Thursday, February 16, 2012

O MY MOTHER, O MY FATHER


O MY MOTHER, O MY FATHER

O my mother, O my father,
I stand at this Y in the road,
the hybrid son of an angel and a demon,
two halves of the same chromosome
splitting like the left side of my brain
as a squad car took, you, my father, to jail,
and you, my mother, my right half,
were rushed in an ambulance,
a bruised and battered rose to emergency
as if you’d just barely survived
a hailstorm of meters intent
on making your species extinct.
And it was hard to tell if flesh of my flesh
blood of my blood meant the same as
flesh upon flesh with a dull thud
upon the untempered anvil of a child’s heart,
or not. So is it any wonder
when you split the atom that day between you
like Charles Manson and Mother Theresa
and our nuclear family turned out to be
despite Leucippus and Democritus,
fissile material in a radioactive meltdown,
wholly divisible into the infinite wavelengths
that weep like shattered mirrors
with splinters of stars in their eyes
for things they wished they’d never seen.
So is it any wonder I’ve been
this photon in exile ever since,
this candle that got knocked off the balcony
like a potted geranium of blood
where Romeo declared his love of Juliet
out into this storm that’s been trying
to blow me out ever since in the pelting rain?
I’ve hung onto to that flame
like the rag of fire I was swaddled in
as my natural birthright ever since
like a withered leaf on a maple tree
in the dead of a bird-killing winter.
Strange, isn’t it, when a circus
comes to your homelessness
to put up tents where surrealistic clowns
laugh at a childhood in distress
as if it were some kind of joke
you weren’t let in on?
And I doubt at this late date
I’ll ever know what to make of it
whenever it stares me straight in the heart
and I’m brutally clear enough
not to let my vision of it be smudged
by either hatred or compassion
or the chromatic aberration
of peripheral ideals drowning in wishing wells
like flies in a toilet bowl
love’s too dainty to rescue
and the saints are too lazy to save.
Is it any wonder then O my mother, O my father
that I have become this silver-tongued
shape-shifting snake with
a graceful way of twisting things
and haut-couture tattoos on my back
I earned in a radioactive snake-pit
of high-maintenance wavelengths?
That my tongue should be as forked
as three-tined lightning in the mouth
of Hermes the Thrice-Blessed
bearing alphabets to expectant mothers
in a crane-bag of occult grammars,
prophetic as a witching wand
looking for water on the moon,
a split hair, the sacred meeting place
where rivers were enjoined
like bloodstreams of native tribes
to sit around the same council fire
and share the same heart.
That it’s a slingshot that can slay Goliath
square in the third eye from anywhere.
Two roads that diverged in a yellow wood
and I took neither one.
The split ends of one strong rope of a language
that was frayed into two
like a Manichean conception of good and evil
or the wishbone of a broken filament,
the death of a nanocosmic chandelier
that sings like tiny birds in the morning
when you shake it close to your ear
like a seashell or a crystal skull
to see if it’s still alive or not?
Blue Flower. Black Dog.
Chicory. A junkyard wolf.
Not two. Not two. Not two.
And I tell myself the brightest lights
like dreams and wine and stars
are all seasoned by the dark.
What else can I do
what else can I say to myself
to heal the wounded myth of origins
I received from you, O my mother,
O my father, but lie down like a bridge
by the edge of a river of stars,
a bridge of scars
with only one bank, one foot,
one overturned lifeboat,
one pillar of quicksand to stand on,
the sound of one hand clapping
like applause when no one’s listening
that I’ve made it this far
like the apostate of the raging heresy
that’s gone on bleeding ever since
however much holy oil I spread
on the head of the crucified dove
nailed by a slingshot when the T of the cross
where my father’s loins hung
like two thieves either side of him
like the unblessed soil
of the ground he walked on
and the people he crushed underfoot
like the cosmic eggs of the skylarks
as if they were nothing but skulls on the moon
one thumb up and one thumb down
like the torches in the hands of the dadaphors
celebrating the Roman New Year,
one thief cursed, and the other
yet to be forgiven. Changed one day
for reasons that are well beyond me
and I intend to keep that way
to the Y of my mother’s delta
that flooded like the Nile
every day of my heretical childhood
with tears, the silt of stars, the dust
of unfinished pyramids
that kept us nourished through
those long lonely nights of famine
we ate bitter bread together
and cracked burnt bones
like koans and fortune-cookies
around the kitchen table
to get at the hot marrow of the matter
without burning our fingers and mouths
as we stared for hours
at the patterns on the worn linoleum
without saying a word
as if we were Neanderthals
who’d just stumbled upon a secret cave
of sacred Cro Magnon finger paintings of us.
Back in those days, back in those nights,
when it all seemed so natural back then
before we lost our innocence to comparison,
to have been littered by a Roman wolf-mother
