Thursday, February 9, 2012

SNOW ON THE EYELIDS OF THE PINE CONES


SNOW ON THE EYELIDS OF THE PINE-CONES

Snow on the eyelids of the pine-cones.
Zen pagodas, meditating. Snow
on the withered stars of the wild rose hips
attaining the unattainable like Buddha
enlightened by what’s become of Venus in the dawn.
Beauty in the truth of abject desolation.
There’s a war going on somewhere
to judge from the number of amputations
the fingers, legs, arms, toes, hands,
the limbs of the dead trees
lying all over the ground as if the woods
were the collapsed tent
of an army field hospital in the Civil War.
The Fort Delaware Death Pen
if I were to take a wild guess,
or maybe Andersonville, who knows,
but I feel I’m walking more like a warden
doing his rounds through the woods at night
than a visitor among these who lie here
in this graveyard of wounded swans
glazed and broken like the handles
of old china shop teacups
butting their empty skulls
against the horns of a bull.
Not like mine. Pure crystal
from glassblowers in medieval Germany.
At least these get to thaw.
And you can see in the withered eyelids
of the leaves whose chlorophyll vision
was once poetically green,
now laced with strychnine and arsenic
when they burned like solar flares in the fall,
and the curtains caught fire
like the veils of an open window
with no one’s face in it
to reveal the mystery of who she is
behind the northern lights,
the works of an entire lifetime
clacking like abandoned fortune-cookies,
the hollow carapaces of crabs across
the silver pates of the blunted snowdrifts
ground down like the Appalachian Mountains,
older than the Rockies, worn down
like molars and glaciers
grinding their teeth in their sleep
but infinitely more habitable
than the nose-bleeding heights of renown.
And yet the leaves are not wasted.
The word was spoken.
The fortune foretold
of better things to come
like pears and apples and plums.
The slow autumn dawns of poems
ripened by rising stars and falling flowers.
Snow on the eyelids of the pine-cones.

