Wednesday, February 29, 2012

BETTER TO FLASH A SHARP KNIFE QUICKLY


BETTER TO FLASH A SHARP KNIFE QUICKLY

Better to flash a sharp knife quickly across someone’s throat
as the last remaining mercy
than bludgeon them to death retroactively as you do.
The first is just another big city workaday murder on the nightshift
but the way your offended sense of righteous indignation
has turned to hate
as you sit there sliding needles into your arm
like loveletters into a bruised envelope
you’ve addressed in blood to yourself
I can tell you’re sticking pins into the eyes
of black madonna voodoo dolls
deep inside a secret hiding place in your childhood
where you indoctrinate them into genocide.
You’re a beautiful woman with lots to hide
and I don’t want to know where the corpses are
as if the only intimacies worth caring about
were all long buried in this desert of stars.
And twice before I’ve tasted the blood of the black widow
and yes it may be sweetened
by all the butterflies it’s eaten
but then your heart goes numb as an ice-cube
in the fix at the end
that comes on like an eclipse
of the light at the end of the tunnel
where all your dead relatives
are dying to greet you again.
I wear my heart on my sleeve
like the colours of the ghetto I was born into
to watch my mother die of overwork for nothing
of any estimable value including me
when I look at it from her point of view.
And I like the sexy West Coast sixties look
of those black Stevie Nicks Gothic spider webs
you wear more like skin
than the net of Indra
with jewels at every intersection.
And I’ve always been tempted and still am
by dangerous pariahs on the lamb
from the witch-hunts of medieval men
who fear a female messiah
that can cast her nets wider
than any constellation
among the fishers of men.
And o sweetness don’t doubt yourself.
It’s still a cheap thrill to feel so sublimely vulnerable
daring the taboo event horizons of your powers
like a firefly going eye to eye with a blackhole
even as I bend space to stay clear as a gravitational lens.
But you’re hooked on your own elixirs
like a dealer who wants to get out of it
on his own product
and in my world magic shoots the stars
like whitewater in the Ottawa River
in the spring run off in May
when the toxins wear off like cataracts
and you get high on the risk for free
in the name of sick children
waiting for heart transplants.
And yes, yes, yes, there’s still a Neanderthal in me
that wants to paint your face
in carbon and red ochre
on the inside of my witchdoctor’s mask
to make all this space seem
a lot less lonely in here
since I killed off the last cave bear.
I could so easily encrypt my starmaps
on the mystic enigmas of the dice
I’ve carved like small Kaabas
and Rubik’s cubes out of my own bones
to see if the nightbird calling out to you
in this mutual darkness of ours
were worth taking the chance
if it should happen to come up snake eyes.
Or if I could learn to be hypnotized
without turning to stone
by a Pythian priestess
with a Medusan hairdo
with oracular highlights that bite
and you could learn to dance
to the picture-music
of a different kind of flute
like Salome for Herod
and John the Baptist’s head.
Love doesn’t begin where lust leaves off.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.
I think that’s only true for those who are no good at it.
Or dominated by a spiritual Gestapo
that makes the body wear a yellow star.
Three phases of the moon.
Maiden. Mother. Crone.
I’ve seen the spider with its crescent fangs.
And I’ve hung from my own spine more than once
like a mummified fly on a trophy line
