Saturday, January 21, 2012

SAVAGE ASHTRAY


SAVAGE ASHTRAY

In the early grey morning trying to tune the tinny rain
to the fleeting keys of the pentatonic birds,
a bad musician lost in the labyrinth of its ear
like a spider or a sodden note with too many sad flags
caught in the torn stave of its saturated web,
I arrive like a messenger from far coasts
and the exotic nightlife of the bright cities of the stars,
having crossed the passionate ocean of the poppy
that dared her maiden voyage in a bottle.
And I say to myself, because no one is listening, behind seawalls
of black coffee and rolled cigarettes
because I own no part of the sky, no
fraction of the leaking house I’m quartered in
with a library of pleading guestbooks I refuse to sign:
look for the secret gold in the crumbling foundation stone,
pull yourself out of the rock like a charmed sword
or the mad ore of a sad crown in a kingdom of one.
But pauper that I am, I’ve never managed more
than an empty throne, and the antiquated office chair I sit in
was crafted from the timber of burnt windowsills
I rescued like eyelashes from the cooling ashes
of my last revision of the schools of weeping glass
who loved the flaring of the mystic arsonist I used to be.
Whole generations can die in the pause
between one heartbeat and the next and I don’t remember
when it was that I woke up older than the rain
that once derailed my affair with a married sphinx,
but yesterday is not a bruise I want to wear tomorrow
and today is not wise enough to guess the riddle of my sorrow.
More amused than bitter in the expanding interim
of my cosmic solitude, there are graves ahead
I feel compelled to answer from the irrefutable depths
of the opulent silence that owes my voice
a god and a name. And there are roads that I must lead home again,
adopted rivers that have never met their natural headwaters,
and valleys full of fireflies I must endow like brides
before the last crescent of the autumn moon
severs the fruit from the wombs of their lachrymose guitars.
And I am weary and scared and inconsolably alone
in the stern mirrors of the morning that reflect my face
like an apology that came too late to make a difference,
or bridge the distance between one beginning
and the next. This is my life, I tell myself, and hope I’m lying;
this is the blue stairwell of my irremediable longing
to suffer the unattainable until I am wholly transformed
in a single embrace, to die with eyes, to heal the wounded beast of coal
so much like nightfall in my blood with salves of flowing diamond,
or crawl from the ashes of miscreant angels with wings.
This is my life on earth as it is, and this who I am in the changing,
a lightning rod in a makeshift morgue
trying to raise myself from the vast surrender of the dead
I was born among to weld their chains to the clouds
in a flash of liberation. And this is my life in the ruins
of darker aspirations that squandered its victory bells
in useless assaults against the instransigent walls of heaven,
the adamant gates of hell. And should I now deny
out here in the open with my small army of masks
depleted by desertion, what I haven’t even admitted to myself:
there never was a way to wage peace against a world
collegiately braced for war. There never was a way
to campaign for love and survive the treaties and truces
that snarled like poison kisses on the cheek of the moon
I could not turn, the bitter cups and skulls and crazy wines
of the sacrificial knives it kept refilling like a garden. So now
there’s this exordium of islands and exiles like me
buried every step of the wayless way ahead
in our own footprints, casualties of the blessings and bullets that missed.
This is my life, and I will not decry it like a stormbird
off the precipitous coasts of savage ashtrays
nor haunt the shore with reading lamps to jackal through the salvage.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LAST DRAFT


THE LAST DRAFT

There never was a way I could say it;
impossible from the first. The night
opened my mouth and poured its stars
down the well of my throat so I could say it in light,
but all that came out when I tried to sing
was silence and darkness
and a solitude that pawned the wedding-ring
that slipped from the finger of the wind
like a punctuation mark.
I envied the leaves that could say it in rain,
and the stones freaked by fool’s gold
so much like my own brain
but able to say it with ease
like the birds in the morning trees
shuddering with eloquence.
Women could say it, and children, and dogs,
and even the spider could play it
on its lethal guitar,
and the moon by stealthy increments
draining its cup to the lees,
but I could not say it, even after
years of study and extravagant teachers,
everything ended in the cruel laughter
of clones and clowns aghast at my ignorance,
even the pictographs of the mute bones in the cemetery articulate
compared to the dumb show
that betrayed my grief and shame and fate.
I implored the sky to let the words flow
that would set me free, release me
from this lifelong agony
I’ve endured like a downed powerline,
but only my own voice returned
without a branch and leaf, without a sign.
I grew weary of form, of emptiness,
of roses that curse and thorns that bless;
I collapsed all opposites
into enlightened oxymorons,
no polarities or contradictions anywhere,
and shrank to the size of the universe
in forward and reverse, random borons
the only gravity that called me
back to earth, this interminable birth
that hasn’t yet evolved a mouth
that can say it. Now
I don’t know who I am
or what I am
and I’m aging. And I’ve forgotten
what it is I wanted to say
that seemed so important, so pressing,
so absolutely engaging;
maybe something about the mystery
of the human heart
wounded by its own beginning
turning into the history of art,
but I’m guessing. Here
among these immensities,
there’s a window, and a star above the moon
and a fable of blood
riddled with intensities.

PATRICK WHITE