PATRICK WHITE  

AUTUMN SWINGS ITS BELL


AUTUMN SWINGS ITS BELL

Autumn swings its bell like an eyelid over my heart
and in the penumbral umbrellas that bloom 
in a garden of eclipses and sundials,
I discuss you with an enlightened ghost
and an ignorant shadow
that have learned to see star to star
in this echoless abyss of silence and solitude.
Within, where the winds scrawl
their spray bombs on the wall,
delighted with their literary delinquency,
I realize what’s beginning to look like
the mouthless howl of an ancient agony,
the collapsed bridge
of that which was separated
from the moon’s reflection,
an ache deep in the ores of the earth
before it learned to speak of trees and rivers,
before its longing invested the dead branch
with a fugue of nightbirds
trying to write themselves like a dream
into the black candle of the darkness
with a feather of fire.
My heart is hollow, and empty,
a drunk in an oildrum,
and love seems nothing more
than a harvest of eyelashes
and all my works are seeds on the moon.
A kite crash lands in the powerlines.
A phoenix rises from its dearth of ashes.
I want to go deeper into myself,
I don’t want to hover like smoke
over my sidereal cremations,
or atomize the particulars
of how time bends like the arms
of my galactic alarm clocks,
or if I deserve to be this lonely,
a lighthouse that went on shining underwater
after the last flood carried me out to sea.
You make things happen in me,
thinking of you, your lapidary tides,
blue species of emotion
are born, evolve, and die
for reasons unknown
in the space between two thoughts;
and there are crazy black spiders in the wine
that tempt me to swallow them
to know how things are connected,
and always an electric dawn
to dazzle the event with black holes
and blind, astronomical photographers.
I feel the tenderness of time and distance from you,
fountains that no one drinks from,
and space all the jewels and palaces of water
that no one owns or lives in
because they are reserved for your progress alone
through these wounded labyrinths of me
following the stars I’ve laced
in the wake of living your way free of the maze
that will prove to be
the foundation of another kind of temple,
the cornerstone of a vastly more intimate space
than the eclipse that encloses you now
in the bleeding flames of an endangered poppy.
I wish I were wise, I wish
I were young and becoming,
I wish I could engender a planet
out of this cosmic debris
I spew like a supernova across the night,
the exhalation of my spirit from the lamp I go by,
the arraying of the world in every breath.
I wish I were good and always cooling
on a farmhouse windowsill;
I wish I was not so tormented
by the torn skies that hang from the broken window
I hurled my heart through like a stone with a message.
I wish my enlightenment
didn’t knock on every door of delusion
hoping to find no one home.
I place the cool kiss of a nocturnal snail on your skin,
and I look at the words and I wonder
if you’ll wake with a silver smear on your breast
like the path of the moon on water
and know it was me
or feel the tremor of a forbidden ecstasy in your sleep
I burn a church to the ground like a ram
to honour the altar of your talent,
the passion, pulse, and fire-voice of your poetry
and the midnight shadows of your blue rose
shedding its eyelids like petals, skin and sky.
My words are metal birds, rocks
wishing for wings
so that this avalanche of mountain thunder
might once take flight in the dusk
toward the valley where you wander like a stream
turning over lost echoes
like the links of a chain with a key,
zeroes looping arms with the past
to bind one moment of the infinite
to the wonder of a passion that lasts.
My eyes are heavier
for having seen the light,
saturated with everything they’ve witnessed,
honey, ink, and blood,
and every tear is a sea closer to the moon,
and every lyrical efflorescence of the dream
is punctured by thorns,
and even the lies of the most subtle mirrors
have grown obvious
as the beast within is saddened
by its cultivated charm,
knowing what hour it is.
Understand me well
in this rogue season of awareness;
where lightning freezes in the flower-realms
and breaks like branches of ice,
where even black is too garish for clarity,
and sometimes even the sea
loses its nerve,
gaping into its own depths,
an asylum of lightless shapeshifters
for a likeness of itself
that isn’t perfectly preserved,
the locket-heart of the last fish on the moon,
a Martian meteor in Antarctica,
this gravel walk of asteroids
through the gates and the gardens
of the whole planet I am in every piece,
though I do not glow like fool’s gold
in the pan of the night,
and my throne has crumbled like hard bread,
and love seems to die at the first affirmation
like a bird against a late night windowpane,
this goblet of darkness
that stains the lips with an indelible silence;
though I have been deconstructed
by the suspicious sphericity
of my most cherished symmetries,
toppled like a tower of blood and water,
a shattered river
condemned to the beginning of spring,
a continent sunk in the depths of the mirror
barring this handful of nuggets and islands,
I am still immutable diamond
that learned its flowing from the stars,
and what I write to you
is not a thread of light
that holds the kite of your heart
up to the lightning like a key
to prove that your blood is a good conductor,
not the severed fishing line necklace of eyes
scattered like beads and dice
across the usual geometries
and impoverished granaries of the floor,
not the afterbirth of a morphological wine
that left you burnt orchards
as the fruits of the fire that promised
a feast of pears and cherries,
not the disembodied jewels of a ghost
weeping in the doorway of its skull in the night,
but the threshold and theme,
though for the moment you disdain the stairwells
in the hovels and mansions of love,
embittered by the lonely rose of space and matter
that pours the shining out the backdoor
like the lees of harvest stars
in the corner of the eye of an irisless bell
waking you up mutely
from a dream of falling in a morgue,
but the threshold and theme,
the story-line, the mythogem and motif,
the oceanic pulse and spume
of sidereal ferocities and urgent follies
robed like the king of shells
in the bruised purple of symbols
I take like the pulse of a lightning-rod
rooted like blood in me
to know as constantly as space
that I draw my life from you
like a shadow in a garden of blue fire
that courses through the dried creek beds
of these hourglass deserts
like the mystic tents
of a caravan of rain on the moon.
Wells, goblets, bells, or roses,
or thorns gnawing through chains and lifelines
to let the heart drift
like an empty boat from its moorings,
whatever season you assume
like the changing wardrobes
and unassailable affinities of a life
you must improvise as you go along,
I will always be with you
like shadows and leaves
and footprints and stars,
as I am now your next breath
whatever the scarves of fire
that grace your ghost-dance
with the black ribbons of an abysmal freedom
that feels like the halls of an abandoned prison.
I will liberate the key
like a hanged man
from the noose that adorns your neck,
and raise myself like a bell to your lips
and have you drink
the light and stars and flowers again
from the urn, the crown,
the hive of the heart
that sends its eyes out into a far field like bees
on the perfume trail of a summer constellation
to sweeten the light around you
with honey that burns for an emergent queen to find it.