who had driven my father
like a jackal in a lion’s hide
with the soul of a scavenger
off what remained
of the carcass of her marriage
to feed her young
and keep them from being eaten
by the likes of him or any other man
for that matter, in her eyes,
though I remember how
it used to terrify me
in a cold sweat for sleepless starless hours
of living a waking nightmare in bed
after all the lights had gone out
that one day I would have to betray her
like her son, Judas,
with thirty moons of silver in my hand,
by telling her against my will
that I was becoming one.
I was becoming a man
and there was nothing I could do about it
except drive myself away from the pride
not knowing in my heart of hearts
whether I was a lion in the wilderness
or a scapegoat that had just cleansed
the sins of the tribes
as if they were my own to bear
for the rest of my life
like a debt to you, O my mother,
my beautiful, savage,
pagan godsend of a mother,
with the soul of a moonrise
and the heart of a gypsy artist in partial eclipse
and your crescents withdrawn like claws
and no blood on the thorns of your rose
when we were happy together, remember,
like weeds in a field, like night birds
that were going to risk the winter
in a tree full of September apples
as ripe as Queensland sunsets
you used to tell us about like passions flowers
that were your version of paradise
you wanted to get back to one day
like all those blue luggage trunks
you kept waiting in the basement like arks
if you could when the wind and the stars,
and the forty days, and the forty nights
were blowing from the right quarter
like a wharf that gave suck
to the comings and goings of the lifeboats
she nursed into life at sea
without ever going anywhere herself.
O my mother, precisely because
you’d never ask, and never did,
what can the son of bright vacancy
say to the mother of dark abundance except
I am a debt I’ll never be able to repay you
regardless of what the bloodbanks say,
I am the lion sacrifice on the lunar altar
of the black lamb of the new moon
that opened my third eye
at a coven of gypsy witches
dancing around the fire
like a zodiac of mystic eclipses
far into the wee hours
of my afterlife in this wilderness
of broken vows and stained-glass windows.
And, O my mother, you must know,
before your green eyes
burn like the salt of the earth
in the distant fires of autumn,
before you die, before I do,
before the rose of your life
you turned into a tent and a fire
that sheltered me under
your eyelids, your wings,
goes out when the wind
upends this hourglass world
like a blossom in a mirage of shifting sands.
Before the landlord comes with the sheriff
to serve our final eviction notice,
I sweep your threshold of thorns,
I sweep the wasps like cinders
from the eyes of your fountains
in tears as deep as watersheds.
Because I am so afraid of losing you,
because any word could be our last,
because every word I say to you
seems like an empty lifeboat
drifting across the moon like a cloud
or a lost nightbird in a storm of sorrow,
and all I can think to do to make
what I can’t make up to you,
is to become a small boy again,
a thief of flowers who used to steal
from orchards, telelphone booths,
and the backyard starfields
of the abandoned houses of the zodiac
to have something to bring home to you
like Evening in Paris perfume
on your birthday at the winter solstice
when the days began to get longer and warmer
and every bead on your rosary
of habitable planets in orbit, each,
one of the ninety-nine names of God
and one unknown secret she keeps to herself
so the light won’t get tongue-tied
trying to say it out loud,
tilted toward the sun at apogee
as only a mother can do
letting the light in through
a crack in our bedroom doors
like a moonrise at midnight
to see if we were all right.
All I can do, and it’s only
a metaphoric gesture of the love
I bear for you like a bucket of water
a wishing well once gave birth to in the desert,
is strew your path with fireflies,
with desert stars, with passion flowers,
with humming birds and honey bees
in the wild bougainvillea of Queensland,
and an easel in Eden to paint them with
and Scotch thistles with no thorns for brushes
and caterpillars of oil paint in tubes
that will turn into butterflies at sunrise
when the southern stars and the fireflies
get the light just right,
and any one of which,
their shining sitting to have
their portrait done in the living likeness
of the starmap I’ve will always see
in your green, green eyes
as life-giving as the moon
in the sentient corals
of this vast nightsea
and the way home for all of us
when the prodigal son returns
like a boy riding a dolphin of stars
through the wavelengths
of the lightyears to come
through both hemispheres
of my heart and mind,
through the northern eclipse of you
O my father, and you, O my mother
who shone even at midnight in the southern
and kept us all together even in our absence
like a weld along the equator
that scarred the wound of the beginning over
with herb gardens you gathered
from the mother-tongue of your heart
that have gone on blooming ever since
well beyond any fence
in any universe of inconceivable existence
that could keep a good thief of flowers out.

