Sunday, January 1, 2012

AWAKE AND LABOURING


AWAKE AND LABOURING

Awake and labouring for light in this dayshift of dreams
as the platitudinous dawn takes her make-up off,
her eyelashes the hands of amputated clocks
that once prayed over the ruptured acids
of identical batteries, the premature twins
that exhausted their patrimony of corroded polarities
on the green-blue lichen that eats them in their graves
and spreads like an infection of the moon, I realize
I need a new emergency, a more radical embryo
than this destiny of durable shoes to fulfill the imploding uterus
of a radioactive fortune-cookie. I need more bells,
I need more bullets, I need to rise from the ashes
of my passport to anywhere with a completely new identity
that’s good for an eternity of idiotic bliss. Give me a face
I can believe in that isn’t
a drug-sniffing dog at the border, eyes
that don’t know more about me than I do,
that aren’t surveillance cameras of everything I do,
that don’t watch for me like herons hunting fish. Unspool
the movie and give me conch-shell labyrinths for ears,
I want to be lost at sea again, and a mouth
that isn’t the last druid of a dying language. And I want
an island like a shipwrecked woman who’s marooned on me,
no more of these petulant nunneries and shepherding moons,
no more of their tedious gravity and menstrual atmospheres,
there must be a muse somewhere conceived in her own fires
that isn’t a defection of all that she inspires.
I’m sick of this ghetto of overweening awards
that put their best face forward to accuse me of failure
and whine like the tarnished brass of palatial promises
I did not make that they will go on suffering for my sake.
There comes a day, an hour, a second, the ambush
of an insight that isn’t just another auroral peacock
with a shovel full of eyes, that it’s time to walk out on yourself
like the dark ages and cancel your subscription
to the jaded slug-lines and papal dispensations
of liberations that die like crusades in iron cocoons;
and I don’t care if I’m forgiven or not, let hell
thorn its black rose in my blood again,
and heaven feed like lilies on the corruptions of the swamp,
I’m already recruiting for a new holy war
that won’t make me surrender on my knees.
And how many times can a man cross his own thresholds,
his arms full of wives and groceries and hundred pound keys
he drops on the counter like anchors before
he raves for chaos to craze the plywood windows of his usual enormities
with wilder hurricanes than these that come on
like weather-reports in an onslaught of nicknames?
I want galaxies off the coast of my peninsula, I want
to hear the exaltant screaming of albatross and eagle
slashing through climacteric volumes of electric air
like maverick hinges and butterfly blades in a surf war to the death.
There must be storms in me yet that I can wear like eye-patches
to raid the angel fleets and whole universes
waiting like heretics and ferocious luminaries
to enlighten this burden of wish-bones I carry to the grave.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT A GUEST OF TIME, BUT A HOST