PATRICK WHITE

HE KEPT SAYING TO HIMSELF


HE KEPT SAYING TO HIMSELF

He kept saying to himself
it’s not that hard to know the truth.
The truth is what you see
when there’s no one else there
to witness you witnessing it.
When your nakedness lets you be you
without worrying too much
about who that is.
He kept saying to himself
the truth is the infinite elaboration
of an archetypal fractal.
Keep it simple and austere.
The truth is a subatomic shapeshifter.
When you look at it it acts like a particle.
Turn away and it’s a wavelength beyond comprehension.
The swords of the cannoneer cattails
banged on him like a shield in passing
as he covered his eyes
to bull his way through the underbrush
heaving his mud-caked legs
over the hurtles of the fallen birches.
What animal ever moved
with as much clamour and damage as this
as it nosed it way along the soft lake shore at dusk?
He kept saying to himself
since when has the silence
ever needed anyone to speak up on its behalf?
What idiot spreads a starmap out on a table
to show space where it’s located
or tell time what hour it is
though neither of them have asked?
He kept saying to himself
like a swamp that reeks of enlightenment
now watch where you step
as he monkeyed himself up
a jawbone of grey rocks
to a thin pate of yellow grass
that looked as if someone
had bleached their hair too much.
He kept saying to himself
as he lay upon his side on the ground
and watched the wavelets on the lake making jewellery
and spotted the two great blue herons
on the far shore
standing like gatekeepers
among the dishevelled palisade
of dead trees with its stakes all askew
like an abandoned Iroquois village
that was content to forget what it knew of pain in silence;
he kept saying to himself
because his thoughts were as inter-reflective
as sky and water
nothing needs to be here
none of this
not the herons the lake or me
and yet here we are large as life
each facilitating the other’s interdependent origination
whether we like it understand it embrace it or not
everyone’s the matrix of everyone else.
The waters of life have made a waterclock of the womb
and the day we stop being born
is just a short bridge of water away
from the next bucket of being
that pulls us like a rabbit
out of the top hat of a wishing well.
His eyes tweaked by the occasional glimpse
of the silver eyelash of a star
in the blue-green sheen of the peacock air
breaking through the Persian silks of the sky
as the sun goes down with Venus in its wake
he kept saying to himself
it’s all picture-music without meaning
you can hear in your blood
with your eyes
at your fingertips
on the nape of your neck
like the breath of a friend
or the breathless scent of an enemy
who’s finally caught up with you
like loveletters and death threats from the past
that forgot what they were going to say
when they were given a chance to speak.
He kept saying to himself
as he watched the aerial ballet of swallows and bats
swooping down low over the water
through the starclusters of frenzied gnats in ecstasy
over their fifteen minutes of fame in the after light of the sun
bleeding out on the horizon
what could it add to their bliss
if everyone of them were to have a star named after them?
He lingered in the ruthless beauty
of the spontaneous inconsequence of all this
and felt even less employed than they
as a witness who wasn’t called upon
to provide an alibi
for his awareness of the creative liberties
and impersonal risks life takes with itself
like an isolated imagination
with no more motive or purpose
than the wind when it plays
with the waves and the leaves
and taunts the the autumn willows
to drop their veils
like rotten curtains
blowing ghosts out the windows
of an abandoned one room schoolhouse.
Nothing to learn.
Nothing to teach.
Nothing to conceal or reveal.
No paradigms of spontaneity
out of reach of the mind
that grasps at them
like air and light and water
he kept saying to himself
as he felt the darkness
alert his eyes to a deeper vigilance
opportunistically alive in the woods
watching the anomaly of his presence here
from deep within
like a snapping turtle looking up at waterbirds
like a pair of wire-cutters
sticking out of a tool box
at a no trespassing sign in peril
of taking its purple passage too literally
to heed its own warning to drop everything
and take to the air
before it’s pulled down under
like Cygnus into the starmud of the cosmic Id.
Here self-reflection comes to die
like a third eye in a graveyard of mirrors
that can no longer recognize their own seeing
in whatever appears before them
as the unlikely similitude of a sentient being.
He kept telling himself
you can’t raise a phoenix out of a sumac
when its flightfeathers are falling all around you
like Icarus out of the sun
and expect to find your way out of here
by asking a fire pit of ashes and smoke
how far to the next manger
with a star overhead
before it gets too dark to see where you’re going.
He rose to his feet
as if they had somewhere else to go
and followed a deer path up
through a thicket of excruciating hawthorn
that raked his skin like the needles of old record players
screeching across all 78 rpms of the celestial spheres
