YOU TAKE THE SOLITUDE OUT OF POETRY

YOU TAKE THE SOLITUDE OUT OF POETRY

You take the solitude out of poetry.

You rob nobility of its grief.

You pursue an earthly excellence

like a posse, you hang poetry

like a horse thief with wings on its heels.

The nightbird no longer sings

about the way it feels to lose its voice

in an aviary of half-hearted appeals

begging bird seed like begging bowls

from the dawn. Something’s gone

from the light, when you deny

a moonrise its black pearl. It’s true

that orchids bloom in the shadows

of outhouses, and waterlilies in swamps,

but if you only want the star and not

the mud its rooted in like a brain,

the shining’s tinfoil, and it never rains,

all your Chanticleers are bronchial weathervanes.

The highest, most difficult path

isn’t for petty people. The trail

isn’t well worn or warm to the touch

of your bare feet firewalking the ashes

that bite like thorns of the reflexive wavelengths

of the red shifting snakes in the aftermath

of greater spirits. Even horned reptiles

can’t fledge an arrow with scales

without first turning them into feathers.

The snake’s got to achieve its wings

if it wants to fly with oxymoronic dragon sages.

If you suffer your dismemberments

like a picket fence losing its palings,

it doesn’t say much for the lion gate.

Maybe your sacred grove

with its toxic unicorn is nothing more

than a twig of kindling and a bundle

of firewood for a homeless oil drum

cooking stolen barnyard birds

stuck in their own throats like wishbones.

It’s well known Apaches don’t pluck chickens

to make war bonnets, and it’s hard

to convince paper lifeboats on the moon

they can still float, after the captain’s

jumped ship like a plague rat in 1348

and the defection’s beginning to catch on

like a popular meme of what it really means

for a flea circus to act great and black and tragic.

Celebrity bubbles keep rising like weather balloons

until they burst with a big bang

of narcissistic mythic inflation,

parachutes tangled like Medusan jellyfish

in their own powerlines, come back down to earth,

candling like condoms, wind socks

and withered daylilies off the charts

of their heart throbs on life support

that never got over the analeptic shock

of you letting them down like a dandelion

that roared as if it had a mane and teeth

to back it up when all else failed in diaspora.

Poets into gleemen, gleemen into entertainers,

entertainers into court jesters, court jesters,

into fools, fools into idiots, idiots

into morons, morons into experts, and experts

beating on a pinata of paper wasps

like Chinese lanterns and burning box kites

that don’t yield honey or wield their tiny stingers

to tilt quixotically at windmills and real dragons.

And then come the donkeys to the well

to see the well looking back at the donkeys

like the shameless celebrities who are famous

among crows and nightingales alike

for not being able to sing even so much

as a riff of an honest lullaby to themselves,

late at night, and they’re alone, and nobody

applauds the braying of a jackass at the moon

in front of a make-up mirror in the green room.

You can go to a Grateful Dead concert

and huff laughing gas like a muse.

You can moshpit your way to the front

of the crowd elbowing other people

out of the way to a seat on the celestial omnibus

that isn’t leaving for anywhere in particular

for a couple of thousand light-years yet.

You can piss on everyone’s parade

like the golden showers of Zeus

tinkling like a horse-haired glockenspiel

on their watercolours of starmaps in the rain.

You can act as if you’re mad when you’re sane.

A nasty being with a beautiful soul.

But you take the black hole out of poetry

you’re Orphically afraid of descending into

and try to fake it like a tunnel of love,

you rob the river of the sea, the road

of its homelessness, the bloodstream of its heart,

the galaxy of the sense of direction it’s had

from the very start like a prayer-wheel

turning into the wind like a jinxed Sufi

at the crossroads of where it all begins and ends.

You take the ore away from the gold.

You take the coal away from the diamond.

You liberate the star from its dendritic chains

of black matter in the darkness, the mystery

from the occult, the history from the bloodshed,

the eyes behind the mask you wear

like a fancy poultice at a costume ball,

the arsonist from the mouth of the fire swallowers

you surround with emergency exits and alarms

and stumpy fire hydrants waiting in attendance

like an ambulance upon a fire engine,

the poison in one fang for the sake

of the antidote in the other, you’re only

milking the crescents of the moon like a snake trainer

with a bird bone flute to bite other people

without taking a risk of dying of the spit

you drink out of everyone else’s mouths

like house wells you’ve been fracking for snake oil.

You want to die a trivial death, a volcano

buried in the caldera of a firefly, flaunt

your sex appeal in front of a jealous muse sometime

and try to convince her you’re as real

as the falsies in your padded bra

you’re palming off as poems. Or cod pieces

in the dancing leotards of prosthetic anacondas.

And she’ll show you soon enough

she’s not an inflatable doll on a long shipwreck

and you’re not the swan she’s going to stick

the copulative sibilant of her neck out for, when

the the double-bladed axe comes down

like the crone phase of the moon

on a chopping block of a real fox

inside the razorwire of a chicken coup

born running from the shadows of hawks.

PATRICK WHITE