Sunday, January 15, 2012

NOISE SEEPING INTO THE SILENCE


NOISE SEEPING INTO THE SILENCE

Noise seeping into the silence.
The apartment groans, cracks it knuckles.
The gas furnace flares, a poppy, a matchbook,
and as things heat up, the tin pipes
keep making spasmodic rimshots on the drums,
then cooling off, you can hear
the last heavy, ripe drops of rain
on a metal roof with no walls
as he imagines it, somewhere in Burma
where the bacteria have such an appetite for life
they eat books down to the spine
and the glue that binds them
like a creekbed of milky honey
that’s cracked with use and time.
And all the letters of all the words,
nothing but flies in amber paperweights.
You take the dirty laundry of a life time
and you wash the blood and semen
off the sheets, the sweat-stained outlines
of a he and a she that made lust
to exhaust themselves and go to sleep
like the chalk silhouettes of two corpses on the street.
And you hang them on the line
like a computer screen blowing in the wind
on a sunny summer afternoon
for the neighbours to see
how much like them you are
when you’re both wearing the same disguise
like clean bedsheets with no evidence of life.
A tabla rasa. A cheery white void.
Snow on a desolate sidewalk late at night
that no one’s walked in before you
showed up to ruin it with your presence.
Footprints on the moon. The estranged signs
of a starless space within
that keeps a journal of our innocence
and its aborted attempts to shine.
He watches the smoke of a cigarette
shaped by the air it passes through
and thinks of the bucolated cosmology
of his last lover’s hair, black walnut
with Bronze Age touches of infra-red.
He remembers her taking her clothes off
in master strokes of candlelight
that painted a Rembrandt of her likeness
and realizes however naked
she stood before him on Wednesday night,
there were still skins to shed,
layers upon layers of metaphor
as divisible as an atom
or the pages of a book
that’s written in wavelengths
that go on forever
beginning where they left off.
And even nude beside each other in bed
they were still too dressed up for the occasion.
And even the silence and the solitude
don’t go far enough into the abyss
not to be warped like space
by the mass of a metaphor
concentrating its light in one place
like a serpent sleeping in its coils
with its head on the pillow it makes
of the endless wavelengths of itself,
an emergency firehose encased in glass
dreaming of what snakes dream of
when they’re not called upon to put things out
by swallowing the moon in a single gulp
to bring the rain on
in this white Sahara of snow,
listening like a mirage
that wished it had something to cry about,
to the eyes of big rain drops
falling on the tin roofs of Burma
like a gas furnace
learning to play the drums
like a novice John Bonham
in Led Zeppelin’s next afterlife
in the dead of winter,
in the dark hours of the morning
in Perth, Ontario, Canada
in an apartment that thinks it’s a band
warming up,
doing a sound check before the show.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN RAGE BROKE DOWN INTO TEARS