trying to torture the truth out of him
like petty inquisitors who had all the right answers
to a man who had forfeited his soul
for the courage to ask all the wrong questions
as he kept saying to himself
as if he were standing in front of a mirror
and not by the shore of a lake
if you take the dark glass away from your eye
everything will become clear as night.
If you take the dark glass away from your eye
everything will become clear as night.
He saw the Summer Triangle capsizing in the west
and the Pleiades like a profusion of insights
at the tail end of Perseus
holding the Medusa’s severed head
up to the mobs of enlightened ghouls
gawking in in a bliss of bloodlust
to discover that the light
was no less heartless than the dark
when it comes to blooding its abstractions.
He walked through constellations of spiderwebs
the sun had moved out of
like a jewel out of the house of a dreamcatcher
so far beyond repair
it forgot timing was as important as content
and expired like an out of date calendar
with nothing left to celebrate.
And he kept saying to himself
nothing lasts forever
not even time
and there are holes in the nets
the Circlet of the Western Fish could swim through
like hanged men who fell through a noose
toward paradise
as easily as threading their blood
through the eye of a needle.
No more rites of passage.
No more luminous renewals.
No more transits of nadir and zenith
in chains forged from unlucky horseshoes
or the triumphal wreaths of olive emperors.
The feast of life a mere table of contents
after a long prelude of taboos
that weren’t worth the menus they were written on
once the real dragons were sedated in zoos.
The trespassers not up to their own temptations
and even the great desecrators and idol slayers
indifferent to their salvation through sin
just so many snakes sewn into a bag
and drowned in the river with Rasputin.
And rarer still that atrocity
that can trouble a child’s dreams
who lullabies a voodoo doll to sleep in her arms at night
because today’s passive victim
is tomorrow’s active participant.
He heard the chronic lapping of bare-footed waves
stubbing their toes on the rocks below
when they tried to walk across the lake without a lifeboat
and went down with all hands aboard
and he kept saying to himself
when the wind dies down
only horses and slaves are drowned in the doldrums
and the rest are left to endure their grim continuance
watching their sails wither like waterlilies at anchor
moored to the docks of an empty-handed port
like a return voyage that never left home.
And he kept on saying to himself
be a good explorer and mount
a northwest expedition through death.
Grind your way out of here if you must
like the visionary glacier that once
gouged out the eye-sockets of these lakes
as if they were milling starwheat on stone.
And let the tears you’ve shed
to absolve yourself of yourself
he kept on saying to himself
over the course of a lifetime thaw and gather here
so that the crow the beaver the muskrat
the shrew the mole the bear the deer the bush wolf
the pike the trout and the small-mouthed bass
can drink from their own reflections
as they appear and disappear in your eyes.
And let the Algonquian women beat the wild rice
into their laps and the prows of their birch bark canoes
under a full moon that buffs their stealth with laughter
ride low in the water with the bounty of life.
As he pulled his foot out of the cleft of a root
and regained his balance
by putting all his weight on the other
like a heron when it’s spear fishing on the moon
he kept on saying to himself
you don’t have to go as far as the stars
to discover the origin of everything
when fireflies are a lot closer to home
and their light is infinitely more intimate.
A fish jumps at the stars
as he makes a path of least resistance
through the junipers and basswood trees
and the lake dilates with ripples
like a mind at peace with itself.
Dark energy accelerates his eyes
at the same velocity as the expanding universe
and looking into the starless voids ahead
he keeps saying to himself
one more insight one more insight
one insight more
like Venus in the dawn
and everything will break into light
like gold pouring out of dark ore
like life sprouting out of a dead stump
like a nightbird with a wounded song
falling like a feather of feeling
out of the immensities it encompasses
within its wingspan
as if that alone were enough
to tip the scales of life and death in its favour.
He steps into a clearing like a red-tailed hawk
into the eye of a storm
where some unknown local
had planted a secret garden years ago
that had gone on growing without them
far off the gravel road where the cars
growled by like bears
and no one could see it
and he keeps on saying to himself
if I’m not meant to be here
even in this happenstantial kind of way
for whom did these flowers bloom
and these rocks flint knapped from the Canadian Shield
be gathered here like Stonehenge
so that time could sacrifice its virginity
to the spring equinox
and the last of the wild geese high overhead
returning the souls of the dead
like water to its watershed
and the swallows and Monarch butterflies
who paused here to add their inflections to the palette
