Wednesday, January 25, 2012

THERE, YOU SEE, I LET YOU GO


THERE, YOU SEE, I LET YOU GO

There, you see, I let you go, just like that, open my hand
like milkweed, like dandelion, a grave full of ghosts
and let space take the parachutes and parasols,
chimney-sparks and fireflies in a gust of wind by a dark lake,
and I wonder if the stars, too, are a way of saying good-bye,
if the blood drapes its lanterns in black
after the light has fled
and latches the gate with a question, if
the sun dies in the apricot after it falls,
if the branch is sadder by the weight of one bird
or if the fruit it bears like tears is enough
to go on conducting the requiem of your absence,
because we are just an eye of water at the end of a leaf,
a match plummeting down a well,
a tiny fury of seeing that scalds the watershed
with the hiss of a cat, a feather of flame, and dies,
the dreary slag of a dwarf moon, a black, pitted skull.
And who would believe such a desolate thing,
was once a red bud on a paper stem, dreaming of flowers,
imagining the dawns that would come of its flaring,
or the constellations that might recruit its shining;
now the head and thorax of a dismembered insect,
a pygmy matador robbed of its scarlet cape,
its anonymous corpse, the only gravestone
to say it once existed among the radiant, a meteor, a comet,
a star doused in the morning light, an orchid of fire
at the end of an exclamation mark that shocked nothing
by its Luciferian fall from grace, no more than a wounded kite
that mistook itself at the end of its tether
for a phoenix with other lives. And the spring is green
and the rain trips delicately off the plectra of the leaves and petals,
and everywhere there is the frenzy of growing things,
blue carillons of liberated bells, but I am alone
with the battered asteroid of my own insignificance
far from light and water, in a straitjacket of space,
a minor bead on a rosary of greater planets,
a nugget of injured iron in the gold-pan gleanings of the sun,
the seed cast away, the extinguished stone
of a directionless house of worship
with nothing in my loins but the ghosts of the evicted poems
that once lived there, the pride of the desert tribes
before the nations of faith revised the unsayable silence
your eyes have left me like dry wells in the starless dark.

PATRICK WHITE

SWEET ONE, SAPPHIRE LAPWING



SWEET ONE, SAPPHIRE LAPWING


Sweet one, sapphire lapwing, killdeer, comet;
how haven’t I seen you in everything, casino stars,
the high fires on the mountain that bloom in the snow,
and the tangerine daylilies like the tents of the street lamps
watching the streaming serpents flow over their roots,
even the razorblades, paperclips and bicycle pumps
have signed your guestbook,
and the rose and the rose and the rose
I left for your poetry, on the grave of your soft eclipse.

You were so gentle about it; the way your words
slipped over and off the light, and your anger
that glowed like igneous subdued cherries, always
just a planet away from the darkness,
and the flaring emergency exits
that soaked the air with poppies:
you moved easily through yourself, kelp in a tide,
trailing your soft blue whips behind you
like the little threads of the stream where it meets the sea,
and something in you ends, and something else begins,
and you were grey and sad as an overcast Sunday morning
blue-greens of pagodas and pines,
and the mist that concealed your shrines.
And I realized I had to be water if I wanted to hear your voice,
and a few fireflies more, and I could see you alone in the haze
you wore like an ashen negligee, or a milky window.
Your life was all islands, and tulips clipped to butterflies,
Voices out of the dark, and the white birds that circled
the gaping mouths of your abandoned towers, like words
you’d left behind to remember the place.
And I recall thinking as I read
how much you drifted through your poems like a capsized boat,
and of all the life that goes on underneath the silver leaves,
and the things that take shelter there from the rain,
and who was in the boat when it overturned.
And I wonder who the woman was under the eyelids that felt
like big, heavy drops of rain where the stars
swam away from their pain, not fleeing
but moving off in easy schools of lantern fish.

You were a lens, a dark translucency,
but you washed things deliberately out of focus like fog
that veils everything in its water skin.
You marveled in shadows,
and there was a fire, a smudge of cedar
somewhere on a lonely beach with starfish,
a small bouquet you were trying to uphold in the wind,
and your life depended on that, that was the part
that couldn’t go out, and I think it was your heart.

And I heard the canary in the collapsed mines
trying to warn the miners to get out
but the warning always seemed to come too late;
And I began to wonder whether you
were coal on its way to diamond
or an ore with the moon inside
but it wasn’t until I stumbled across the smile of a knife
with your fingerprints all over the ivory handle
that I finally understood
that there had been a sacrifice, not a murder,
that you bled in the name of a lamb you once cherished,
and you must be young, or it would have been a goat.