WHEN RAGE BROKE DOWN INTO TEARS

When rage broke down into tears
over the shattered chandeliers of stars
that crashed against your windowpane
before they thawed in the furnace
of a Promethean thief of fire
human enough to burn,
and you cried, yes you did, I was there,
I took the splinter of light out of your eye
with the corner of the sky where Venus
goes down in the west like the crumb
of a radiant dream that wanted to break
loaves and fishes with the masses
only to find you were swimming through glass;
you cried as if all the birds in the world
had died under your windowsill
like the words to the song
you were dancing to at the time.
And you picked them up one by one
and cradled them in your hand
like a midwife with a manger
and stroked their soft bodies with your finger
as if you would give their lives back to them again
by way of apology for being human
in an ice age of rain
that had lost its purpose in life
like the seeds of flowers on the moon.
And that’s when the wind, that’s always
the moment when the wind cools your eyes
like a glassblower dipping crystal blue birds
in the fountains and watersheds of the moon
and strews your path with the flight feathers
of a nightbird that can see beyond a starmap
fireflies shining in the distance.
And you suddenly realize
a thousand and one ways home ahead of you
like a Nazca landing strip
for alien artists blown off course
into the third eye of a spiritual hurricane.
And you can’t help but fly through it
like an open window into your soul
seeking repose and shelter
among the human totems
of more habitable emotions
scratching fish, birds, monkeys, spiders
jaguars, flowers, trees, fallible people out
in the desert plains of coastal Peru.
Zoomorphic geoglyphs of greeting and return
in every conceivable sign of life
as if the whole planet came out
all at the same time to say hello
and welcome back
like a vow they kept for you
until your myth of origin
returned to its fulfilment,
a nightbird singing
in a rootless tree on the moon,
as if love, rage, life, joy,
death, separation and sorrow
were all pilgrims of one voice.
A pageant of medieval notes
bearing the banners of knights
the hoods and habits of monks,
unholy vocables of middle English
on the tip of your tongue
like the wicks
of holy candles at a black mass
where a young girl dances naked
around a pale fire on the moon
as a flower blooms in the flames,
or sparrows on a stave of power lines,
when the music makes its return journey
like Canada geese in the spring
bearing the souls of the underworld back
like the eyes and stars
and new moons of the dead
to the night of the living
making love in the dark.
Pelvis to pelvis,
heart to heart,
crescent to crescent,
two halves of a broken wishbone
conjoined again into one harp,
one cithara, one guitar
in the ashes of a blue moon,
the second harvest of loaves and fishes
at the spring and autumn equinox.
Every year a new zodiac,
the growth rings in a tree.
Something protean about memory.
The dark matrix of the muse.
A wavelength with its tail in its mouth
that doesn’t ricochet off anything else.
Lamentations, bewitchment, rapture,
time in the hold of the abyss
for not mastering your own powers.
You either cast the spell for yourself
or you wind up gilled
in your own sidereal nets,
a firefly in spider webs of dark matter,
and it’s not likely
you’re being hauled into a life boat.
There are realities, there are windows,
some broken, some whole
even the moon won’t dare look through.
And there are rooms in a palace of water
that move like fish on the moon,
and starmaps that are used to start a fire.
Birds that are the sacred syllables of the sky
that nest in chimneys like hash pipes,
every one of them the Rosetta Stone
to a language of your own
only you can learn for yourself
even if you’re the only one
who was ever born to speak it.
Most people sip spit
from other people’s wishing wells
but they’re always two echos shy of an original
and it’s enough if they put a seashell up to their ears
like a hearing aid to listen to the ocean,
a tidal pool dying like a starfish
out of water and sky,
a shore-hugger that’s afraid
to go along with the ebb and neap
of the dream that gives a pulse to the moon,
your own mindstream
returning to its homeless source
to realize that life and death are both redundant.
That whatever passes away, stays.
And that which doesn’t, goes.
And there are places so deeply secret
that everybody thinks they know
what’s happening to them as it unfolds.
But this is just a way of using knowledge
to keep your eyes closed to the world.
Only a fool would build a gate
and live in a guardhouse
of sword swallowers and fire-eaters
to keep the birds out of the garden.
Or a refugee camp for turtles.
True clarity doesn’t know the light
for what it is.
Reality is as blind to its own translucency
as a painted window.
Two blades of stargrass in a hurricane.
But if you were to take them away
like the long and short straws
of something to win or loose
like the luck of the draw
and chew on them like cud
to get to the deeper meaning
you might get a gesture of it,
you might get the flavour of it
like a dry wad of gum
stuck to the bottom
of a school room desk,
but you wouldn’t get the use of it,
for any reason at all
that should or should not concern anyone.
Have you ever noticed
that time might be
an hourglass full to the brim on top
but it always begins at the peak
of an inverted pyramid
stuck like an arrowhead
in a flesh wound of sand that’s bleeding out?
What’s the point of trying
to claw your way up the heap
to the top of the bottom
when even Sisyphus knows
enough about absurdity
to realize the mountain
climbs its own reflection
all the way down like an avalanche
of all those little rocks
you used to roll up a hill
convinced you were getting somewhere.
And it’s true there’s a different universe
in every grain of sand
and every grain of sand is us.
So why go looking
for what’s already been found?
In any universe there’s no up or down.
And everywhere anywhere you are
from the smallest pebble on the beach
to the most radiant star beyond reach
the gates of the lost
are the end of the search.

PATRICK WHITE