know what hour it is?
A billion pine needles
from as many lost compasses and clocks
softens the ground he walks on
and pungently greens the air
with the fragrance of thick dolorous tears
running down the bark of old love affairs
that never stopped bleeding out.
And there the New England asters
who batted their violet eyelashes
at the stars all summer long
to catch their attention
hags of the last frost that killed them
like the cold shoulder of a disinterested universe.
And he keeps saying to himself
like a mantra under the duff of his heart
it doesn’t matter whose ghost
was meant to be summoned to this stranger’s garden
like the memory of some cherished intimacy
long past the point of no return
slipped under the door
that’s hinged like the earth is to the sun
to our exits and entrances
like a parting note of farewell
as profoundly poignant as autumn in passing;
all that matters is that someone anyone
however lost or overwhelmed by despair
however helpless or alone
however far from the nearest fire
makes their way through the dark
to a moonlit clearing in the woods
just to sit by a secret garden of their own
and watching their breath
like a wraith on the cold night air
answer it like a prayer
that went off into the unknown
like a thread of smoke from a dying candle
without appealing to the stars for anything.
Just to sit there without saying anything
no razor to your wrist
no complaint
no prophet in your belly
no spiritual lost and founds
looking for the lost innocence
of their missing children
no protest
no surrender
no serpent fire
burning up the ladders of your spine
until you’re frantic with the crazy wisdom
of realizing how much you can’t
and you’re looking for water on the moon
to quench your fever for life
no rejections or rendezvous
with fire-sprites or witchy manitous
no reason to be here
no reason you’re not
the silence not expecting a response
and the sound of life on the nightshift
while everyone else sleeps
and only a solitary watchman
to shine the occasional light
through the windows of their dreams
where what is and what appears to be
is reflected on both sides of the same translucency.
No muse to inspire an elegy to an unknown human
as if the earth itself weren’t enough of a headstone
to lay your head down upon
and listen to the deep underground voices of the dead
rooted in a garden that outgrew its sorrows
like the blood of a wild rose
left untempted in the wilderness
transcends its thorns with the beauty of a wound
that only a human exalted
by the spearhead of the same event
that humbles him to death
could suffer and celebrate in the same breath.
No mixed passions of starmud
that slip like Indian paintbrush and chicory
out of the palms of our hands
when the painter falls asleep
and the landscape finishes itself.
Just this small gesture of a shrine
this tiny enclosure of the heart
to some foregone human divinity
that once made it shine
like enamel buttercups
and scarlet columbine
tinkling in the spring rain
like wind chimes above the moss.
The ululations of a delinquent loon
couldn’t make the night feel
any more lonely than it already was
as he kept saying to himself
real not real
life is art.
Art is life.
The reality of delusion is art.
The delusion of reality is life.
There are toys in the wrack
of the worst catastrophes of life
and serial killers in the toy boxes of art.
You make it up like trout lilies and loosestrife
as you flow along with your own mindstream
like a leaf on the theme of your heart
whether you’re falling
into billions of individual degrees of separation
and the strong rope you were trying to climb up to heaven
frays on the edge of the world
into a million weak threads
of monadic drops of lonely water
working out the lyrics to go with the music
like wild irises in a secret garden that’s gone to seed.
Or you’re weeping like a chandelier
whose candles have gone out in a palace of light.
Or you’re the free-spirited genius of rain
the dispirited wizard of a starless night
or the nymph phase of a waterlily on the moon that died young
as the man said of the things
he just couldn’t keep to himself.
The mind is an artist.
Able to paint the worlds.
As someone here once saw something
that inspired them to paint
this prolifically sad human heartscape
like a bouquet of local wildflowers
and when they were done
and their eyes had gone with the light
from their vision of life
where a black sun always shines at midnight
and sets at dawn
left this palette of complementary emotions
like the fire pit of a phoenix
that’s flown south for the winter
with the spirit of the autumn leaves
that leaves us alone in a place like this
to add a few touches of our own.
Less blue in our longing for death.
More moon in the auras of life
and over there where
the ruby-throated hummingbirds
added their highlights like whole notes
to the picture-music of the wild grapevines
a deeper more loving delirium of stars
like the royal jewels of the underworld
inspired by the darkest muses
that ever shone a light
into the depths of the night in the eyes
of this most human of mysteries
burning in the crowns of the disrobed trees.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT I WANTED TO SHOW YOU


