Saturday, January 28, 2012

THE BRIEF HISTORY OF NOW


THE BRIEF HISTORY OF NOW

They cancelled the foundation stone
like quicksand, a god, or a bad cheque; finally
after thousands of years of watching her change in a window,
her lingerie spread softly on the clouds,
they seized the moon and raped her
and chained her to a bedpost by the neck. Science
denounced the sloppy dynasty of flesh and bone
and standing in the power circle of its denuded magic
disappeared in a delirium of mystical bosons
that added gravity to the argument that life
was neither divinely humorous nor infernally tragic,
but the astronomical defect of agitated genes.
No one really knows what that means,
but everyone took them at their word
and sacrificed their first-born like obsolete cell-phones
on the altars of the absurd. And in the leafless tree no birds sang
exalted by the morning, and without a warning
that it had had enough of sweeping up the mess,
the wind walked out with seeds in its hair and everywhere
the doctors listened for a pulse, a gust, a breath, a breeze,
nothing was heard but the silence of ancient vacancies
sphinxing the unmoved deserts with time.
There was nothing left to celebrate, nothing sublime
that could lift the human spirit
out of the post-diluvian slime of random selection
to commemorate its myth of origin
with a shrine or an obelisk, or, at the very least,
the good beginning of a spiritual erection.
Bread didn’t rise, and the sun in the east
was a mess of uncertainty and sad yeast.
Even the darkness lost its charisma and taste
and the night was no longer an act of grace
but a junkie turned out with the battered face of the moon.
Hard, hard, hard, the obscenity of human lovelessness
that sipped its sacrament from a coke-spoon
and stripped of its creeds, when down on its knees
to confess the infallibility of its helplessness. The worst
grew bolder than porn and celebrity children
that no one missed on the back of milk cartons
cursed the day they were born. The experts and the wise
pondered the weight of their proof like gold
and alloys of the tempered lies they once foretold,
calculated the infinite odds against the recovery of the truth,
and breaking into a sweat of febrile fears
distinguished the tenure of their correct careers
by calling in a bomb-threat from a telephone-booth in arrears.
Baghdad nosed among its ruins like a missile.
Rwanda cropped its people with machetes;
the gangrene of the Sudan reeked and ran
and everywhere that Jesus walked the Promised Land,
apocalypse was wired to a parked van
as the U.N. and the Vatican proof-read Paul’s epistle,
whistling in the dark about a veto and a thistle
thorning the heart of charity with reservations
that calmed the queasy conscience of the brave and sleazy nations
with press conferences and funeral orations
that talced the rabies of the demonically depraved.
So that in the end, with heartfelt regrets, no one was saved
from anything, not the butchers in the boardrooms
compounding third-world debts, not
the designer generals in their new-age epaulets, not
the testaments of never again that everyone forgets,
not even the babies in their prams and bassinets
waiting to have their asses wiped like bayonets.
And then the bottom fell out. Greed spoke like a nuclear tumour.
And all that was left of civilization
raised on the ethics of deprivation
from the ziggurats of ancient Sumer
to the stock-markets of New York
died like a vicious rumour.

PATRICK WHITE

LEES


LEES

What a mess I’ve made of it in the name of an earthly excellence,
my life, in the pursuit of poetry, the afterbirth
of the stars that step out of the veils of the creative mystery
into the new legends of their shining. I’m the leftover hydrogen
the placental remainder, the outcast element,
the excess lifeline of an incumbent umbilical cord
that’s eventually eaten by their radiance or blown away,
the ashes of the moth that committed its kite to the flame.
It’s a foolish host that starves at his own feast
and I’ve been generous serving up the earth and sky
and all the things that water can be in these reveries of flowing
when the intimate strangers knock at my door in the night
seeking shelter from the storm; my heart’s on the table
and the slender goblet of the moon is always full
of the blood that I’ve aged into wine. And there’s a guest bed
with clean dreams and fresh paintings on the wall, and I keep
a nightingale on in the hall for the dead and wounded,
and sometimes I’m more of a hospital than a hostel,
but no one’s ever been turned away from what they seek, ever
been denied effusive accommodation on the other side
of my indiscriminate threshold.
What horror, sorrow, joy, rage, longing, lament, love, laughter,
petition, prayer, curse or insight ever arrived,
a pilgrim out of the void, dressed in rags or robes,
beggar and braggart alike, a whisper of waterlilies
or the igneous proclamations of prophetic stone,
to find I wasn’t there to greet their expectations?
What refugee from the boneyards of the butchered nations
ever found a gate, a guard, a border, a passport in their path
or that I was less than a tent and an ocean of wheat
without a shore, when they slumped their distress at my door?
Over the last forty years I’ve embraced them all
without judgment or deceit, ushered them all in
thief, lover, assassin, and sage, to be what they must be
as they take form in the abundant dark
and vacant light of me. Like the sea
in the lowest place of all, greeting its lost rivers, come in, I’ve said,
sit, eat, here’s a stage, a page, a heart and mind and fingertips,
take my seat and borrow my eyes if you’re blind,
my mouth and my ears if your mute and deaf, my soul
if you’re horned and cleft, my body if you’re passionate;
take and make of yourself what you will
until there’s nothing left of me but scrapings off a plate,
bread crumbs in the cupboard, the emaciate ore
of a depleted mine, tailings in the creek
or a crematorium of ashes under the iron fire-dogs of a cold grate.
And I have accepted it all with the grace of a leaf in the fall
and the dignity of a star as it pales in the morning light
to voice their entrance out of the open into being through me,
this eloquence of avatars born of the living word
that upholds the singing bird on the green bough
of an ancient apple-tree. And though time alone will winnow the stars
from the tares and eerie eclipses that blight the field,
even in the falling of the gifts I sought to yield
this is a noble calling that grafts the best to the real. I’ve accepted it
and accept it gratefully now with the humility
of the chrysalis and cocoon cast off
like tiny houses of transformation redressed by the sun and moon
as the dragons and the monarchs, and the lunatic pharaohs
dreaming in their pupae of wide-eyed moths
with feathered feelers. Or sometimes I’m an empty lifeboat
as big as the world, abandoned by the survivors and revivors
after rescue, full of night, without regret, cut loose, and drifting.

PATRICK WHITE