waiting for my next afterlife
assuming I had one
and Merlin I may seem to you
but I still fear a starless power darker than my own.
And there’s the maiden like Morgana la Fay
beguiling as lunar waterlilies and deadly nightshade
renewing her virginity in a snake pit.
The urge to possess you overwhelms
the certainty of being bit.
One fang kills you.
The other fang cures it.
But even death eventually wears out its welcome
and the spring isn’t enough to make up for it.
But where’s the middle extreme
defined by the other two?
Where’s the mother?
Where’s the summer
that warms the bloodstreams of the garden snakes
like water in a basking hose?
Spring and winter
but where’s the harvest moon
that shines down on the fullness of life
and adds her mother lode to the gold of the grain
like Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries
adding little mushrooms of gratified desire
to the wine you only need to drink once
out of your own skull
to stay intoxicated forever?
Prosperpine may have gone down into the underworld
to shoot jewels with the dead
when a serpent bit her in the heel
like a dirty syringe
but when is she going to live up
to the rest of her myth
and drive the snakes out of her garden
long enough for a rose bush or two to take root again?
You leave two kids at home alone
with a couch-surfing crackhead
you met in a bar last weekend
and you expect me to trust you?
Lady I can look through you
like a broken windowpane
and still appreciate the beauty of the view
without cutting myself on the flint knapped glass
and yes you can still cast a spell
that can turn seasoned sailors into swine
and I could so easily
buy into any delusion you wanted me to
just to sleep with you.
But I’m standing at that window with your kids
and there’s a crackhead behind us
flipping channels like cards in a game of solitaire
and we’re looking out at the view together
pretending none of us are there
because we’re all scared
of the cranky stranger with the tarantula tattoo
and all we can see as far as we can look to get away
is this mindscape of you
salting the flesh of the good earth
like Carthage on crystal meth
when you should be planting seeds
in the hearts and minds of those
who look to you for love
like a chance to flower
even on long starless nights
to live without fear
unmenaced by shadows
swarming the night light
like a seance of anti-matter.
You belong to those who love you in life
and blood may be thicker than water
but without water
it coagulates like a rose that’s lost its colour.
It makes raisins of the grapes on the vine
long before their time
as if someone cancelled summer
and no one gets to taste the wine.
And it’s probably wise
to pour both into the cauldron of your heart
until they’re both so intermingled
the rain doesn’t put
the scarlet desires
and phoenix fires
of the passionate poppies out
and the hot-blooded gypsy witches
don’t turn the rain to steam
on first contact with their skin.
We’re standing at a broken window
and we’re looking in
and what we see is that in you
there is no summer
and where blood should be thicker than water
the water’s turned to ice
and the two rosebuds
standing like your daughters at this window
like two cut flowers in a shattered vase
are haemorrhaging like too much turpentine
on two brushes loaded with red paint
too thin to bloom.
Because the ladybug
is too busy playing with matches
trying to get a rise out of the fire-hydrants
to see if she’s still the arsonist she used to be
to know when her own house is on fire
her kids are alone
and it’s time to fly away home.