NOT A GUEST OF TIME, BUT A HOST

Not a guest of time, but a host, be, now
bright August stars shining above the white gold
of the riverine wheat that trembled like skin
when the wind blew on it like a lover
to cool it like bread on a windowsill
and it shuddered with light. Stand, kneel, bend
stand in the doorway of your house
like a skeleton that’s been fleshed out
by your own hospitality, and invite time in
like a runaway emotion on a homeless rainy night
and say, yes, stay; heal, eat, sleep, dream,
laugh, breathe, cry, dance with me
until you know it’s time to leave,
to kiss the wind good-bye
as it showers you with seeds and words
like a billion sleeping stars, each
a blessing on the threshold
of a world of your own
that can’t be born
until you lay your eyes upon it,
rain and light, fire and frost,
and they wake up to themselves,
like water to the memory of a distant mirage.
Not a guest of time, but a host,
with your arms as open and wide
as all that falls between
the first and last crescents of the moon,
embrace time expansively within
as the youngest caprice of the sublime
and root it like an orchard in your mind
that’s going to grow like the lucky day
you discover it’s all one day,
into a riot of enlightenment
when it gives its blossoms up to the wind.
And it comes to you,
the kiss of a beautiful farewell,
time is bliss, time is life, time
is the sad soft mushroom of cool lips
pressed against the forehead
of your prophetic skull
saying thanks for letting me stay awhile,
thanks for the future you shared with me
under the eclipse of your eyelids
when you offered me shelter under your roof
like a wood violet under the duff of your leaves.
Not a guest of time, but a host,
welcome the prodigal into your life,
a green bough to a red-winged blackbird,
a dead branch to the wayward blossom of the moon,
and offer the candle of your flesh to a fire
that didn’t want to dance with anyone else.
Account time among the companions
of your silence and your solitude
who grieve with you
at the dry wishing well
you’re trying to fill with your tears
for all those things that never came true
and time whispers into your ear
gently removing your hands from your face
like the petals of a flower
whose time has come to bloom,
I am spring. I am
the most beautiful of lies that heal.
I am the wisdom
in the ashes of the dragons
who swallowed me whole
to bring the rain
like water to the dead seas of the moon.
Now is not just now.
It’s tomorrows that have come and gone,
yesterdays that have yet to be.
And you see, you understand,
time isn’t just a calendar
of grave stones in a cemetery
beside the rail road tracks;
it isn’t linear like that;
it isn’t Euclidean in the least.
It isn’t a superficial approach to space
trying to put a face on nothing.
It’s the night creek flowing
like a violin among the autumn aspens.
It’s the underground river
that sustains the secret garden in your heart
and sends you messages from time to time
like loveletters out of the darkness
that open like flowers and water birds.
The iris of the eye might be as beautiful
as the promise of gold
at the end of the rainbow,
but it’s the black hole of the pupil
that lets time in
like a porchlight that’s burnt out
to deepen its insight into stars and fireflies
as if it were asking for news
of a friend from afar.
Lavish your eyes upon time,
squander the generosity
of your passage upon it,
break bread with it
above the salt on the table,
let it be flesh of your flesh,
bone of your bone,
blood of your blood
and drink wine with it
as if you were both drinking
out of the same skull
that predicted one day you would
like spirits that know their own.
Don’t be the ghost
that comes when it’s called,
be the seance that summons time
to the table that throws away its crutches
and begins to shake and dance
and sing in tongues
that can taste spring in the air
like buds and birds
and wild columbine
like the antennae of a rock.
Don’t be the guest, be the host.
Offer time clean sheets and a bed
the dead have never slept in,
a wall with a painting on it
that was done by you
and a window with a view
that no one’s ever signed
as a work of their own,
and a key to the door of your home
you reforged from the swords of a clock
when you gave up your holy war of one
and went back to ploughing the moon
as the more vital of two absurdities.
Time is not the dark twin in the womb
of your own myth of origins
that brought death into the world
like the only known antidote
to the long hard labour
of the passing years
you spent mining diamonds in a snake pit.
Time is the wavelength of a jewel
that’s turning in your own light
like a planet around the sun,
a gold rush in a nugget of starmud
you found in your travels
on the dark side of the moon,
an eye that flows with the translucency
of water and air and fire
as if you could still see angels
walking on earth
among the daughters of men
and you were looking into the eyes
of everyone of them
vision after vision
of your own insight
into the fact
that time has no afterlife but you
to rely upon like Stonehenge,
the call of Canada geese
traversing the moon
like rosaries and caravans
or evergreens in the fall.
And the old woman
does not say I am old
and the old man
does not say I am weary.
No season younger
or older than another,
the light turned up,
the light turned down,
the stars don’t adjust their shining
to the day or the night
and time doesn’t run out of itself
like the prequel to eternity.
As I said, time has no afterlife
without you and sooner
is always later than you think.
Not a guest of time, but a host,
beckon time in off the road
as you would a stranger
in the lost country you call home;
teach it a language of your own
with a distinctly human accent,
why we might know an hour of bliss
and lament its passing for years,
why with all our meridians, sundials,
waterclocks, wristwatches and zodiacs
we live in such haste
and keep our eye precisely on
that we waste the most,
and yet we still can’t see
that the sun shines at midnight
and the stars and the shadows
are darkest at noon.
It’s been said that time
is an eckaksana, a thought moment,
as if thought had the lifespan of a gnat,
or that time is the sensation
of a gap between thoughts,
but I can’t subscribe to that
because if so we would have
drowned in the void a long time ago
though we’d never know it
or have these flashbacks
of our present and past lives
as we’re sinking
to get out of the way of our future.
If there are gaps, then
time is the bridge between them
that arcs over the mindstream
like a vertebra over a spinal cord
that flows beneath it
reflecting the underside of the overpass
so that the circle remain unbroken
and people can get to the other side,
coming and going.
Time is no more a numeral
than a tree is the name you give it.
It never has been
nor will ever be
two in the morning
or nine at night
or the seven ages of man
declining from his gold head down
to his clay feet
stuck in the starmud.
You are two in the morning.
You are nine at night.
When time wants to know
what it is
time looks at you
and you’re older than the universe
and the universe within and without
is a spontaneous array of endless beginnings
that happen all at once.
As you are
time is.
The star above the childhood
of the abandoned barn.
You waiting for your date to arrive
and the waiter
to get back with a candle
he forgot to place on the table.
The blonde willow
that stripped the dye from its hair
and wears it defiantly thin
with an orange tinge in the winter
against a tree line of dingy brunettes.
If you don’t make an enemy of time,
a doom’s day opponent
that’s always happening to you
from the outside
then you befriend
at one and the same time
your life as well
because there’s no difference
and both it and time
are always on your side
like your eyes are,
your mind is
that can see everything
but themselves
the way a lamp is lead
by a light that’s blind
to what you’re seeing
ahead and behind you
in all directions at once.
When the darkness you’re lost in
wants to take the measure
of how many lifespans and lightyears
it is between one thought and the next
one breath and another
where breath stops
to turn around
breathless in the moment
it consults a star like a clock
that always shining
with as many hands
as there are directions of prayer
directions of light
directions of time
rivers to cross
roads to walk
gates to open
guests to greet
or ways to guess where you’re going.
Time is music.
Time is the soul of space.
Your youth doesn’t age with you
into the available dimension of the future
and your death is already behind you
like a birth with a past
that’s not the guest of time
but the open-handed host
that leaves the door ajar
to receive the pyramids, the deserts, the stars,
the masterpieces of immortal art,
the lovers who said forever
in a farewell of broken vows
on the other side of the hourglass
into the chambers of your heart.
When time says good-bye
to those who arrive
and hello to those who depart.

PATRICK WHITE