Sunday, January 8, 2012

PEREGRINATION


PEREGRINATION 

Mauled by the infidel lions of savage hope;
my voice looking for its wings in the ashes of heroic doves
who were immolated like love letters
in my chronic cremation of the world that scorned me like a seed
and ploughed with a razorblade, I sowed shadows on the moon
and reaped a harvest of swords
to feed the open mouths of my wounds, a bitter, burnt bread
that tasted of my own embattled blood. Well beyond
the luckier stars of tamer constellations
I bent space into an igneous foundry of light
and poured myself into my work like a weapon
that would claim its own dark domain from the night
and defend the coronation of my indefensible solitude to the death.
Eventually the madmen and the clowns
and the lost pariahs who drank from tainted grails,
and those who were consumed without enlightenment
at the gates of other flames not strong enough
to grant their petitions of annihilation, and the women
who offered the vines and olives of peace with their bodies
but whose eyes were declarations of war,
and those who tilled their own dead planets
and the freaks and the criminals and the refugees and exiles,
and the dwarfs of envy with their sunspots and rashs
came to seek asylum on the uncertain slopes
of my tormented eruptions. And these were the days
when islands boiled in the sea, days
that stiffened like dogs in their death throes
swamped by the firestorms that tempered their hideous nights
under the eyelids of the tides that flanked the bay,
as skin by skin, I grew the pearl of the earth
out of the crude womb of the oyster slagged by the wave,
out of the black radiance of a ferocious heart
crushed into dark-eyed wine. I lived
as I could among the wrack of battered coasts,
among dismembered, used up things, smashed crabs,
and their fallen coats-of-arms, dead starfish
and spiny sea-urchins disgorged like the garbage of heaven,
and the deranged cryptic of delicate bones
that could only guess at what they’d once articulated,
the flayed pillars of amputated trees and huge molars
of tormented roots twisted by sun and salt, I lived
and prospered as I could
in an unsalvagable nation of the forsaken and marooned,
wholly at home around the driftwood fires
of the derelicts and castaways
who alone had died enough
to hear the oceanic lament that raved like a widow
in the fathomless depths of the bells
I abandoned like poems. But the sea is an obvious garden
that weeds itself
and eventually it uprooted me.
I followed a westerly east across the mountains.
Now I listen to the small thunder of wild apples in a night squall
dragging its nets of rain over a thousand shattered lakes
and the shipwrecks have turned into dilapidated barns,
and the shells of the hermit crabs
are the empty husks of the milkweed pods
that have pulled the rip-cords on a blizzard of angelic parachutes
and the planets still cruise
the same upscale configurations of the stars
casing their b. and e.’s for dogs and burglar alarms,
and in every leaf I see a wave, an ocean in the trees,
and the wind like the tide
still shows life’s asperities the way to my threshold,
but somehow over forty years and thousands of miles,
the poems have changed:
they’re no longer bells, though, bow into the storm,
I still turn the wheel loose
to counter the gales of the rages and sorrows
that overtake me; they’re prophetic lighthouses
on the promontories of hell
and despite the fact I know the dangers
of those dark waters well, and once abandoned them,
on the blackest of nights they’re still the only lights
that don’t forsake me.

