Monday, January 9, 2012

SALT TRUCKS OUT ON THE STREET


SALT TRUCKS OUT ON THE STREET

Salt trucks out on the street. Black ice.
Noah’s wife salted like Carthage.
The town encased in a glass patina.
The storefront windowpanes are jealous.
Orange pygmy snowplows
seeding salt and gravel on the sidewalks.
Ladybugs about their business.
Butter on a black mirror smeared
like a palette of streetlights and logos.
One misstep and you’re on your ass again.
The night is sumi ink.
There are no revisions.
Who didn’t expect
to die on the highway tonight?
Whose heart breaks like a poppy
glazed by the freezing rain?
Who's been broken off
the brittle tree of life
like a twig that snaps underfoot
to give the nightbirds under the eaves a warning
and the presence of something foreboding away?
Accidental, trivial, random, happenstantial,
how much that was imperatively crucial
perished for nothing tonight
like the driver of a tractor-trailer
that jack-knifed on the backroad to Plevna,
haemorrhaging alone miles from the nearest farm
while the ice fell from the aspen trees
like eggshell light bulbs
and forsaken chandeliers?
I stare blankly through a veil
of freeze-framed tears
crudely woven on the loom of the bug screen
at the subatomic causes
of astronomical catastrophes
and think of the collateral damage
of something so slight as a drop in the temperature.
Three degrees warmer and you would have lived.
But just as wet and three degrees colder
and you would have lived.
No malice. No mercy.
No one to look over the fallen sparrow.
You’re a casualty, you’re a tragedy,
you’re a victim, a bitter fact, an act of God
in a godless universe
that’s anything but self-evident
to those who can’t see in it
either a blessing or a curse
or believe the worst
always works out for the good, better, best
of a cold front that was just passing through.
Who added their emptiness to the abyss tonight
as if they were returning their lives
like shattered windshields
to the frozen watersheds
they took them from
as their broken bodies freeze to the pavement
until they’re discovered in the morning
and chipped away
like a statue by Michelangelo
who could see form in stone
and where the cracks in the marble lay
like fault lines and dangerous stretches
of asphalt highway we fall through
when the earth gapes
and swallows us whole
like a snake you can’t train
to bite other people
that eats its own reflexively.
I’ve tried to reconcile absurdities.
I’ve tried to measure the worth of a human,
noble and ignominious alike,
against the indignity of the way we die
but the scales limp with a heavy foot
as if they’d had a stroke
that paralysed them on their left side,
and left them with no feeling on the right.

PATRICK WHITE

ONE DAY YOUR MOUTH


ONE DAY YOUR MOUTH

One day your mouth just opens
like a rose or an eye or an oyster
that bloomed in the night
when you weren’t looking
and whispers things you should have said
in the defense
of your own innocence
and didn’t, things
that should have been defended with fire
but were washed away with tears
and the bitter acids of high ideals
like a poem in the rain.
I lie, but never out of fear;
and when I lie it’s always
an attempt to heal, to clean, to dress
that gash of a murderous fact
or remove the thorn, the claw, the fang
the sickle of the crescent moon
from a wounded heart
that hasn’t tasted life enough to know
why the blood is made of iron.
I mingle a little shadow in with the light,
a little wine with the vinegar
when the truth has no eyelids
and the bitter cup is full of bleach; I let love
sweeten the green apple
and err on the side of compassion
when the windfall needs a face-lift.
I don’t grow gardens
in the dirt under my fingernails
or drive a golden chariot through a slum,
but a few geraniums on the windowsill
can’t hurt the view.
And what can come of trying to pour
the ocean into a tea-cup
when all that’s needed
is a quick rinse in a bird-bath,
or a few drops of holy water
through a sieve? Terminal
literalism and contagious symbolitis
are the snake-oils
of fraudulent medicine-men.
The truth is a scaffolding
to climb up on and paint
and I never sing in the same tree twice.

But I steal, from everyone, chronically,
dreams, visions, glimpses, insights,
the little jewels of wisdom
that fall from their signet rings, plunder
whole mansions of emotion
in a single night,
a cat burglar on the fifteenth floor
of a tower of moonlight, seeds,
feathers, leaves, flowers,
names and faces, I’m a thief of fire,
a pickpocket and klepto-crow
with a passion
for the silver things of life,
a b. and e. artist with an ear
for encrypted vaults
where they keep the safety deposit boxes
like black holes crammed with stars,
a grave-robber looking for afterlives
to fence to the living, a professional booster
who can walk into any solar system
in a t-shirt
and amble out with a planet.
I once sold Mars in a bar
to a drunken movie-star,
but I’ve never wanted anything
that wasn’t mine, or the wind
couldn’t get its hands on,
or I wouldn’t receive if I asked,
like certain hearts that have accused me
of being in possession
of stolen property. Even the poems I flog
are hot, but like the rain and the sun
I lifted them from
I give to the rich and poor alike
with an empty hand
and the budding daffodil
of an open mike, stealing the Buddha’s purse
to buy the Buddha’s horse.

And it’s true, I’ve been violent,
cracked a few skulls, deviated
more than one septum, but only
when attacked or cornered
or on behalf of the weak and hapless,
gone out to the parking lot
and given as good as I got,
stood up and got counted
then quickly dismounted my rage,
turned the page, not
my cheek and in a week or two
when the swelling’s gone down
and the teeth marks on my knuckles
haven’t turned into aids,
like any cosmic ape or alpha chimp
with gargantuan glands
tried to play the sage
and walk away with a cosmic limp
and eons of blood on my hands.

But as I said, I lie,
and now that I’ve written this
to set the record straight
thinking I had good cause
to touch up my portrait a bit
I confess
between the cracks and the flaws
and the lines around my eyes
I can see another face
that isn’t a disguise
beneath the layers of paint
staring out at me
like a demon in the heart of a saint
who knows what I am
and scoffs at what I ain’t.

PATRICK WHITE