Friday, February 17, 2012

YOUR INTENSITIES


YOUR INTENSITIES

Your intensities dissipating in the silence
that follows your urgent avowals,
it hurts to be subjected to oblivion
like a burnt out streetlamp in a city of light,
to stare into the invisible blaze of the vastness
without eyelids
like craters on the moon aghast with shadows
scabbing the nightshift of a crown factory,
love’s labour locked out,
a footprint on the neck of a flower,
trampled like a protest sign by the crowd
of platitudinous slogans that defame it,
and the pain growing wider than the bridge
that can cross it
and my heart trying to pretend
it’s still a scratched poppy
when everybody knows
it’s a haemorrhaging rose.
And the stars have hardened into diamond thorns
that score the eyes like rocks
striated by arctic runes
in the path of advancing glaciers,
and there’s a hawk in my chest
excavating the message of the dove
I sent to look for land,
and every moment is the era
of a lingering why
that hauls me out to sea like a death barge
to dump my severed body parts
like scrapings off a plate
and no matter how eloquently
I rehearse for a role
in a farce of infinite agonies,
I’ve played the part too many times before
not to know
it’s all just birdseed in a cemetery
that’s tired of hearing itself moan for the dawn.
The wind blows through me
like the ghost of a curtain
long after the window it hung from has thawed,
blows through me like the slash
of a long, fluid incision
as if a knife were learning how to master
the serpentine penmanship
of a sacred crescent of the moon,
and there’s blood all over the page.
And even as the schoolhouse
of a famous arsonist’s childhood,
even as a sacrifice bunt at home plate
I feel neglected and trivial,
a butterfly, a blossom, a rag of blood
torn on the razor-wire of vehement absolutes.
Blood. Passion. Muse. Love;
the submerged foundation stones
of an Atlantean temple
kissing the feet of starfish
or the live walking of aspiring mountains
rising like stairwells up to the doorways
of unnamed constellations,
someone with the courage at last
to step into the open
without their shadows on,
disrobed of all eclipses,
all the inkwells of their spiritual indelibles
ready to taste the wine
that would make a drunkard of a desert for life
and wakes the dragons
in the throat of the well
to dispell their dreams like rain.
Lime in the grave of a used resurrection,
detonating leaking explosives
in the quarry of a black hole,
pouring igneous iodine over the fang marks
of the delirium of toxins and elixirs
that follows the colon of your silence
like the sloughed skin of the moon,
bleached, isolated, more apprehensive
than a field of harvest wheat
watching a scarecrow play with matches,
the clouds of an overhead storm
arcing blue lightning over the grain,
I break black bread with myself in a private hell
where the only way to smuggle in a firefly
is in a fireproof pocket of ashes
and the moon passes secret mirrors through the bars
and the only visitor to log in
is the death mask
of an old vacancy from the past
that has stood by me all these years like a key.
Is it circumstance, inclination, mood, a sloppy heart
that dips this noose of vinegar in the wine
to blow bubbles
in the eye of a hurricane,
or are you just amusing capricious reflections
in the mindflow of a wishbone river
that cracks like a bough
under the weight of its mute bells of ice?
And if it’s death you toy with
like toe-nail clippers,
I had thought to die more originally
than a paring of the moon on the floor,
the mediocre cremation of a shabby fire
I could swallow like a swab of cotton candy
laced with lighter fluid
to smoke the bats out of the attic
and amuse the dazzled bumpkins on the midway.
I have roared with the ghosts of glass lions
and wept like time with ashen wizards
and danced with prophetic shadows
in the lairs of demonic clarities
that could melt thought
in the creative heat of their ferocities
and I wear the scars of ancient claws
worthy of the sword that wept
like wounded ore on the moon
to plunge through their hearts
like a meteor without a warning.
And I have been torn like a page
out of the mauled journal of the rose
like a heretical orchard of blackthorn
and stayed up all night
like an unfinished poem
drinking down to the lees
of the seabeds of oblivion
until I emptied the cellars of my own darkness
down to the last good year of stars
and I could hear the whisper of a palace
in the hovel of a bottle
raise my skull to a throne.
My death is not a stranger
to the pillars of my own domains,
and there are skies that wait
with the dignity of mystic robes
every time I wash the stain of the world off
in my own grave,
and silver oils distilled from attendant ravens
that supple the agony of the worst sunspots
with the tender fountain-mouths
of the unsayable encounters that inspire
the bruised grail maidens
that bloom like nocturnal wildflowers
in a far field
to come looking for me
like the cure for their own eyes
in the labyrinthine courts of the hidden king
that rules the afterlife of the night
at the visionary discretion of a living man.
Behind the door of every affirmation,
the assassin of a denial,
as every flower engenders the frost
that will snuff it
and every candle is a pilgrim
on the road to its own extinction.
And I know it’s hard to live beyond the obvious
without a map back to your face
or breadcrumbs in the wilderness,
a voice beyond the clamour of worldly echoes,
the first feather of an abyss
that’s never known wings,
and your heart the rumour of an avalanche
that’s buried you alive
in the valley of its own debris before,
but I thought you had died enough already,
not to be looking up
at the blue bones of heaven like a shovel,
or weeping like shattered glass
at the graveside of a sparrow
that mistook the burning kites
of your midnight love-letters
for fire lilies blooming like reversed torches
on the extraordinary translucency
of a sky as yielding as silk spun from the cocoons
of the rarest stars to ever burn on water.
And it’s not that I’m not grateful
for the little eras of life that go by
like urns and rosebuds,
or the undulations of flesh and gold
that silt the hungry deltas with siloes of sacred grain,
I have been empowered by many deaths
that have slain me deeper into life
than the roots of the veils and delusions
to squander my blood like an ocean
at the feet of their busy altars,
knowing even space
must fall like a petal at last,
and the silence
of these eternities that pass
through the eye of the moment
like little red threads of blood
must give up their dead
like stories the wind tells around a fire
to make the stars tremble
with the secret lives of water
that unravel like embroidery
on the soiled pillowcase of a dream
that woke up without a tongue
in the shadows of a floodgate
that gapes like the mouth of the moon.

PATRICK WHITE 

No comments: