Thursday, June 7, 2012

CRAZY, SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE, BLUE SKY


CRAZY, SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE, BLUE SKY

Crazy, sunny day outside, blue sky,
and my shadow’s got me in a choke-hold
so I can barely breathe. I’m wrestling
with the black angel in the way, my own vacuity,
the absurdity of the burning gate that affronts my emptiness.
I’m in a truce with a room that tolerates me well enough.
Sometimes a hush falls over it like a nuclear winter
or somebody’s about to read a poem,
but it’s got big windows, and it’s safer
living above people than it is on eye-level
and I don’t mean that in any kind of way
except everyone’s afraid and that’s when
they’re at their most dangerous. But you can
see them coming from afar off from a second storey.

Most days I’ve got a fix on what I’m doing.
I follow the star in my eye. Portable north.
I lay my strange gifts of refuse and lucidity
on the temple stairs of a goddess I’m beginning
to lose my faith in, and as far as I can tell they’re cherished.
Wonder what it would be like to send a muse packing for once.
Ungenderize inspiration, be the wellspring, instead
of drawing from it with a desert at your back
eyeing you from the crests of the sand dunes.
But how would you get the flavour of sex
into a bottle of water without it
souring into a message for help?

Even the salmon-flaked brick walls
of the chic boutique across the street
that caters to witches and fairies, seem bleak
behind their facade, with a darkness fairies can’t people.
Utter black, impenetrable, unregenerative,
and every petal of sunshine, trivially epiphenomenal,
every gust of stars that wheels into a galaxy
like the evolutionary emergence of birds,
neither the cause nor the effect of anything cognizant.
Life just the flimsiest of distractions
on the skin of a bubble walking on thorns.
There’s a black hole in my heart
that’s lapping blood from the rose.

I’m trying to upgrade my eyes to be able to relate to it.
I’m cloning eclipses out of the stem cells of the night.
I’m grinding lenses out of anthracite, colour cones
without irises or chromatically aberrated rainbows.
I’m transplanting the eyes of all my dead flowers
with black diamonds on the same wavelength
as the X-ray star I can sense shining behind everything
that ever mattered to me, to achieve some kind
of nefarious harmony with the unilluminated doorway
that is neither the exit nor the entrance of being.

Everybody seems mesmerized by the temperance of the day,
all the things they’ve seen before, they’re looking at again,
as if the light could ever be new in yesterday’s eyes,
but I’m inside the seeing like a dragonfly in a chrysalis
trying to pass through this black hole
into an entirely new world that isn’t
just another sketchy metaphor for this one.
I want to see the roots the blossom’s wired to
if at all. Or if it’s just one big disconnect
and all understanding is playing unplugged
like a downed powerline with the oracular powers
of a snake-oil salesman selling holy water to the fish.

Disoriented in the starlessness of the blazing afternoon,
I’m waiting like an image of the imageless
for the darkness to adjust to my eyes as if this time
it was up to God to get used to me, and evolve accordingly
and there were no other recourse for getting around me
except creatively. Except to tell the Hox genes
where to put your eyes, where to fit your mouth
in that lifemask that disguises you like a surrealistic scar
grappling with experience with nothing but your innocence
to fall back on for an alibi no one accepts when you lose.

Farewell to all that. Evolution can take its cue
from me for a change, and branch out dendritically
like a flash of lightning rooted in my starmud like a cedar fire
sweeping underground through the valley I just passed through
like the mirage of a waterbird through
a shapeshifting hourglass of stars
that are not fixed, but protean myth givers responsive
to the darkest insights of the human imagination
that doesn’t create worlds in the likeness
of a preconceived image but each to their own medium
turns the light around on them like a revelation
of what they conceal like a jewel of water in their eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

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