PATRICK WHITE

EASY


EASY

Easy to extract oneself from the climacteric of doom
that will absolve humanity of its horrors
by placing its destiny in its own hands
like a loaded gun in the hands of a child
by taking long nocturnal walks by the Tay River
among wildflowers full of farewell.
To watch the moonrise glowing
on the Texas toes of my wet black boots
as if they’d just been spit polished by morning snails
and sense the just proportions
and inchoate eloquence of eternity
in the trivialities of sublime coincidence.
How randomly everything fits
into this urgent medium of life and death
as if it played the tailor to its own emergence seamlessly
the way the mind stream cuts a path for itself
among a bewildering array of rocks and fallen birch
or a startled rat snake adds its wavelength
like a higher frequency to the laconic water
and yet no river has ever flowed the wrong way to the sea.
Easy to step out of the polluted light of the streetlamps
into the cleaner darkness on the outskirts of town
to renew my innocence
in the macrocosmic reveries of my solitude
enchanted by the mesmerizing details
of the mystically miniscule.
How the New England asters
in the middle of September
that yesterday bloomed like stars
in happier zodiacs than this
today are watching their eyelashes fall out one by one
and the daylilies that blazed with desire
wither like the kisses of old women
when no one’s there to receive them.
Easy to accept catastrophe in nature
as the spontaneous gesture of a hidden wisdom
that our eyes are too dependent on the light to see yet.
The muskrat gutted by the cattails
by a posse of rampant coyotes
in a frenzy of panicked hunger
sensing the cold-blooded wind turn vicious.
Soon the air will bare its fangs and snarl.
Soon the earth will harden into knuckles of ice
and the raccoons semi-hibernate
and the blue jays come like thieves
to pick the time-locks on the sunflowers
and the seeds enter the cryonic comas of their afterlives
confident of their revival in a future beyond doubt
as the planet sidles up to the sun at perigee
like an old love affair gone cold
tilting its head away
to rebuff any further advances.
Easy to lose yourself in the life of the mind
and the phantasmagoria of reality
that makes you feel you’re walking with gods
you’ll never know the name of.
Turn your back on the world
and let your thoughts wander off like smoke
from the fire pits of lost caravans
that have pitched their tents
on the dark side of the moon
where they can make up their own myths
about the strange stars
that have misled them this far from home.
How the creek laps the rock
like a doe at a salt block
left out in a farmer’s field.
How the water purls over the terraced shale
that looks like a burnt book in the ashes
of a fire that’s just been put out
like the library of Alexandria.
You could do that.
And who could blame you?
You wouldn’t be wrong.
It’s hard to listen
the way you listen to a star stream
slipping through a grove of birches at night
astute to everything it’s whispering;
hard to listen to the blood
gurgling out of a wounded child
like a poppy choking to death.
Hard to fine-tune your sensibilities
to the miscreant devolution of your own species
and not be savagely appalled
into holding a mirror up to nature
that blocks the view as surely
as if you’d put your hands up over your eyes
to escape it all and wake up somewhere else
where skulls are more natural in Eden
than in the abattoirs of human carnage.
A clean life with no skidmarks of despair.
No fingernails scratching at the walls
in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
No graffiti under the bridges of PsychoBabylon.
No university students on the road to Damascus
tortured like Rosetta Stones
that have just had their tongues cut out
for not saying anything
that makes any sense
to the body language of the depraved
mutilating their flesh like slang.
Just the claw marks on the rocks
that have been sanitized by time
like the glacial striations of the last ice age
that gouged out the eyes of the lakes around here.
The bitter aesthetes of retreat run back to paradise
to study demonology by the light of fireflies
to better understand their fellow man
and live tactically out of reach
of their common inhumanity
where there’s not chance of a ricochet.
Under a locust tree in full bloom.
A fragrant cloud of honey-bees
with as many thorns as they have stingers
behind a wall of zinnias, cosmos, gladiolas
on a hill in the eye of clearing
completely surrounded by trees
sitting at a picnic table
with a black coffee, cigarette, and journal
inspired by the beauty of the morning to write
before your lover wakes up
to tend nine bean rows in Innisfree
though it’s eleven miles
and a hundred years ago
outside Westport Ontario
where you can hear the scarlet carillons
of the wild columbine in the rain
tinkling like delicate wind chimes
and modestly agitated chandeliers
plucked by the rain like the plectra
of home-made harpsichords
on the moss-pated rocks
of their composer’s skulls.
No mediocrities in nature
it’s hard not to feel like Mozart
whatever you’re listening to.
No air raid sirens, ambulances
