Monday, February 6, 2012

LOOKING AT THE SKY


LOOKING AT THE SKY

Looking at the sky from the bottom of a well,
midnight at noon, a firefly
or a musical note deep in a flute
waiting to be played, ore in the mine,
I can see like a painter
holding up a mirror
to check for flaws in a portrait,
I’ve got all my stars on backwards,
I’m wearing my eyes inside out,
the punchline happens before the joke,
and there’s a corpse at the bus-stop
waiting for a coffin
draped in a patchwork flag of advertising.
The mind is the world,
my passions nest in trees,
my insights shatter
on the hard eyelids of the water,
and my heart is a succession
of boundary stones
that groove like sullen planets,
heritage jewels in antique gold.
The pathetic fallacy is not a fallacy
so when I cry
it’s not just my roots
that are drunk with emotion,
or the dykes of a deepening darkness
that haemorrhage on the moon.
There’s something sad about being a human,
an old sorrow,
as if the heart were a rock
recast by breakers of blood
into a bell that can no longer tell the difference
between a wedding and a funeral
one pulse to the next. Marginal seabirds,
humans live off the coast of everything,
continents, God, reality, ourselves.
Generation after generation,
we drag our dreams to the grave
like chains and withered lilies,
and there is so much longing in a hole,
an ocean in the vulva
of a dawn-coloured shell
turned like galaxies and sunflower seeds,
one golden ratio for all,
grief comes in like a tide
with a pod of misdirected killer whales
who will die nobly
under their own weight
like a religion, or a brotherhood
of tonsured priests, Jesuits
banished from the ear of the king.
Some days I’m a logger with a chainsaw
snarling through the trunk
of the tree of knowledge
despite the spikes of the protestors; others
I’m handcuffed in the upper branches
like a shaman in a cradle
nursed by flying serpents. But there’s no point
in clear-cutting the slope
of the mountainous library,
intercollating the growth rings of the heartwood
or raging through paper like fire,
an environmentally approved arsonist,
lightning flicked from the flint of a zippo.
I’ve read all the poets,
I had a mother and I know
there are swallows under the eaves,
wild poppies along the highway,
and a beautiful face
singing in the sunshine
that poses for everyone
like the moon on a lake,
that love and friendship sway the world
like powerlines and suspension bridges,
and goodness exists like oxygen,
the silent partner of the flame.
You needn’t try to convince me of the wonder,
I’m a savage mystic
who’s been washed up with more dead starfish
on the shipwrecked shores
of the eerie islands of night
than there are the names of lost lovers
in the dead letters of a sacred alphabet.
It’s just that the pain
of averaging out the crises
and astronomical catastrophes
into the sea-worn roundness
of a planet I can live on
sometimes overwhelms me
with a morning, a thought, a spear
that pierces my heart
like the axis of a wheel
that keeps coming home,
a seasoned traveller,
to the beginning
of a journey, a road, a voyage
that always ends in the going,
the flowing away,
right where it stands
in the shadowless afterlife
of a sundial in the moment,
this passage of waters
from abyss to abyss, mouth to mouth
neap and ebb,
and the paper boats that fail them
like drowned sailors
poured out of the urn, the amphora,
cinders from the eye of the sea
like the ashes and wine
of abandoned poems
that always lead back to me.

PATRICK WHITE

No comments: