PLAYING CHESS WITH MUNDANITY TO SURVIVE TO WRITE

PLAYING CHESS WITH MUNDANITY TO SURVIVE TO WRITE

Playing chess with mundanity to survive to write.

Evading destroyers disguised as Everyman

who hates what I do because he thinks he can’t

and ignores it, forgetting I’ve been trained for oblivion

and writing poetry is the only way you can breathe

when you’re swimming in it and the moon is in the corals

trying to grow gills. All the useful functions I serve

I had to make up for myself. I express things

with no regard to having a useful function

though things shape themselves around me as a result.

Let them. I’m as supple as space on a balance beam.

Younger, I sought a name in the fountain mouths of humans

to actualize the pretension of what I hoped I was,

real carrot, real stick, real donkey, by consensus,

like reality, until I began to smell the methane,

and the swarms of squabbly seagulls, and uncover corpses,

and realized the pursuit of fame was just trying

to be something shiny in the garbage dumps

of other peoples’ mouths and minds, and any thought

of a literary career came candling down after me

like a collapsed parachute that felt like a punctured lung.

I don’t really care how many books you’ve got published now.

I’d rather howl like a wolf on my own above the timberline lamenting

the loss of the wild spirits that used to animate this wilderness

where my instincts are not blunted like swords of moonlight

on the skulls of first edition gravestones. All those books,

songbirds in an aviary of caged words that have turned you

into a voice coach. I’d rather howl with the wolves

than chirp with the birds, or teach the pigeons to sing

under the eaves of the safehouse built on quicksand

that’s taken up residence in you. Moonlight feathers the tarpit

and the rat snake’s scales gleam like sequins in the dark

as it slips like a wavelength back into the lake of the abyss.

Try writing four lines that are remembered for nine hundred years

because they intrigue the human heart with the sincerity

of our mortality caught in a rainstorm of bleak sorrows

far from anywhere, and the struggle of blood

to keep a small fire burning in the encroaching solitude.

Humans will keep your memory alive only so long

as they need you to hold out your lantern into the emptiness

like a lighthouse teetering on the brink of a vertiginous precipice

to see if you grow wings on the way down when you jump.

Experiment and experience. Though the former’s

old science by now. Objectivity is as obsolete

as a steady state universe with a planetesimal theory

that sank like a cue ball in the pocket of a decaying orbit.

Mystical science. All phenomena are numinous things of the mind.

Two of an infinite number of windows in a palace of water looking out on

the leafless autumn trees like coathangers stripped of their wardrobes.

All seeing is creative. And the dark, a beginning

that isn’t trying to upstage the stars it engenders

out of its own inconceivability with waterless mirages

that reflect nothing but what they depend upon for a living.

Focus like a telescope on any star of your choosing,

steady your tripod like a body in meditation and just sit

like a clay owl on the roof of a barn to scare the chickens away

until you’re flooded with an inundation of clear light

from the inside out of your usual direction of prayer

and you realize the crazy wisdom of what you’re doing here

is neither random nor absurd, nor particularly instructive

given you can’t step into the same mindstream twice,

but an occult chance to revel in the light of secret meanings

all of which are your own hidden paradigms of a shapeshifting universe.

I’d rather drown in an outrageous northern river,

slash my wetsuit and puncture my raft

than sail around the rest of my life in a system of locks

in a game of snakes and ladders. Money talks

and the silence walks like the darkness away from the stars.

Don’t devote your immensities to the sparkling of tinfoil.

But if that’s enough. It’s enough. Just as long as you know

that the shamans aren’t going to waste good magic on you

if an obvious fraud is enough to satisfy you

and the water sylphs won’t reveal their picture-music

like muses with something to sing about if you’re afraid

to plunge in and get wet pearl diving for the new moon

that’s been growing like a sacred syllable under your tongue

for more light years than you’ve had occasion to regret

you couldn’t hold your breath in your own depths for that long.

The mystery of the wellsprings of life and inspiration

is that it only receives swords that have been broken in tribute

to the fact that everything must be returned in time

not words or lives that can be retrieved from the river

to be used again in a recycled holy war that never leaves a scar

worthy of the blood you had to spill to lose it

as if the singularity of your devotion didn’t mean it

or the gatekeeper hadn’t informed you on your way in

that poetry, like the heart it takes to live it, is all entrance. No exit.

PATRICK WHITE