squad cars or firetrucks
screaming like banshees
like furies and erinyes
to the scene of the tragic event.
No fractious braying of political jackasses
grinding their teeth in their sleep
like the mill wheels of the stony bread
the rich resent the poor
like loaves and fishes and mice in the silo
boat-tailed grackles and black-capped chickadees
salvaging what they can
from the dumpsters of leftover gardens.
No pathological racket of garbage cans
being tipped over in a street fight
to end all street fights
like knights in armour on their backs
in front a shield wall of local police
picking them up to hold them for ransom.
No drunks and druggies in the hallways
only bats velcroed to the burdock
blinded by the porch light
and star-nosed moles and snakes on the threshold
the cats leave like offerings
on the stairs of the temple of Bast.
So much easier to listen to the eerie wailing
of baby porcupines high in the basswood trees
than the shrieks of a family
being dragged out of their beds
by an occupation army
to see which of their daughters sisters mothers
will be raped like the Congo
whose childhood shall be pressed into murder
and who shall be bred out of existence.
Easy to buff the crack of the world with talcum powder
to spare you from getting diaper-rash of the mind
and side-track the ferocity of your insight into the horror
with lightning-rods and tuning forks
you can break with your pinky finger like wishbones
torn from the throats of children
who didn’t have time enough on earth
to learn to read the names on their own gravestones
if they’re lucky enough to have one.
Easy to have a time-share
in nature’s indifference to death
when there no place left
on the surface of a raging planet
that isn’t a dangerous vacation.
So much easier to tinker with echinacea
and smudge the bad spirits
out of the renovated farm house with sage
from home-grown herb gardens
than it is to inhale the reek of cordite
or the stench of organic decomposition
of the adolescent flesh of the festering corpse
found in a drainage ditch among the weeds
like a lily that smelled far worse than them
on the outskirts of Argentina
in the stadiums of Chile
in the Tiananmen Squares of China
in the mass hysteria of the bloodbanks of Syria
trying to assail a nest of dynastic vampires
with a silver bullet through the heart of the cloaked one
in the radical slums of Gaza
in the Warsaw ghettos of the West Bank
run by Israel searching children outside the gate
for smuggled vegetables from the Fertile Crescent
in the native reservations of the originals
who peopled Canada
like a charter of indigenous freedoms
without any concept of surveying their mother like real estate.
Outside the emergency exits and entrances of Arizona
where immigrants beaten to death
and dumped on the pavement to die
abandon all hope of ever entering there
and bullfrogs squatting on their sheriff’s badge
croak about getting tough on the mosquitoes
by hand-cuffing them to the food chain for deportation.
Flies eggs in the goat’s milk.
Spiders sucking the life out of the jewel
in the heart of the American dream catcher.
All that is hideous, grotesque, perverse,
genocidal, fratricidal, patricidal, matricidal, suicidal and worse
than acid splashed in the eyes of Afghani schoolgirls
learning to read through holes in the ozone
by flashlight under the veils of Isis.
Seek ye knowledge even as far as China.
Wheresoever ye turn is the face of God revealed
like the encaustic portrait of girl that came unglued
like a multilated candle on CNN
trying to shine a light on
nur wa nur
what’s dark and brutal
about the alif ba ta tha gim
of an alphabet in the mouth of an oral tradition
with an alchemical regime of hashashim for muscle.
You know how many dolls they collected at Dachau?
You know how many soccer balls
have had their feet blown off by cluster bombs in Gaza?
You know how many weathervanes
have stiffened their resolve
to look the other way like iron roosters
with alarmist political agendas
and industrious military complexes
as corrupted as the weather
when the wind is blowing the wrong way
like bad spin from the chimneys of Auschwitz
and Sabra and Shatila lie in the direction of prayer
like the gunsight of a Palestinian sniper?
Is this God’s ferocity
or the inconceivable atrocities of mad men
eaten alive by Herodian maggots
seeking the life of the first born of every nation
to preserve their myth of spontaneous generation.
Sweet to see the shadows of the autumn leaves
fossilized like bat wings on the sidewalk;
to notice how they turn
in the same succession of colours
from the outside in
as rainbows sunsets
and the emission spectra of nearby stars
busy on the nightshift making calcium and carbon.
Sweet to know this and to wonder at it
easy in the mystery
among the dragonflies and the blue hyacinth,
nailing bluebird boxes out of the reach of the barn cats
and egg-stealing raccoons
to play your part in it like a companionable spirit.
Asylum from the world.
Sanctuary.
Diplomatic immunity among the great blue herons
because you’ve stood there so long
without disturbing a fish
they think you’re one of them.

