IOTA SUBSCRIPT

IOTA SUBSCRIPT

Devoid of everything but metaphors,

the bread gone hard in the tasteless cupboard

littered with bees and flies

that struggled alone with death

on the plains of the upper shelf,

I enrich my patrician poverty

with poems and painted moons,

dreaming of the unlikely day

without anticipation

all things will be corrected. Hope is a lichen,

a sea of shadows on the moon

that drains the water from the stone,

the siren from the rock. Despair

is a cuff of black blood

caught in a bicycle chain,

and if there’s a dawn to all of this,

a day when it promises to change,

it always comes up like a bride

getting married at her own funeral,

my heart waiting,

alone with the flowers

in an empty limousine.

And madness is not an option

in these days of disintegration;

the asylums are full

and they’re handing out straitjackets

in the lifeboats of the survivors

who jumped ship

when the sea got rough.

I could drink or shoot up,

but that’s a parachute without a rip-cord,

and besides, who’s got the elevation

to get off on the rush

of their falling? And I’ve grown old

as a foundling

on the stairs

of an abandoned church; I have no faith

in miraculous adoptions

or the emergency exits

out of hell, and the deacons of absurdity

long ago gave up passing me around

from heart to heart

like a collection plate

when they saw how little I rendered

as the lean scythe of the harvest moon.

Now the mirrors leave pamphlets,

celestial junkmail

on the threshold of the mornings

left to live. The years fly by

like an abacus of birds

on the sagging powerlines

that weave compliant lightning

into spider-webs.

And everything I’ve caught

has poisoned me

as the women came and went,

different styles of voltage,

brown-outs and butterflies

surging through my heart

like a new transformer.

Now I remember them gratefully

as so many incubators and used cocoons

beyond conversion

I must be a lousy messiah

or one of the lost wise men

to have come this far

beguiled by an elusive star

without finding a manger anywhere

or saving anyone

from their unsalvageable selves,

least of all me, baffled

as I always am poetically

by these luminous rumours of clarity

that arise like women and waves

to dispose of what I am

and enlighten what I’m not

in the bedrooms and Babylons

and spiritual snake-pits

of a dozen sacred brothels.

Aging is not incremental,

drop by drop,

a succession of moments;

it’s precipitous, a stairwell

of continental shelves

I keep stepping off

into deeper, darker, colder depths,

each, a longer fall than the last;

or it’s like the rain

that fell on me as a child,

and falls on me now,

and will fall tomorrow

to open the flowers

that will languish on my coffin

before they launch my moon-boat

crammed with farewells

into the grave. On good days

poetry is an encyclopedic obituary

you can’t take out of the library,

on bad, a suicide note you can

as soon as you pay your late fees.

My devotion has made me absurd;

and my famous pursuit

of an earthly excellence

has treed me like a pack of hounds,

the chronic yapping

of a literally-minded audience

who want the word made blood.

Out on a leafless limb

I linger here

with only the rising loaf of the moon

to sustain me, believing

for lack of a better delusion

as I scramble the stars like code

it somehow keeps my life

hopelessly important

to bait my own dismemberment

by maintaining this fire-watch

throughout these long nights

in a collapsing wooden tower

erected by reformed arsonists

looking for revelation in a lightning strike.

If I have stayed true to the stars,

to fireflies and candles,

and poems that flare like a book of matches,

and preferred instead

to read in the upturned palms

of the passing storms

not the judgment of a god,

but a cheiromancy of luminous life-lines,

the humour is not lost upon me

nor the danger discounted

that the way I’m going

I might very well end up

reaching out for a rescue

that condemns me to hang

from a rope of my own, as usual

the last to know

in the name

of my misplaced loyalty to everything

I took my own life

to consecrate

the unhallowed ground

of an exalted footnote

wandering from page to page,

looking for a cigarette

and a purple passage worthy

of its illuminating irrelevancy,

its penny of qualification

in the back-rooms, sewers,

short-cuts, by-ways, alleys and gutters,

the addenda, appendices

and mystical errata,

the epilogues and variant recensions

that wait like empty cupboards

and extravagant cemeteries

to annotate these endless drafts

of the unpublishable book of life.

PATRICK WHITE