Friday, January 20, 2012

THE STARS WILL NOT DEVISE


THE STARS WILL NOT DEVISE

The stars will not devise a way out of your life
that they haven’t already offered you
and the sprawl of green fountains
that hallows you now, the victorious trees,
will later drop all their keys
like a nightwatchman too drunk to get in.
You must stand in the ashes if you want to study orchids,
you must fill your body up with clouds
and red-tailed hawks, and autumn leaves
torn from the pages of the history of fire
if you want to follow what the wind is saying
back to its mouth in the sun.
Everything else is the source of everything else
and the rain knows more about circles and arrows
than all the bows and compasses
of the sad magician who’s stripped his purities of flesh.
Stay close to the earth if you want
to look deeply into the eyes of the stars
and see the golden maggot that hangs from its lifeline
like a message in a tear delivered with wings.
Your blood, no matter how you say it,
is a prelude of wild roses beside a murdered brook,
and there are legends of light on your skin
that are ancient instructions
on how to bring it back to life again. Denude yourself
of those feathers and leaves and mirrors
you dress the morning up in
to go and sit on the corner like an open guitar-case
to deprive the music of the night before.
There are women everywhere, half-awake,
who grope the sheets for you like spare change
in an empty bed, and blue doors where you live
waiting for you to fill the tiny eyes of their spy-holes
with ruined moons willing to sacrifice themselves
for a few moments more.
If you give your word to me
you won’t desecrate their graves with shallow questions,
I’ll show you where the harps
of the enlightened peacocks were buried with honours
when they saw through the veils of the eclipse
that opened their eyes to a dawn
they hadn’t expected. Get up off your knees
in that house of chains and crippled ladders you worship in;
there’s nothing holy about the crutches you contrive
in a shipyard of able bones, and your voyages
are already blessed by the sea that pounds in your chest
to add you to her islands. Can’t you feel
the soft adagios of her secret distances
swaying the keyboard of your crossed horizons like waves?
And why do you quote the fool of your own silence
to contradict the wisdom of the night
that everywhere answers you
with the shadows of bells and owls
you can read between the lines of the stars;
isn’t it clear that all that vastness is a rock in a well
she’s singing to you, a fragrance of time
that wants to voice the solitude
of her lachrymose labyrinths to someone
who knows how to listen
in the nocturnal flowers of her native tongue?
Write, yes, write; by all means
show us the beauty of your soul
in its passage across the moon
whether coming or going, array your lonely jewels
on the carpet of the sky before us
like the fruits and tears and eyes
that have congealed from your sorrows,
and those dark drops of amber and tar
that preserve all your flights and fears intact
like supple summers jailed in a locket; let’s
hold them up, too, to the light and wonder
that you could endure such fables of pain;
and not just your bleeding rubies, not just
your emeritus emeralds and the radiant sapphires
that fell from the crown
that graced the domain of your regal demeanour
with a northern constellation,
but the painted fish and electric eels,
and the sharks and the crabs and the jelly fish
that live in the dead cities of your all night corals
like cheap actors in ravenous wardrobes of blood
playing for real; let’s see them as well,
and all the rank gardens that grow in the dirt
beneath the crescents of your untrimmed nails
slumming like landlords in places you wouldn’t live;
let’s see all of these and more lifting the veils
on the ferrous brides of your unimpeachable sincerity.
But when all the vows have been taken and forsaken
and your dead have been lavishly mourned
in brass, granite, marble, and staples,
let’s see if you know how to drink with the shadows
you go out every sunset
with your tongue as thick as a broom
to sweep from the stairs? After the cool, blue, jazz clefs
warming up like fireflies and fiddleheads
to the implications of emptiness improvising
on the black trumpets of the scorched daylilies,
let’s hear from some passing storm now and again
that you’ve learned how to die enough
that the pulse of a profounder heartbeat
that marks time with the breathing of nightfall
is all that keeps you alive.

