I call myself
keep turning the mirror inside out
so that one word of enlightenment
might be poised on my tongue when I die, but
until then, I am bound by a serpent of doubt
to drink from its fountains of fire
a martyr to my own desire. The greater love unanswered;
it could only end this way, a creature
endowed with seeing, mind, wonder
looking for a purpose in the skies that ponder
what to affirm and what to refute
masters of the mutable and mute
who return the view to the seer, no wiser,
an ice-age of winter glass inching like a glacier
or a cataract over the smudged moon,
and over the hazards of light, the ellipses and eclipses
that make it seem midnight at noon
when the heart looks radiantly
for comprehensible origins that do not diminish
by dwarfing the questions,
the intrigue of knowing the finish.
The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way,
strangers that trust the word of the wind, and avow
adamantine fixities of nuclear binding forces,
but cannot, ambushed by change, stay,
grief in the flashflood creekbeds
that release the runaway horses
that were slowly gathering in the clouds
and farewell like blooming flowers
all along their courses and crusades.
Orion over the horizon, trumped by the queen of spades.
Eyes, heart, mind, eternities hover over every event
in a spiralling descent
from the bough of happier springs
that lent the soaring wings. Now food
is organized into civilizations
and the key to the chain of haloes
that enslaves the fallible nations
is buried with the dead like a dangerous secret
behind the dream mirror
in the jewellry boxes of their graves.
Generation after generation
the truth has been kept like a firefly in a jar,
a prophet in an asylum, or a peduncle
lost in the ensuing phylum
of a spurious progress toward pi-ing the circle
into incommensurable parts. We elude the real
and break like waves of urban trash
on the volcanic ash
of our island consciousness
ignoring the distant appeal
of the unsinkable world in distress on a sea
of infinite being. Everyone goes down with the ship
because the greater love unanswered;
it could only end this way, our moiety of intelligence
merely a quip of the stars that rip
their constellations down the middle
like a first draft of muddled fates that congregate
at the embassy gates
of a passport and a sanctuary that doesn’t exist
regardless of what the murderous squads
of defecting tour guides insist;
when the heart opens like a fist
to take up the cross on its holy quest
to free itself from the infidel, and the eye
is clear in all directions,
after countless liberations,
the only thing that is freed is a funeral bell
calling the faithful to hell
because the greater love unanswered, nothing certain
and no one with anything to say
at the falling of the curtain
on the specious themes of a cretinous play,
it could only, so delusionally enacted,
no absurdity retracted,
end this way.

PATRICK WHITE

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