Saturday, February 11, 2012

AS IF BEYOND DEATH


AS IF BEYOND DEATH

As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that’s never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I’m here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
on a homing crow’s head
as the shadows assemble the wings
of a total eclipse
and a new dragon is born of the pain
that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,
a torn animal
peeled out of its own skin like an eye
to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose
that roars in the night
to blood the hungry mirror
with the thorns and talons of clarity,
to feed the wound of its existence
its existence.
And when I walk to the end of myself
through the golden rod and waist-high asters,
the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,
some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses
and others grasp themselves like a key
to a door that the whole universe can walk through,
and there are strange birds
flying from the eyes
in the rising skull of the moon
that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars
that died like trees in their solitude
and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.
And there’s a wind, intelligent, dark,
the ghost of an ancient serpent
horned without ears,
an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave
that howls like a secret it can’t tell itself,
like a root blind to its own flowers,
that wants to lead my voice away in chains,
that wants my tongue to try
like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm
to scream its agony out in the night
so that even the furthest star shudders
with the horror of its final liberation
like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.

PATRICK WHITE

ALL DAY THE SUN


ALL DAY THE SUN

All day the sun ripens the grape;
all night the wine ripens the cup,
a carrying forth into a carrying forth
of fruit into fruit, sun to grape,
grape to cup, cup to mouth,
life into death, you into me,
and everything drunk with transformation,
and everything crazed with flame and fury
as if the lips of the night were bleeding
as if there were eyes on the limbs of trees
that were nudged by the wind
to let go of their chandeliers
and the fire wanted a creek bed of its own
that could weep its way to the sea
and the wind shook the window
it wanted to be. And there are shoes
that were once the barges of men,
and roads that mistook themselves
for a journey, and hearts in the grass,
hardly distinguishable from other boundary stones
that once were blazing meteors,
gashes of demonic iron that could change the earth
in the reflex of their igneous agony,
and faces in the orchards
that admired them for their blossoming,
now, all, utterly changed, transformed,
like the reasons for water or God.
And night after night it goes on like this,
swans in the ashes of burnt guitars,
and women with hysterectomies,
and a pearl on the tongue of the eloquent oysters,
and fire hydrants coming home from war
like amputees, and the lovers
behind the auroral curtains over the hills,
clouds in an hourglass
with lifeboats of sand for mouths,
and floral yokes of bright farewells
on the spinal wharves of their longing.
The sea became waves
and the waves became snakes
and the snakes washed up on the tide
scaled the ladder into feathers
and flew. One can become two, but zero
never empowers anything to change
except to be more of itself,
that’s why it’s cool to be nothing
and enlarge without limit
the infinities in the grain
of a human heart into a silo for the multiverse.
There’s enough space
in the tiny blood-drum of a shrew
for an eternity of zeroes to shine through;
and that’s what the stars are,
nothing shining down on nothing
so that everything can exist,
me voiding myself like the silence
I feel like a child before you,
so I can hear you
making nothing of yourself to see
who I might be
in the empty mirror without you,
because there are lamps
that feed on the darkness
shadows brighter than noon,
that make the darkness darker
so we can see the moon.

PATRICK WHITE