Friday, January 27, 2012

IF THE BREAD GOT ANY HARDER


IF THE BREAD GOT ANY HARDER

If the bread got any harder I’d be buttering stone,
and it’s morning again, cooler than yesterday
that licked my face like a dog
with the mosquito-breeding breath of a reeking ditch;
and maybe there’s a cabal of stars or confidential angels,
a thirteenth house of the zodiac
that no one’s ever heard of, with a garden of black suns
overrun by weeds, blooming along the walkway
up to the sagging porch, a place
where the dispossessed gather to own each other, a hidden harmony
that manages my affairs along with the stars and the ants
and knows with the confidence of a nightwind off the sea
that I am supposed to be here, broke, aging, alone,
dreading the landlord at the door like the beginning
of another ice-age, cataract, polar cap,
the shifting of a continental plate
as I wait like a fault in apprehension
of the final jolt that will tear me down.
And all of this in the name of poetry in a world
that holds the tail of the new moon like an old black bull in one hand
and guided aimlessly over the unfurrowed fields
sows microchips and seedless oats, breeds featherless chickens
and patents animals and diseases, pierced by the swords
of seven mad lucidities with no known antidotes.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not crying. I’m not pleading for anything.
I’ve got the pride of a pearl in a scabby oyster about me,
the indefensible dignity of a pyramid built on quicksand,
the air of an exiled king of shadows
living in patrician poverty to uphold me in my solitude,
and this ruinous occupation of deriving an earthly excellence
out of my sinking like a mine, always deeper, in search of the ores
that glow in the night like marrow in the bones of buried constellations:
that’s enough of a labour to keep me dancing in my ashes,
enough of a continuity to believe I might still be a road.
I do it for the crazy, vicious, ignorant, greedy humans
whose lives are only a ribbon of blood in the water
that boils them into a feeding frenzy, cannibals on crack,
tearing themselves and the world apart because
even they sense, wincing into solutions like straitjackets,
they’re a prelude to disaster. And I sing for the rare orchids
that are never seen, the wild asters at the edge of the garbage dump,
the green flame of the blade of grass,
hotter than acetylene, that burns with life through the concrete
until it parts like the Red Sea for an outlawed prophet of one.
There will always be people
who know how to break their hearts like bread
and I write to be worthy of them, to remember them
the way the genes recall, however faintly,
the genius of their last selection, the first time a flower had sex,
and everyone’s eyes have been the colour
of stars and olives, earth, sky and leaves ever since.
There is something in me that grieves like a fire
for the passing of everything, that bleeds like a rose
on the blade of the moon for everything
that is cut down in its path without fury or malice,
and the children broken like windows
that were never installed in the house, and the poor,
and those, mute and silent, but for the look in their eyes,
their voices shattered bird cages plundered
by the cunning and savagery of ideological fangs;
the lifeboat of my heart swells like an ark
caulked and pitched by thick nights of sorrow
when I consider these swept from the table like crumbs
and open my mouth like the borders of an outraged country
to scream undiplomatic obscenities
at their virulent persecutors frothing like breakers of rabies.
Even drowning in a snake-pit of oilslicks,
I want to throw the world a strong rope
like the umbilical cord of another planet
braving the ferocity of the storm, a lighthouse, to haul it ashore,
or lift it like a fly from a toilet-bowl.
And if you were to ask me why,
when I can’t even save myself, I’d have to say
there’s a cruel folly in the wisdom of the word once,
the sum of all knowledge, all compassion,
a fountain and a tree of blood beyond reason
that drives me to cherish even
the slightest crack in the cup by which life leaks out
as if it were a wound of my own. Born a lost cause,
how could I not squander myself
on the beauty and truth and suffering of others
who are not? Poetry looks at the stars, at the world
through the eyes of a blind messiah
led out of the desert sun by a childless eclipse,
and every saint owes his salvation to a sinner somewhere.
Invited to the feast of life,
whether above or below the salt,
who doesn’t offer themselves,
their blood, their heart, their mind
like swaddled bread and wine
or a grateful guitar to the host at the door?
Who, so devoid of grace, they wouldn’t honour the gate
they came and went by, every footstep
an exit and an entrance to themselves? And something deeper,
I don’t know what it is, that draws me down into it like a woman,
a curvature of space that yearns to be filled
with the honey and sugars of bees and apples
that have ripened their gold and silver dreams
in the light of the sun, the moon, the stars
and taste of the earth and the rain, and the shadows
of birds and butterflies, of sheltering leaves;
of pilgrim orchards that passed their way
only a moment ago as long as the lifespan of water
with festal cities of love and peace on their mind.
When I lie down beside her to make love
it’s like returning to an ancient, native language
that’s been forgotten in the literalism of the day,
an elemental tongue that everyone once spoke
spontaneously enthralled by the eloquent mystery of her beauty,
urgently moved to praise the world into being again and again
like the falling of light and rain
on the softening eyelids of seed-words
that have lain dormant in their visions for years
in the scorched gardens of a volcanic brain
that doesn’t know what any of it means
when every whisper and kiss
is an embossed grammar of blackberry dreams
and the decrescent wake of her nails on my back,
a way of ploughing the moon with a ship,
an analeptic shudder of delphic bridges off the bow.
Never two flowers the same in her garden,
and even the thorns of her black roses,
an enigma of panthers, I never know
what germinates like oracles in her caves;
but more absolving than the youngest of dawns,
I have always believed because
I can taste her sacred mountains in my blood,
that there is in the deltas of the language that she seeks,
the alluvial silk and gold of a way of seeing
that helps us recall ourselves as we were and are,
prophecy and recollection, an ancient future
like the light of a healing star,
the face we wore like an orchard
in the dreamtime of learning to be,
something crucial and redemptive
about our essential human nature
that is only forgotten,
like the ability to play, terminally.
Of all the freedoms I have ever endorsed
she is the one I live; chicken wieners
and beans in tomato sauce, night after night, let it be
this bedlam of money and thin-skinned heels,
the swarming humiliations that orbit my distracted skull
like deerflies and invigilating satellites,
the dark thoughts that buff the wine with bleach
and boil my morning doves in battery acid
to turn their ashen quills into asps and arrows.
What mountain ever rose higher
than its valley was deep, what victory
if there was never a chance of defeat, and if
in the eyes of men crazed with forgetting themselves
they think they recognize in me some kind of bad joke,
my pillow stuffed with nettles, let it be;
because even in the lipstick on the cigarette-butt
I pick up out of the gutter
I can be a wild poppy in a field of August wheat.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THERE'S A BITTERNESS IN THE LIGHT