Your poems were quick, impressionistic sketches
of a girl jumping from stone to stone across a creek
with an affection for her loneliness as if
all the dandelions had gone into exile.
I wasn’t quite sure what came out of the silk cocoons
you hung everywhere on the wet branches of your poetry,
sometimes I thought it was just you wrapped in blankets
and other times, dragonflies and violet fairies,
and there was hot honey in the sexual hives of your bees.

And I think I fell in love with your ghost before I did you
when I realized that every poem was the next bucket
of a waterclock that was trying to get something off its skin,
each a small pond where you renewed your virginity
by bathing in mirrors, and that was how you knew
what time it was, and where you had been,
by all the swirling faces that floated downstream.

And now, something has changed,
you open the windows wider
and let the world in, your grey blue-green lichens
are no longer the masks of the moon, and your poems don’t end
with the flags of who you are
flying at halfmast as much anymore,
though I can still hear the odd sparrow
brain itself to death with a thud against a glass sky
and I like the new depth in the guest dimensions of your seeing.
And there are stars showing up everywhere like migrant candles
in all the nebular nests of your being.

And I’ve stood here a long time now
and watched you rise shyly out of your poems
like the orange dancers in the forest who leap like flames
or the starmap of a mysterious constellation
I couldn’t identify above the hills of your body
until I saw it was the nightly journal of a blue panther
who had crept up on me in the invigilant silence from behind
as if two shadows had met in the dark like eyes and grapevines
and tangled up in each other like kites,
neither knowing where they began
or how they would end, if ever,
confessed to the webs and the wines
that they were in love with each other,
that there was lightning in the powerlines at last,
and transformers everywhere going off like landmines
and a voice in the shining, that knew, without a word,
that they were the sign of legends who woke without a past.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THE POEMS SIT THERE


AND THE POEMS SIT THERE

And the poems sit there on the tracks,
on the shadows of serpentine ladders,
without engines, though moving, without diesels
to drive them, chain-letters to the world,
to a moment with nothing else to do,
to lonely abuses huddled by the flowering lamp
like fairies in boxes of shy plaster,
to broken windows who rage at the stars
for not accepting their jagged black holes,
to lovers who spend too long in the shower
pruning their gardens,
every ray of light in place
as they go out to pale their shining in the sun,
and the poppy girls with spider tongues
offering little green crowns to the bees, sit there
without moving, though moving,
pulling their hearts on long lifelines out of the void
that fuels their furnaces with crows,
that rescues drowned sailors from the rose of the sea,
that fangs the old lions with light
to pluck the one-stringed jugulars of radiant gazelles.
Two cobras dancing, the hold of our hands,
and the swans revealing their lizard roots,
and the rain a small violet in the rusty passions of the coffee-can
I don’t want to trade blood with the sour wine of the snails,
I’ve always had my own skull to drink from, and the water
of the dirty windows weeping in the morning,
and there are faces I can lap like mirrors for a taste of stars,
and bodies that unfold like single futons
patched with small maps of nocturnal sugar
that glow like prophetic ores from somewhere deeper in the mine.
Every morning I take my eyes out like contacts
and rinse them in the grave, wash off the residue
of yesterday’s visions, the smog and the dew and the soot,
the stagnant waters that cling to them like skies and skin
and the little rivers of blood that show you
an aerial perspective of the lightning, fireflies, stars, dreams
and the cinders of oil drum fires under all-night bridges
and the black commas of what’s left
of the butterflies in midnight webs. And there are cocoons of birth,
of transformations with wet wings emerging among the water hyacinths
and then there are the cocoons that hang like pendants
from the trophy lines of fat arachnids,
webs dripping under the weight of their hourglass stones
like torn suspension bridges and swaying spinal cords.
And it makes me so sad to see a door burn, a helical stairwell
straighten itself out to belong to a fire-truck,
and there are other things, sadder things,
ants with pruned antennae, dreams who think like used stamps,
the rainbow fingers of painted children
washed off under a cold tap,
and the breast of a pigeon undone like a pillow by a hawk,
the sad, abandoned look of heroic fire-hydrants
ready for action, that sigh like empty watering cans
as they pour their newly-enameled transplanted hearts out all over the street
like a wedding rehearsal that stood in for the bride
who’s burning in the walls of the groom like a flower of fire
in the lapel of a black tuxedo; so sad, so indefensibly stricken by grief
to know the paint rags are a better likeness of their sitters
than a face is, that there are tiny screams in the grass for mercy
that are only answered by a praying mantis,
and agonies of crushed centipedes that die like eyebrows
and the hides of mangy crosswalks thrown down on the street
like zebras; so unbearably sad in an avalanche of tortoise shells
excavated for their meat like raped bells with their tongues cut out,
my mouth turns into a wound,
and every word’s a galaxy of salt.

PATRICK WHITE