Sunday, January 22, 2012

JANUARY SUNSET


JANUARY SUNSET

January sunset, clear blue sky,
peacock viridian with a wash of ultramarine,
warm for this time of year.
Ninety-nine percent of a full moon
waxing maculately ivory white in the east.
The threads of the little black creeks
that have frayed away from the strong rope
are the dissonant wavelengths
of baby snakes in the snow.
The willows orange against
the burnt umber backdrop
of a grove of pine, birch, maple
trying to keep some desperate secret to themselves.
Unkempt, wind-swept fields,
under an archipelago of snow,
the exhausted afterbirth
of cattle-corn and sheep
as if that were all they had to show
for the long hard labour of bringing forth life
as the stars are beginning
to emerge from the dark
as the prelude to something spectacular.
The air damp with the fragrance of snow
as the temperature drops cold-hearted
as the blood in the proboscis of a mosquito.
And way off in the misty distance
at the edge of the field
praying mantis hay-balers
arachnid hay rakes,
late triassic tractors
that look like dehorned stegasauri,
machines seized by rust, time, futility,
that have stood there so long,
patient dinosaurs enduring their extinction,
it would be less than human
not to feel sorry for them
or wish for some kind of astronomical catastrophe
that could make it up to them
without bringing the dead back to life
like clusters of houseflies fooled by the weather.
Lunar lichen and wet leaves
the colour of tanned leather
plastered like poultices
to the skeletal femurs
of a crippled cedar rail fence.
Buds on the New England asters
that will never bloom this side of spring,
moments in time
freeze-framed in space,
as if spring didn’t know when
to leave the party at the peak of her popularity
and over did it way past curfew at the group home.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE'S NOTHING COZY ABOUT REAL BEAUTY