PATRICK WHITE

MY HANDS WERE ONCE


MY HANDS WERE ONCE

My hands were once the afterlives of birds
that caressed the cheeks of the sky
and brushed back the wind from its eyes,
and took a finger to intercede with a tear
not to start a pilgrimage without a little laughter,
and I am of the stuff of three stars
and a fire in my loins
that inseminated space with planets
and wrought red iron into bells of blood,
and leaned on calcium for ladders of bone
and taught the four-armed shivas of carbon to grasp life
and dance for the wheat and the grapes and the poppies,
and man lying down with woman
in waters urged by the fires of thought
furiously rooted in the gardens of the stars.

I am the ancestor and offspring of everything
and even my solitude is the loneliness of the mountains
sleepwalking over their own seabeds,
and the way I love, a trigger of oxygen,
and the way I see, a whisper of time and space,
a feather of moonlight dipped in the ink of the night.

I have within me,
deep in the vaults of my wounds,
swords from the wars of the grass and the trees,
and words that sang like arrows in the sacred groves
to answer why I live and what I’m looking for
and why all my foundation stones are shoes worn out with roads,
and who is it looking back at me like a dark echo in a dream
to see if I’m coming like a shadow with a voice.

And there are mysterious robes lighter than a breath of silk,
auroras and light storms, water skins of the water-walking stars
that have plied themselves like the rings in the heartwood of a tree,
journals of light and rain, to sailor my spirit in a chronicle of flesh,
and be a brief thing in a brevity of eras, to know
why the tiger dies looking into the open, its eyes
yellow lamps in the bluing of the early morning
as if its death were already achieved a breath behind it
and a man crawls toward a meaning on his knees.

All the deaths are mine, the births, the names,
and my heart is the shrine of the moonrise and the dawn,
the blue honey hive of the stars and the wildflowers in their fields,
and the wind takes down what the mute rocks repeat for my sake,
and every face is a blossom or a leaf or an apple from the bough
of the orchard that seasons my emotions to advent and passage,
to the transformative oceans that drink to the bottom of themselves
and leave their empty cups on the moon to be filled again.
I have within me a beginning and an end
that open like the wings of a single gate
I passed through long before the birth of time
like the prelude of a world I hadn’t read yet
because I hadn’t finished living it in tears and blood,
running my fingers over it like the tender braille of a breast,
lapping it like blood from my own skull to see what kind of drunk I was.

And there are lifelines on the palms of everyone’s hands
valleys, rivers, nerves, creases, roots, deltas, lightning
that together make a map to every dream I’ve ever lived,
all the tragedies and joys of fugitive spirits
trying to shoot the rapids with a broken oar,
and secrets that put a finger to the lips of the dead
like the horizontal threshold of a man who stands
like an infinite pause in the doorway of waking up
and just looks at himself with nothing special in mind,
a commotion of swallows in the radiant spoons of last night’s rain.

But there’s you now, who is not me,
because I long for you like a tide longs for its island,
and can find nowhere within myself the likeness of your face,
and though I know the water knows you like an ancient migration
it leaves no trace of your vines on the lips of its waves,
and there are skies where you shine among the stars for hours
where I’ve found threads of your shadow
torn on the thorns of the constellations
like rivers unravelled from your wilderness skin,
and even once I found your footprint like a boat on a beach
but you were not in it, and the emptiness was out of reach.

And I think if I find you, if I look hard enough,
if I stare into space as still as a lizard or a telescope,
if I check every leaf the doves bring back in their beaks,
every eyelid of snow that lowers the pines into sleep,
and lace the wind with fragrant spells and tragic pleas,
if I can break the code of the rocks that ore their silver secrets
like love-letters, like poems, deep in the throat of the earth,
if I grow new eyes for the seeing from the oldest wines of my being,
and the sky has to turn black forever not to have you pale like a comet,
not to lose you like a chandelier of fireflies in a galaxy,
not to reach out and touch you like the creatrix of the creator,
I can part from this life like a gift I left in the night on the stairs.

