Monday, January 30, 2012

TIRED OF SUPPLYING THE STARS


TIRED OF SUPPLYING THE STARS

Tired of supplying the stars their skeletons,
or webbing them into constellations
like love-letters written in prison,
or dusting the hieroglyphics of their fossils
pressed between the pages of nocturnal shale,
looking for signs of original life,
this brevity of perilous confusion
that sits on a throne of fog,
its quicksand foundations
the filth of fanatics and fools, my skull
a paperweight in a laurel of razorwire,
and every gesture of purity, every
symbol, emblem and image of light,
every effort to labour for greener domains
heart by heart, just
another mode of murderous betrayal,
lipstick on toilet paper,
a bullet hole in a swan, I long
for the clarity of mornings that don’t exist
to assure me I haven’t wasted my life
trying to feather a human out of coal.
I want a future that isn’t already a ghost,
I want to know at nightfall, bloodfall, eyefall,
that the available dimension of tomorrow
isn’t just another stalling tactic of today, isn’t
just more vinegar
bruising its eyelids with wine,
the slash of a thin smile greased with cherries.
I want to know that I haven’t been planting
apple trees on the moon,
that somewhere in September on earth,
a bough bends under the weight
of a windfall of planets
wrapped in thin-skinned sunsets
ripe with sugars and seeds
ready to fall to the living root
of their own beginnings
like cupfuls of water and light
returned to the river I took them from,
but sweetened by the spirit
that cherished them like gifts
I made of the gift that was given to me,
this diamond devotion to orchards and oceans
and the wounded humans that walk beside them,
their hearts unharnessed like ploughs.
Tired of having my jaw wired before I’m dead
to the remnants of myself,
these reconstructions of teeth and vertebrae
in the puppet-master museums
that put the future on display
before it’s born, my heart
a black embryo in formaldehyde, a ghoul
in a circus of interrogative clowns
that conjecture on what I might have been
had I devoted myself like rain
to different bloodstreams, had I
not disavowed the old, cracked creekbeds
to make a river of my own flowing.
I want to sit down like a lottery
with a choirmaster in a cemetery,
with a gravedigger on the moon who longs
for the probable impossibility
of knowing how many legs are on a snake
as he tries to reinvent himself from scratch;
I want to sit down on the hilarious ground
at the end of a long apprenticeship
and laugh until I’m sick with certainty
at the accomplished absurdity
of recognizing my best work
in the last phase of a lifelong eclipse.

PATRICK WHITE

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