THERE’S NOTHING COZY ABOUT REAL BEAUTY

There’s nothing cozy about real beauty.
That’s why it scares you to death
when you’re around it. You sense
that it disdains to kill you
simply because it knows it can
but that only makes you beg for the knife
even more, even deeper, until
you’ve suffered more death
than you ever knew there was to suffer.
It’s the same with the truth. The truth
isn’t the act of a well-meaning
coffee-table sentiment,
a hundred dollar book
of recycled paper
to help save the Caribou, 
a checkered impressionist table-cloth
with compositionally balanced butter-knives
that have never tasted blood in their lives.
If you can’t hear the shriek
of the red-tailed hawk as it plunges
toward a mating pair of killdeer
executing an aerial ballet in May
that would make you cry it’s so beautiful,
you can’t hear the hummingbirds
at the holly hocks either
even if you know sign language.
And no more than the truth, poetry
isn’t a mirror you hold up to nature
with preconceived notions of what
you want to see reflected there.
In hunting season around here
the truth can bleed Bambi upside down
from the bough of a willow
that lets its golden tresses down
all the way to the ground
until its tips are dyed in blood.
The truth can tear the heart of a wolf out
and eat it raw in front
of a classroom of schoolchildren
while it’s still beating.
Go ask any child army.
Go ask any street kid in Ottawa
or any bushwhacked adolescent in Lanark.
You asked me to read your poems
without holding anything back from you
and I have and I won’t.
You keep a tidy house
on the right side of the tracks
of a zodiac with astro-turf lawns.
And I see all your candles
have been dipped in scented wax
and write right-handed
with glowing nibs on the reverent air
and there’s a stick of sandalwood incense
protruding from a buddha’s belly-button
that makes me wonder
whether he’s committing hiri kiri
or lowering his lance at a joust
to let a lady tie a ribbon to it
as you have most of these poems
to designate them your champions.
You’ve bomb-proofed your church so well
with so many lesser lights
in cages and black outs there’s no chance
you’ll ever be struck by a bolt of inspiration.
The lightning doesn’t send messages
like sweetgrass in the beaks of doves.
You sip from the muses like bottled water
from the tears of crystal skulls.
But you haven’t yet learned how
to swallow their watersheds on the moon
or drink blood from the skull of your own
in a single gulp for fear
they’ve been contaminated by fracking.
Flying fish in a sea of shadows
that’s always at full tide
but you never reveal
the constellations of dead starfish
that reek to high heaven
like the stink of enlightenment on the bottom
when the tide bleeds out
like a white-tailed doe.
Happy lifeboats moored safely in port
as if there were nothing to risk or rescue
but a new paint job
as a storm front moves in
like a curtain call of judgmental grey.
All your feral cats have been fixed
and the darkness has no claws or fangs,
and that wilderness that used to howl
in an agony of sex and longing
under your windowsill of potted herbs
all unnerving night long
now purrs impotently in your lap.
You strew your path with rose-petals
but when have you ever walked barefoot
on toxic thorns or the plinths and eyelashes
of the splintered chandeliers of the stars?
You cut the polar ice-caps off
the extremes of a hard-boiled planet
and only eat the temperate zones
you can scoop out with a silver spoon
like the front left parietal lobe
of Humpty Dumpty’s sunny brain.
Blackholes do more to enhance
the radiance of stars and fireflies,
ignite the fire of dragons
on the other side of a wormhole hourglass
into the next coincidence
of a harmoniously contradictory world
than all those sunbeams
you try to keep on
like night lights in a morgue
because you’re afraid to sleep with the dead
and they don’t want to wake up without you.
And I’m not saying
you need to go out and mess up,
trample on your own garden,
turn Taurus loose
in the china shop of the Pleiades.
No one can go out and think their way
into an experience they haven’t had yet.
They merely experience their own thought.
Just another poetry book
having sex with itself
in the hopes of winning an award
to make it feel fulfilled enough
it can take what’s real for granted.
But even Rimbaud who
dissociated his sensibilities rationally
and then killed a man with a stone
on a construction site in Cyprus
discovered how dangerous it is
to broach the spontaneous deliberately.
As for me, I’ve learned
to delight in the despair
of my own crazy wisdom.
As for you, you might start
by turning the light and around
and looking into the darkness within you
not as a smudge on the reputation of your lilies
but as a chunk of coal
that didn’t let your diamonds down.
A suggestion I suggest you ignore
if you’ve understood anything I’ve said
about the nature of poetry
that makes any petty sense at all to you.
And the next time you
you run into your own clarity
like Galileo trying to show you
through his telescope
there are sunspots in your field of view
like bruises on a banana
and the moon is pock-marked
by one too many facelifts,
don’t try to paint the lens
as if you were airbrushing
the imperfections out of your own eyes
just realize how important it is
to open them from the inside out.
And as for those little black ants,
that keep inciting a riot of words
you’ve got no crowd control over
you keep setting honey-traps for,
to keep them from running all over
the planetary orb
of your moonlit peony in bud
like a chaos of minutes
looking for a fixed place
on a spherical waterclock
as if they were all
running out on time simultaneously.
Trust me, or don’t, they’ll let you know
when the sun shines at midnight
and your hour’s come round to bloom.
Meteors cry like diamonds
for the species they make a big impact upon.
And volcanoes eventually
weep their way into islands
that will be seeded by birds and castaways.
The eye of the rose
looks into the secret heart of the worm
and sees the wings of tearful loveletters
being born like butterflies in the rain.
And then the sun appears
and dries them out
like laundry on the line.
Or the negative of an eclipse
hung up in a dark room
like a flypaper map of the stars
in an alternative universe
on the other side of your eyes
that hasn’t come up with a name,
a fixed place, or a myth of origins for you yet
until you’ve passed
like the tiny planet of a firefly
through the gravitational eyes
of a constellation of black holes
without going out
like a flashlight you keep shining
nervously into the dark doorway
of a dragon’s mouth when you write
to see what was making the noise
like the universal cosmic hiss
of a flamethrower in a snakepit
of oracular wavelengths
that keeps you from going
downstairs to find out.
As a Zen master once said.
The stone is lustrous
but there’s nothing inside.
The ore is different
but from it comes gold.
And as any poet knows
who’s ever been inspired
you polish gold in fire.
You don’t write white noise
to block the darkness out
as if you were afraid
of things that go bump in the night.
Don’t fall like a snowflake on a furnace
then try to sip your tears like spit
from its prophetic mouth when you melt.
Be a star, be a Chinese lantern,
be a fire-kite of burning insight.
Light upon light means
the darkness shines as well
on the inside as it does without
whether you see it or not.
The moonrise of an emotion
follows the sunset of a thought.
Two tides of the same ocean,
the highs and the lows
the crest and the trough
of the same wavelength we’re all on.
And the mountain you’re trying to climb
is only as high and white
as the valley is deep and dark.
Not two is the furthest thing
you can say in a universe that isn’t a lie.
There’s a lot of shadowless noon
in your impeccable poetry
but where’s the starless midnight
on the other side of of your eyes?
Don’t orphan your first born
to legitimize your poems
like a forged birth certificate
you hope everyone will recognize
as your rightful place
in a table of contents
with the good taste of a menu.
A suggestion I suggest you ignore
if you’ve understood,
deeply understood
anything I’ve said
about the nature of poetry
that makes any petty sense at all to you.
And I don’t say this to be kind or cruel.
You know how
to harvest the full moon
like a sparrow
the gleanings of the light,
twelve grain whole wheat bread,
but you don’t know how to sow stars
on the dark side of an eclipse
that will sprout and bloom,
a phoenix feathered in wild fire
that will catch on and spread
like life itself
like the syntaretic spark
of the timeless with the fruitless dead.
Out of the dark abundance
of watersheds and roots,
the phoenix energy of your cells,
the bright vacancy of the full moon,
a blossom on a dead branch,
the new moon of a crow in autumn
on a green bough of night birds
that are never at a loss for words
when the truth and the beauty
of the light coming out of the darkness
leaves them as speechless
as a starmap of fireflies
where the constellations have no names,
going up in flames.

PATRICK WHITE