PATRICK WHITE



Tuesday, February 28, 2012

AFTER YOU LEAVE


AFTER YOU LEAVE

After you leave, a bell
deeper than the sea strikes once
and my blood thinks it’s a ghost of fire
and tries to evaporate; gusts
of the most graceful emotions,
eloquent clarities of the heart,
shake me free of myself
like leaves and petals and pages,
the tender radiance of night skies,
and I am astounded in the openness
of an embrace without limits,
of boundary stones being hurled delinquently
through the windows of ice-age mirrors
that have wept so long and slowly
over the silver river locked in chains.
How easy in this solitude
to declare myself to you,
to undo the delusions and the fears,
to flip through the chapters of the onion,
take off this last layer of skin,
and shed the final masks of snow
in the warming recollection of your presence,
in the way your beauty exhilarates me
then thrusts me like a torch into a deep silence,
and my heart sets out by itself toward you
scintillant everywhere, gold
flowing out of the dark ore,
as if the moon rinsed out its own reflection,
the legend of a secret constellation
behind the vital starmap of fireflies
that makes me want to shine for you so intensely
in this dark doorway of pain and passage
that the light hurts with the poignancy
of its longing to fall like a key
from the spirit’s lost and found
upon your planet;
to open gardens that have no word
for fence or gate,
to bridge your streams
with the pillars and roots of inspired stars.
My heart sets out for you all by itself
like a lantern on a road
that unspools with arrival at every step.
After you leave I am possessed of the will
of an anvil and a forge
to become a chalice for you, a sword,
an axle and a plough, a strong bolt
against the miscreance of battering circumstance.
I raise your reflection to my lips
like a cup from a watershed of wine
and in every single sip
swallow an ocean like a potion
from the tears of the moon,
knowing how dangerous it could be
to miss you, to become
an addict of your light at the first taste,
to wait for eras for the return of the dawn
that unravels even now like mystic lightning through my veins.
No more than the sun from the vine,
the moon from the dreaming apple
the stars from the ripening vowel of the apricot,
could any torn net woven of knotted lifelines
undo the vision you have already mingled
like a night rose of fragrant fire in my blood,
Not to drift again alone
like an empty boat
ferrying the corpse of the ferryman
through the fog to a cold shore
now that I’ve been washed up on your island
like the voice of a salvaged star in a bottle,
a frenzy of light and love in your tides,
a drowned lighthouse
coming to life in every wave of you.
I want to be brave enough
to risk the possibility
of listening to the night together
with the unveiled bride of the moon
in the bay of my arms,
I want to be the sail, the flame,
the gull of her breathing,
the blue dolphin off the coast of her mouth.
I want to swim like a mirror
the sea holds up to her face
to do her hair up with starfish
she tresses like galaxies in the depths;
I want to devote myself like a candle
to the shrine of the September moonrise
that saturates the far sky over the sad hills
like a warm breath glowing on chilled glass
when she smiles
like the wind over the abundant harvest
of the ashes I’ve stored against
this famine of passion
in the silo of the blue guitar.
I want to place my life
like a feather of fire
on the mysterious altar of lunar rain
that splashes like stars everywhere
in the telescopic silvering of the well in her eyes,
and turn these deserts of space and time
back into grasslands
crossing her thresholds
in whispers of pollen and dust.
She walks into the room
to help me paint the bedroom walls,
as I try to cover the graffiti
of my vandalized soul with white,
and a dove in a cage
panics at her approach
before an open door.
She climbs the ladder in rags with a brush
like the moon over a lake,
behind a cloud,
through the branches of a leafless willow
and everything in the room
is enhanced by her shining
and I’m rolling new skies over
the scars and fossils of old stars,
worn faces with plaster patches
to rewrite the shepherding lies,
the myths and symbols of my solitude
in the sidereal headlines of her transformative light.
Now it’s four a.m
and I’m pacing from empty room to empty room
like the pendulum of a heavy clock
that aspires to be a bell,
threshing words like wild rice
under an eyelid of peacock blue
to fill the empty hold of a buoyant heart,
the small boat of her hands,
with the eyes of a precious gathering.
And the tender snow falls quietly outside
on the crow limbs of the winter trees
like flesh returning to the bones of the dead
in a silent resurrection
more unsayable than a veil of white
that puts its finger to its lips
like an arrow of fire to a bow of blood
to hear what the hidden nightbird
under the eaves of a burning house is singing.

PATRICK WHITE