PATRICK WHITE

CROSSING THE RIVER ON THIN ICE


CROSSING THE RIVER ON THIN ICE

Crossing the river on thin ice, the next step
the beginning, and the one after that
the end and the whole of the rest of your life.
I’m listening for cracks in a mirror.
I’m jumping from rock to rock
like prophetic skulls
cobbling the yellow brick road
with glacial i.e.d.s
playing chess with my nerves
like the wicked witch of the east
laying bets against my afterlife
should I break through
and be swept under
to look at the stars as I used to do
on summer nights flat on my back
when I was young
only to find, older, I still do,
through a broken window in a palace of ice
like an acid flashback of my whole life
seen through an ice-age cataract
over my third eye
like flowers in the sky
strewn over the dangerous path I took
to get to the other side.
As I do. With the uncanny feeling
I’ve been mountain climbing on the moon.
I can trust the river like an instinct.
It’s purging to risk now and again
falling through something
to get to the other side of it
as if life had given you a pass
and you think, maybe, just maybe
it wanted you here for something
that would be made abundantly clear later
though for now, it’s more than enough
to feel the glee
of having gotten away with something
like the simple bliss of just being alive
to celebrate your victory against the odds.
But it’s crucial not to gloat.
Gloating makes you arrogant.
Arrogance makes you stupid.
Stupid makes a mistake.
And the river, like a country road,
will teach you to respect its leniency
on the way back without any.
So for the next half mile
through the intermittent field hospitals
of the birch groves overwhelmed
by the number of the fallen amputees
the beavers have chewed down to pencil stubs,
I remember Walter de la Mare’s imperative
about treading softly,
for you tread on my dreams,
and take great care not to wake anyone up
grasping stray branches I use
like crutches, walking sticks, and canes
as I place each foot down gently and deliberately
crossing a minefield covered in snow
to make absolutely sure that I don’t.
Because if you don’t let things dream
of whatever they’re dreaming about,
and walk softly whenever you’ve got
a big stick in your hand
like a dead tree trying to help you
get a leg up on crossing it like a threshold,
it could be you that wakes up to the nightmare
on the nasty side of Walter de la Mare.
The leaves claw at the ice-glazed snow
like bats at a glass-blown window,
frozen waves of a tide on the moon
flexing the neck muscles of a maneless horse,
or even more bizarrely
because life is more surrealistic
in the deep end
than it is sane in the shallows,
the mummified feet of Canada geese
who’ve lost their footing in the snow.
Brush wolves off in the distance
baiting the farmyard dogs
to howl at the end of their leashes
like the domesticated pets
that became of the dogs of war,
commissionaires at the door,
or come out and be torn to pieces
like the calves and the lambs
and those who fell for the ruse
and wandered out alone
and had their necks broken
for taking their instincts off the chain
to be something they weren’t anymore.
For accepting the challenge
of their old wild adversarial selves
like the French at Agincourt
only to be found in the fall
like the skeleton of a favourite dog
in hunting season south of Highway 7
when the white-tailed deer
are culled by the locals
to keep the population down
and the brush wolves at a distance
looking on with a hard winter ahead
in their strategic hearts
and pups to feed
learning from their persecutors
how to the steal the farm back
one sheep, one cat,
one calf, one chicken,
one foolish dog off its turf at a time.
As I am with a National Geographic
sixty millimetre refracting telescope
strapped to my back like the easel
I used to bring here in the summer,
as if I were out to cull the stars of Orion
by myself in a wild place
in the middle of the night
in a clearing in the woods
where the wolves watched what I painted
fascinated, warily tolerant, and sated
without treading on my dreams
and waking me up to the danger I was in
if they hadn’t recognized
the same voice that called to me
called to them like the sorceress
of a moonlit summer night
and in the winter,
the spell-binding stars
of a wizard of ice
that indentured us all
wolf, human, dog, deer
river, birch, hill, and telescope alike
to the crazy wisdom of an essential insight
that makes anyone whose blood
has ever risked running
like paint with the wolves,
or dared being driven into
deeper snow like a telescope at bay
or descended into a dangerous darkness
to clarify a wolf’s-eye view
of the millions of grazing stars
moving slowly across the heavens,
an apprentice of the light for life
when life isn’t a chore on the farm
you’ve been brought up to endure
securing a board on a barn door
to keep it shut like your mouth
when you know you should
but a calling you can’t ignore
to risk it all on thin ice
like Hannibal or Lao Tzu
crossing the Alps
like elephants in the dark
with one throw
of the constellations
that bite into the dice down to the bone
just to see what you’re made of
when you’re on your own
far from home
and there’s lots to be afraid of.

PATRICK WHITE