AND THERE’S A BITTERNESS IN THE LIGHT

And there’s a bitterness in the light that fails me this morning
like a new nail bowing to the hand it could not penetrate,
the enforced humility of tempered steel
hissing in my blood like an iron serpent, the old folio
of an undiscovered sorrow
folding the edge of a secret sword day after day
into an implacable edge so exquisitely refined and lethal
even the slightest eyelid of the cherry tree is cleft
and even space is bleeding, the sky sheered
on the electric keeness of its honed horizon. Maybe
the only mercy is in a quick kill, the jugular slashed
and the startled elixirs of life released like poppies and roses
to find their own way home among the weary refugees,
their lives slumped like corpses and pillars of smoke
across the yokes of their hill-born shoulders,
and maybe there are underground shadows somewhere,
a habit of haggard roots holding out like fire
against the odds of ever recovering my heart
like a feather in an oilslick from the dark offices of its toxic occupiers,
the long stairwells down to its private deflation,
the lachrymose rubber of a punctured tire,
the parachutes of the daylilies wattled like soggy trumpets.
And I want to cry, I’m nudged to tears
by the wet noses of the gathering wolves,
the sympathetic carbons who sense my desolation as their own
in a ruined wilderness of snarling rosaries
cutting to the quick of their prayers like chainsaws;
but no grief rises from her bath, or virginity renewed
that isn’t a figure of tar, salt, wax, glass, vinegar and acid,
her berries boiled in the poison of red army ants,
and a blindfold of nettles across her eyes, and every word
that comes from her mouth, a mass grave
of contagious swans wintering under an ode of lime
to contain the infection, the caustic snowfall of a blithe extinction.
And I want to cry for the unknown beauty of a ravaged queen,
violet monsoons of tropical tears as long as anacondas,
tears from wells that have been boarded up for years
behind deserted farmhouses
left like a last assurance of return
to a nervous levy of family graves; old canning jars
encrusted with flies and bees; I want to cry
for afflictions that have gnawed
at the decaying orbits of the moon for eras of untold longing,
sit down on the ground, my face in the coffin of my hands
and weep the violent cocoon of the grey storm away
that cauterizes my wings with blisters of mutant lightning
that burn like salt in the shadow of a whip
thrashing over old burial grounds,
a severed powerline in an epileptic fit, my tongue
seized and swallowed like the struggling toad in my throat
that kicks like a baby against the walls of its womb.
I need time, I need space, I need money, light and liars
with morning hands and ample breasts, with thighs
that open like gates at the sound of my voice,
and the lips of enraptured cherries running down my chest,
and norms of oblivion to refute my wanderlust;
and I want somebody to take the straightrazor
out of the hands of the psychotic clock that keeps
nicking and and slashing its way around the sun;
I need somebody to convince me my life
is not a corruption of the original text I was bound to live,
that I’m not smouldering with the weeds
in a heap of rotten planks
stripped from the vertebrae of genetically dangerous stairs;
that my life and my love and my work
are not the smashed empties of last night’s ecstasy
fallen from their nests in the morning
disgusted with their inability to fly,
wingless in a sickening syrup of yellow eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