PATRICK WHITE  

FIRST THE TENDERNESS


FIRST THE TENDERNESS

First the tenderness; I feel the tenderness,
the downy edge of the leaf, the eyelash,
the green tooth of the leaf
gently opening its mouth to the air,
its flag of being high in the branches
unfurling like a sky of its own,
startled by the taste of the first star.
Every drop of rain that falls
is a jester’s cap,
three bells and a splash and that’s me
learning how to swim in this new space
with an ark and a flood, you
the dove with the leaf in its beak, returning.
Then I check a little calendar of razor-blades
to see if any of the days
are holy days circled in my blood,
if I’m late for a sacrifice somewhere,
if there’s a landmine waiting
like a spiny sea urchin buried in the sand,
glass petals shed from a broken rose,
waiting for me to take my boots off
and walk barefoot dazzled along your shore.
You are honey and wheat, and, angry,
a small storm that bleachs lightning white.
Brave despite myself,
your beauty crowns me King of Fools,
and though I meant to disguise my helplessness
by standing my ground like a iron thorn,
I can already feel the earth turning to quicksand
beneath my feet,
and tremors of an approaching earthquake
that might heave me up out of the sea
like a new mountain.
And it’s too early to tell
if it’s demons or angels
that prod my heart
with their taunting spears of fire,
or if they’re just bored,
hanging out on call,
like a gang of crows
pecking at the seed
I left hope against hope on the moon,
but to judge from the way I feel
like a new element
discovered first on the sun,
all my cells and molecules assuming
a new paradigm, a new mandala,
a new configuration of shining,
an unknown constellation in the doorway,
through either end of the telescope,
they seem to mean business.
Fear rolls out its black carpet
and blood rolls out its red,
but only love walks freely in the starfields,
making its own path in the going
and when I think of you,
I pale like a planet
in the labyrinths of a shadowless dawn,
I am the toy of tides of light,
a rootless island
broken like bread
from the continent I thought I was.
Unless broken from the whole loaf
nothing can be shared, and nothing
can feed the heart
that has not been broken
among the hands of the hungry.
I have seen you as a harvest day in September,
your pulse a windfall of poppies and apples,
your radiance, flying fish
and water goblets shattered translucently on the wave,
a white mare in the mirror trampling a glass serpent,
you were the pure blue of a troubled morning
melting the first frost
on the wild, New England asters
that bloomed among the grounded planets
of an abandoned apple tree
somewhere in New Hampshire;
I thought you were a window of honey
saturated in its own light,
that only the rarest of eyes
that came like bees back to the hive of your heart
could look through.
Now the moon is out. Now
I see the ghost of the water-lily ride the darkness
like the soul of a doomed ship
unloading its cargo in the depths,
or the second blue moon in October
silvering the fields
it threshes with a blessing.
First, the tenderness; I feel the tenderness
overwhelm me in gentle enigmas
of fireflies and small eclipses,
random ignitions of the mystery
that this should be so at all,
and it’s as if I could stand beside my heart
astounded by the course of its flowing
as all its rivers run suddenly down to you
like a sea on the moon,
and like the feathers of a storm bird
every sail, every burning paper lifeboat,
every next breath
is a longing off your unmapped coast
and a lighthouse of reason
bawling its warning into the fog
that the star that guides my spirit luminously ignores.
And though my ignorance at this juncture
is a stairwell of wind at a crossroads
and I approach you like a tuning fork
trying to harmonize my ashes
like the urn of a burnt guitar
to sing to you out of the shadows of a summer night,
to touch you with leaves and stars,
to lace the air with the black fragrance
of smouldering roses alluring as the wine of a drunk mystic,
and the beast putting on
his brightest golden chain and collar
to greet your progress through his zoo of desires,
slowly I raise my fingertips to your secret braille of scars
to read the contours of the kells
you have elaborated from your suffering;
the symmetries of passion and solitude,
blood and tears
that ink the mingling of your silent scripture
in the shrine of your deepest intimacy.
First, the tenderness, I feel the tenderness
of a bridge for its stream,
of a fountain on the sun
watching a new comet
rinse the darkness out of its hair with light,
of a tree for its chandelier of ripe cherries
glowing brighter than blood in the night.
And I may be junkmail
on the doorstep to the threshold of your heart,
a wizard shy of magic,
or a kite tangled like a misplaced note
in a stave of humming powerlines,
and I’ve fallen
on the thorns and swords and obelisks
of my delusions more than once,
lost like a single straw in a stack of needles,
drowned diving
for tiny moons in hard shells on the bottom,
and no one grows fat on the feast
in a crumb of light,
and a rumour of love
is not the burning bush
of prophecy and inspiration in the valley of a woman,
and you are not the blue love letter
of an atmosphere I could take for granted,
but I risk slipping myself under your horizon
like the wingspan
of a homing bird in the dusk,
risk stepping out from the trees into the open
to drink from your reflection
from the waters of a midnight lake
that has eclipsed every other vision
that has intoxicated me indelibly
from the very first sip
to let you know while we live and breathe and love and hope,
though hope is seldom a road that arrives,
the first tenderness; I feel the first tenderness
of being enabled, empowered
by this transfigurative gust of grace
that turns the galaxies deep within me like well-wheels,
to summon the images, wraiths, forms of the world,
as it arrays its jewels
on the flying carpets of life,
to compare with your beauty,
to embody these auroral aspects of you
that play me like a keyboard of light
in the likeness of a woman
whose smile
though it were as many as the leaves of fall,
and eyes
though their shining
outnumber the morning asters,
have never failed to startle me
into realizing everything
I am missing in life and love.

PATRICK WHITE