WHAT I WANTED TO SHOW YOU

What I wanted to show you,
you will not see.
What I wanted to give you,
you will not receive.
The wind may mourn your passing
like an abandoned dog
and the leaves of the silver Russian olive
may be baffled into silver
by the way you left the gate open
to a bigger, colder, darker world than it was
before you told me you loved me
like an arsonist in a wheat field,
a comet above the willow tree
that wept its way into autumn.
Go. I lay no claims or obligations
at your feet anymore than I would
try to smudge space
with the black rose of the night
that tastes of old eclipses in my blood.
You say ebulliently
you want to know passionately
the depths of love,
but like the fools before you
who blundered into the fire,
you’re only witching for volcanoes
with the tongue of a snake.
As well look for fishroads
under the dead seas of the moon
as follow the path you’re on.
And your beauty is no excuse,
your body no sanctuary,
your blackberry heart
no pilgrim to anywhere
you can’t stand in the light
trying on shadows like lingerie
in the mirror of the delusions
you’ve clarified like the skin of a bubble
that has smeared the reflection of the world so long
you think you’re a planet with trees.
You’re a spiritual junkie
jonesing for suffusions of the inconceivable
to animate the dust and galaxies
you have no life or love to breathe into
other than that little wind
you carry around in a bottle
in case you’re ever stranded
without an emergency exit
from all the lies you tell in paradise.
You suffer the mythically inflated gigantism
of your own unbearable insignificance,
and abase yourself prophetically
before the mountain of your own lostness,
hoping for a map
of your wandering in stone
that would authorize your confusion
as holier than the rest.
Lonely for converts,
you tell me I’m sure of heaven.
Just as lonely I reply
if someone like me
were to show up in heaven,
it couldn’t be much of place to aspire to
and how could the blessed
not feel cheated?
But you don’t get it;
you really don’t understand
that life isn’t an auditon of angels
and the black cartoon
you’ve made of yourself
to win a feather
isn’t a prelude
to the main feature
when the lights go out
and the ushers
who conducted the dead to their seats
evaporate in the aisles
and you upstage the movie
with your nakedness
as if God couldn’t see
the snake-flute of your body
dancing with serpents in the dark.
Lust alone would have been enough
to keep us together
but waking from your dream
of forbidden undertows,
washed ashore again
on your oracular island,
you kept trying to weld the right light
to the wrong shadow,
and eventually
even the most exotic futility grows boring.
You dipped the stone-flaked arrowhead
of your aboriginal heart
in the toxic fires of your own undoing
and pointing it at mine
tried to deceive yourself into a direction.
And now you want,
now you long,
now you want to come back
and immerse yourself in the life
you once stepped over
like a drunk asleep on the sidewalk.
You’ve suffered and grown,
you’ve wept and derived humility
from irreparable loss;
you’ve trembled before
the first, terrible intimations of the vastness
of the sky in your heart
like the virgin flight of a lost bird,
and you want to be given another chance,
to surrender yourself at the gate
you once walked through backwards
so enamoured were you of your shadow.
And you promise the river your tears,
the moon your scars, me
the rarest of your orchids in the night.
But when I ask you
what the drunk was dreaming
you still look blankly around the room
as if everything in existence
were merely the baffled clue to your beauty
and the answer
something black and revealing that clings.
You still can’t imagine
how easy it is
to say no to you.

PATRICK WHITE