COSMOLOGIST WITH TWEEZERS


COSMOLOGIST WITH TWEEZERS

Palace after palace of blood I feed my idiot heart
to the fish and the cannibal stars
from a barge of funeral swans sullen as books.
I told myself not to look for this death when I dropped it
the day I was born, to leave it lie in the violent grass,
a key to a door that doesn’t exist yet,
an insect crushed between the pages of the sky
that reads like the failing eyes of an ancient astronomer
compiling an expanded preface
to an encyclopedic suicide note. O I can say anything
when the mirror is having an affair
with the moon’s oceanic face.
I can put lipstick on the corpse of a rose
and die for the whole cemetery like a callous messiah
sick of being resurrected at the take-out window.
My love forsaken, a beggar reaching into a serpent’s nest
for an egg that longs to be turned
like the handle to a door
that might be a way out, I consult
the crazy wisdom of the crows,
and a sage of the black night
to find my way back to a grave
that has not forgotten the taste of the dream
that was blood and wine and light.
This is a shabby afterlife, an unworthy war of mistakes,
where the orchids are raped on their wedding nights
and a peace treaty is chalk on the sidewalk
around a murdered mailman.
It would be a lie to say I wasn’t wounded,
it would be a falsehood to say I was.
This pain is the blundering apprentice of a mystic knife.
This agony is stupid and futile and vain, this sorrow
a brothel of homesick nuns.
I give my tears the address
of a man I know in Boston, a bibliophile
who might take them in as a first edition
of a bride who was published posthumously.
I give my heart like a fire-alarm to two women
waiting by the bus.
My skull begs for campaign funds
to run as an alternative planet
to the one I’m walking on,
but the terrorist behind the door
with his redressals and reforms, his ancient future
strapped to his waist like a broken promise
has already ruined my vote
by killing off the candidate.
I confess to a puppet government
with the decrescent sickle of the moon at my jugular vein
that I have always been, even in eclipse,
an avid fan of significant absurdities.
They accuse me of consorting with swans
and I give up smoking
in front of a firing squad.
The sun comes up like an afterthought, an iron rose
or a bullet hole through the troubled forehead of dawn.
Is there no end to the wonders of God?
cries a highschool prophet on a diving board
while his seeing-eye dog runs off
with a shoeful of massacred dice.
And this is the meaning of life,
and this is the meaning of life,
chants the scorned heart
pulling stitches out of a scar,
a cosmologist with tweezers
who bleeds to death
every time he opens his mouth to heal.

PATRICK WHITE

WHETHER I LANGUISH HERE


WHETHER I LANGUISH HERE

Whether I languish here in the cold tin rain, everything
black, green, and grey, and the violet crocus
adjusting its bruised crown to the fragile light,
and the willow already an accomplished dancer,
and the sad brooms of the pine
that sweep the stairs of the wind
heavier than ever in their helpless plight, or
tired of the slow exorcism of old Septembers
that still shine blue and gold
in the back of the family bible where people
come and go like migrant doors, I accept myself
like a heresy of rogue stars
and look for a deeper night within
for the honey and wine of the radiant wonder
that walks like a woman in the guise
of a silver herb through the valley of the wound
that life can be when the geese return from the dead,
I am the lament of a pointless mystery,
an intimate namelessness, an unknown agony
that consumes me like an exile, a severance
and a longing of which I am not worthy
even now among the leaves and birds, all
these manic, animated nations of the spring.
Is it myself I mourn,
some diamond fiction of the mind
that refuses to thaw in a season of flowing,
or have I acknowledged, without knowing,
there never was anyone real to regret,
no one to let down, no one to raise up
and nothing ever missing, no lack
of what I needed to be to live, no
second person to assess the outcome,
and all the coming and the going,
the exits and entrances, transits and transformations,
all the urgencies and emergency graves
were the immaterial props
of a dream, of a life, that was never mine
and isn’t me. Even when I hold
the invisible ink of the wind
like a page of the sky up to the light,
I cannot read my name, my death or birth
perched like a bird
in the concealing foliage of revelation. It seems
in the mystic ore of the oyster
I am not a pearl or a planet
or even a grain of sand
to found a universe upon,
not even the slightest of these agitations
robed in the nacreous dawn of a new beginning.
How many years, how many days and ways
have I groaned like an old wheel
in this river of grief
trying to grind a harvest into bread,
sorting the weeds from the wheat
to allay the chronic torrent
of this bridal hunger on my death-bed?
What faceless love is this
that wakes me with a kiss again and again
in every moment, the lips of the rain,
to squander myself on nothing
in the shrines and asylums of my eloquent pain,
the aging conviction
of a fetal contradiction
trying to celebrate the unattainable
in the resurgent fountains and fictions
of the unexplainable? And what a fool is here
to deride the gestures of his own devotion,
laying his life on the altars of the years
to make a gift of a gift
that isn’t his to give, stealing the wave
to pay tribute to the ocean, easing the flame
from the purse of the fire
to spend on the blaze? 
What could possibly be ours to give
when the only acceptable sacrifice
in the elusive eyes of magnanimous life
is to live?

PATRICK WHITE