Wednesday, October 24, 2012

THE NUNS ARE SLEEPING ON GRAVES WITH THEIR PAGAN LOVERS


THE NUNS ARE SLEEPING ON GRAVES WITH THEIR PAGAN LOVERS

The nuns are sleeping on graves with their pagan lovers.
The black walnut trees have shed their leaves
half way between feathers and scales
like arboreal dinosaurs that are learning to fly.
And the branches of the staghorn sumac
that went up in flames like the rest of the greenwood
now look like the ribs of a snake blanched in the ashes.

I tell the hard rocks chiselled down to the lake
as if they were animate, sapient, sentient life forms
I know just how they feel
when they’re dreaming of Carrara marble
and someone steps on them
like a skull of a common cornerstone
you can take for granted, but the birds,
why is it always the birds that are the first
to be alert to things like this, tell me
not to deprive them of their extinction.
So I’m prone to keeping my words to myself
when I’m on a backwoods pilgrimage alone
with too many death masks hiding the face of the moon.

Half the abandoned roads I’ve walked through life
have turned back in upon themselves
like an ingrown hair of a noose
in a claustrophic cul de sac,
like a thread of the mindstream
trying to close the eyelid of a needle that’s dead.
But the other half of the labyrinth
on the dark side of seeing led me into clearings
in the middle of nowhere I ever expected to be startled by stars
that set my heart racing with mystic terror as if a partridge
just exploded out of the bushes in front of me
and enlightenment came to me for an hour or two
with such force of clarity I was breathing light not air.

And I didn’t become one with everything.
How can anyone say they’re one with everything
without resorting to the past tense the moment they say it?
I stood my ground beside unity like zero
because nothingness is the only way
of comprehending one without being excluded by it
like the exception that puts the lie to the whole,
and I amplified its immensity tenfold.

Ask any silo. There’s no limit to what you can hold
when you’re empty compared to what you can
when you’re full. Even on upgraded hobby farms
where the wheat and the corn are stored
in more ample, lightning proof Euclidean storage spaces,
if you look over your shoulder in passing
at the old wooden siloes barely holding their ribs together
with rusting metal bands, cooper’s barrels
abandoned closer to the road that’s been widened since then,
their roofs blown off by the wind like the lids of garbage cans,
I’ve seen fully mature trees, rooted in the compost
at the bottom, rising up like green oil strikes toward the sky
or a clown like me being shot out of a cannon toward the stars
and landing in the safety nets of the laughing constellations
who weren’t expecting to catch anything that night
but a few eyes out swimming too far, too deep from shore.

Just because it’s a long shot, and your aim’s off,
and your not quite as profound or sublimely targeted
as the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs,
doesn’t mean you still can’t make a big impact as a meteor
holding on to the flower in your hat for dear life
like a butterfly in a firestorm of dragons
with a childlike sense of humour marrowed
in the smooth bore barrels of their dusky funny bones.

PATRICK WHITE  

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