PATRICK WHITE

THE PALE MONTHS


THE PALE MONTHS

The pale months discharge their attributes of green
in the gripe of small, bitter apples
and the white blossoms
have got their laundry done like nursing caps
and the bonds of friendship with the young
have grown sticky and black, almost obscene,
as they lash the willow like bad actors and beauty queens
with long, drawn-out rehearsals of sappy plays
and the busy wavelengths
of petty mind worms inching toward the virgin cocoons
that might lark their threnodies with real wings
and flammable paper if the little mummies
ever make it to their afterlives. As it is, when they weep
their tears fall like the cold lenses
of leftover concentration camps
they may or may not have read about,
and the split seeds of their careful, furtive eyes,
the tender shoots of agile semi-quavers
run to the black and white keyboards of vinegar
thinking the moon’s just an old whole note,
and the silence that lies in state
like wine in the dark cellars of the sublime
is just another waste of time. They can’t imagine
how many stars and planets and lives it takes
to sugar the black holes of their photographic depressions,
how much light must give itself up to the night
to get one drop of translucent honey
flowing through the narrow veins
of their slim contingencies
and into the green flutes of their bones
like marrow and music. Okay, they’re not
the red wizards of autumn yet
forging swords out of the ores and eras
of the igneous sunsets that have purified their fury in the fire.
They’re too busy looking for their place
and white surplice
in a travelling choir with portable pews
and souvenir crosses of wood. They’re young
and imagine because they say the word good a lot,
they’re good. Let them stand for their hymns and anthems
as they will, it’s natural, it’s right
and there’s even a beauty
in their platitudes and repertoires, their reforms
of ancient hydrogen
that looks like the birth of stars,
the seven spoon-fed sisters of the Pleiades perhaps,
or the reluctant debutantes torn on the horns of Taurus,
white dwarfs and cepheid variables,
young pulsars turning their diamonds in the light
to see if they’ve been cut right, if all the facets
are correctly interfaced
to download easy solar systems from the night.
They’re goldfish in a shark bowl,
flamingo fan tails and neon tetras
in a cannibal aquarium
of tiger-barbs and brutal dime-angels,
they’re an army of baby turtles
holding on to their helmets
as they run for the beaches of Normandy,
strafed by the Stuka seagulls,
black panzers in heavier armour on the cliffs,
black wolves swinging their muzzles into the wind.
It’s a hell of a way to begin
the rites of spring,
but the best steel goes through the fire
and there’s a chastening beyond virginity
that’s got nothing to do with victory
or the peevish tempers of first violins.
And I look at the old women, the derelicts, the crones,
and the roadkill along the highways of life
unstrung by the turkey vultures like dead guitars
and the sad veterans of spring in the swan park
staring themselves to death like foodbanks for birds,
all the lamentable carbons of human existence
down to the last embers of their spent hearts,
the spare change of cogs and bobbins
taken apart like watches, and I see
another kind of beauty, the deeper innocence
of worn bannisters spiralling up like smoke
in the stairwells of old hotels panned by junkies,
sybarites of wood aged and polished
by the sweat and oils of ten thousand different hands
that steadied their ascents and fallings
through years of snakes and ladders
on the chromosomes and rungs
of these who’ve bleached their peptides
in the caustic salts of the sea. Born
a beachcomber among wasted, cast-off things,
the second-hand bins of the stranded performers
and dismantled wild-west shows of the wave,
a seahorse, a Pacific cowboy from the lunatic fringe,
I look efficiently into the secret urgencies within
the Pre-cambrian tidal pools of their fossils and shells,
tears the ocean left behind in the undertow of a thousand farewells,
and a I see a darker kind of flowering
and the mysterious purple fruits
of a second innocence sweeter than the first
long after the apples are out of their diapers
and their blossoms are fouled by rust,
swinging from a dead branch of boney vertebrae
like bells, and moons, and chandeliers
clustered in an eclipse of black cherries,
and windfalls of seasoned planets
waiting to be pushed through the doors
of the hungry dead
in a jubilee year of pious offerings.
See yourself reflected in the face of an old man
if you truly want to understand what grace is,
or the well-used wood of a faithful chair
with a view of forever
beyond plans, if you’ve got the juice
to make something of yourself in the light and the rain
that can embrace the whole of the night,
can hold it like a syllable under the tongue,
a coin of insight, and not go insane. That’s what
courage is, not the charades of the young
besieging the sweetmeats
of moonlight in a nut,
raising their arrogant hammers
like stone gavels on the anvils of the heart,
mistaking their juvenile bias
for the robes of an older law
that presides without judgment
over everything that lives, not the breezy sail
of a quick voyage into the depths,
a love-boat cruise among enchanted islands,
but staring into the eyes of the Medusa
in the snake-pit of an oceanic abyss,
and greeting every grinning serpent
with an antidote and a kiss.

PATRICK WHITE