Saturday, January 14, 2012

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN


IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

If I could cry again, as once I cried for you, if
I could saturate this dark fist of a heart that closed up
and hardened from that flower so long ago, trying
to hang on to the jewel, the pearl, the star, the eye of the issue;
if I could turn this stone rose freaked with harsh minerals,
back into that night you drew the blade of the moon
across the wrist of the bridge you were standing on, waiting
it seemed your whole lifetime, trembling
like a drop of shadow-flavoured water
from the tip of a spear of stargrass
for the wind to shake you loose from your agony,
a lost earring, I could put out this root-fire
that runs underground from cedar to cedar, person to person,
consuming its way without flame
through the long valley of the sorrows and years
where I buried you like a storm that had swallowed the hot sword
of its own lightning; I could affirm the black ash
of that night that has gone on dying in me ever since,
I could green it with daylilies and vetch
and the frog splash of lachrymose junipers beginning to rain.
I could stop meaning what I say when I say
crueller solitudes are born of the pain that’s endured
like a grave with no eyelid staring into the sun
waiting for eclipses to fall out of the light
like coins from a one-armed bandit
that gashed the vein of its motherlode
to die in a windfall of poppies, a junkie of luck,
than the strange loneliness of the losers
who cash their winnings in, and bleed to death.
I could mean something else other than heroin,
I could mean a new religion, a successful skin graft
of happier metaphors and cooler tattoos,
brighter constellations than the needle tracks
that loaded the deck of your dark zodiacs
with star-crossed lovers in public washrooms
tying you off with the spinal cord
you carried around in your kit. I could stop the bleeding,
I could put the fire out, I could look at your death
square in the eyes
and haul in a god to answer it
like you did me that last night
when I asked for signs of life
and you quoted maxims to live by from the razor-blade
revealed to you alone on your holy mountain
before you dumped on paradise
like a shovel full of dirt, a spoonful of ashes,
an avalanche of hurt. I could open my hand
and fill your absence in
with things that begin. I could scrawl
a reason to live on your mirror in lipstick
and marry you in our honeymoon coffin
behind closed doors
in a downpour of wedding rings
I stole from the dead.
O, baby, my lost one, my fire in the wood,
you could be my candle-holder
and angel-food for good
if only I could cry again,
as once you knew I could.

PATRICK WHITE

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO I AM NOW


IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO I AM NOW

It doesn’t matter who I am now among these white dragons of energy
sleeping all around me like hills of snow, longing for a heart
that hasn’t been run through with a sword or fried
in the fires of its squandered passions. As I pass and passing is an art,
the silent art of learning to prefer death, alone
with the tongueless eloquence of a vast departure, as I pass
I keep a journal of faces in the windows of longing hung
with sidereal curtains
to elucidate the perfect isolation of my enlightened crimes.
I wrote myself off a cosmos ago; everything I do, a reflex of emptiness,
even the shining a cry of torment out of space, an unnamed wound,
a fountain-mouth that has sung itself away like the birds,
a leaf on articulated waters, an idiot moon that has sighed away its seas.
Within me, night; within me, mysteries I keep as pets
to amuse the children who come with their inquisitive eyes
and tortured dolls to learn if hope is the truest of fallacies. I read my own ashes,
some slapstick sage, embarrassed by their innocence
into an impromptu clarity, brick roses, embarrassed
to be anything at all. Out of the depths of my own inconsequence, the dark shale
of my awareness of life, the indecipherable chronicle of my life
that whispers strange fossils into the moment like curious doors
to the exhausted shrines of time, I laugh at myself as an antidote,
a mystical serum, as I teach the unteachable by arraying
the sacred fraudulence of my own unverified life.
I listen like the shadow of an assassin behind this eyeless translucence
for the sound of approaching footsteps, the groan of worn stairs,
the musical rain of keys, to startle the bones of their dragons
out of death, to cannibalize their lies and rob them of their radiant chains
in a sudden assault of light. I sell them forged passports to nowhere
to befriend their endless seeking like the wind
that erases their footprints home. I offer them everywhere
as a room for the night, my heart the stone beneath their head.
Sleep, gently, babies, in the arms of the dream
that covers your faraway hills like a summer sky freaked with legends.
I am the unworthy nothing that loves you best; the ghost of the grain
I break like bread and salt with stars
to entice you to the unsuspected windows of your own inner seeing.
Rogue dragons wake in the blood, root gods thaw
and send a shudder through the branch, spinal lightning
strikes the cold stone of the brain and the castle falls
that ruled forbidden fields. Are you afraid of your freedom, your exile
your ancient throne? Is the vastness too much, the solitude, the curse;
do you tremble before the armies of your own defeat, regretting the gods
and delusions you overcame to arrive at this moment
faced through tears by the mad messiah of suicide
who has come too late to witness your lonely redemption?
Are you snarled in the void by nets you cast for golden fish,
mesmerized by the points of emptiness that come
with pins in their mouths to trick you out in a wardrobe
of designer straightjackets, your heart, the rock that killed the bird,
your blood, an igneous delirium, drunk on the wine of razor-wire
consecrated by the grave in a ritual condemnation of a lonely prisoner
eating spiders in solitaire? Here
from the medicine bag of this black dwarf
prompted by dragons that elude you, I offer you
a way out, your own slave-price, a hole
more merciful than the knotted ankh of your noose, a road
beyond your walking, this jewel
from under a pauper’s tongue. The crow returns
to this ark of clowns, a continent in its beak. If you want to know
the clairvoyant insanity of the firefly that engendered this world
out of the void, compelled by a silence of light
in a beginning that never began and has never passed, now, still
the mother of itself; if you want to know that which creates and destroys you,
the uncreate which sustains you in the reeling fever
of all those strange emotions and hazardous thoughts
you call you and mistake for something, if you’re still secretly
looking for water in the mirror, your face a dead divining rod,
listen, though you don’t understand what I mean. Go.
The dragon dreams. Look under his eyelids. What does he dream?
If you want to live forever. If you’re alive enough to know.

PATRICK WHITE