Saturday, February 18, 2012

I'M A SAVAGE MYSTIC WITH CHAMELEONIC PASSIONS


I’M A SAVAGE MYSTIC WITH CHAMELEONIC PASSIONS

I’m a savage mystic with chameleonic passions.
Serpent fire with meteoritic nano-diamonds for eyes.
The black slash of the wounded crescent of the new moon
bleeding to death like a thorn among the willows
who grieve for me like Arab women under their veils.
I’m a house of ill-repute on the outskirts of the zodiac
and under my eaves and eyelashes I can hear
the storm cloud pigeons cooing like shepherd moons.
I’m dark ore with a star in it, a star
giving birth to dark ore where I mine the eclipses
that pour out of me like igneous swords and snakes
I temper in the dead seas of my mystic watersheds
hissing in the cool bliss of a cosmic riverbed
waiting for the next flashflood of insight
just to hear the frogs singing again among the wild irises
who come with blades of their own as sharp as mine.

And this could be the slipppery slope to solipsism,
subjective idealism, rabid Narcissism,
Vishnabandu’s eighth century Mind-only
non-conception of inconceivable enlightenment
being everything all at once the moment being
ceases to exist chasing its own tail around the mulberry bush,
I’m never all that sure myself, but for the moment,
I’m swimming through stars like flying fish,
I’m drying the painted tear on the face of a clown.
I’m trying to put a smile on my deathmask.
I’m listening to Mayan calendars and crystal skulls
in the gloomy backrooms of human sacrifice
weeping like chandeliers of prophetic lightning
shattering my peace of mind like black mirrors of insight
thrown down at my feet like the ten commandments
brought up from the valley of death like imported brides
to marry those brought down from the mountain.
And all I can say, is, aw, come on now, give me a break,
I can remember when you guys used to feed
your Pythian pythons sweetcakes after every oracle.
What have you got them on now, Qualuds?
And even if the world does end
when the sun rises in the west at midnight
and no birds sing in the eucalyptus trees of Israel
where bull-dozed Arab villages used to stand,
and the shepherds of the black camel
build tall buildings in the desert in the Kuwaiti desert
where the black camel is obviously oil,
and the last man in the world is Chinese
and grovels in the dust at his sister’s feet,
and the Nazca lines turn out to be a starmap
to the place where extraterrestrials used to stage
the discus throw for flying saucers
when they put on the Olympics once every four light years;
right now while I have a rare chance to,
I’d rather sword dance with enlightened fireflies
to the hillbilly fiddles of the summer crickets
against your gathering storm on the hillside
on the thresholds of life and insight
than goose-step to your martial requiem
on the event horizon of a black hole.
And who knows, if you go a little deeper
into the dark with all three of your eyes open
you might find a dragon like me
full of serpent fire with the alpha and omega
of crescent moons for fangs and claws,
one of which kills you, and the other cures,
spiritual antidotes to toxic cosmic glands,
this remedy in the heart of the disease,
this herb of the moon on the tongue of a snake,
this Eden I’ve flown into off course today,
not a cinder, but a nightbird in the eye
of the hurricane rose of Armageddon,
where the nations meet on the plains of Jazreel
to dance themselves to death in a moshpit
at a rave of wavelengths out to save the world.

PATRICK WHITE

A GHOST IN A MOONBOAT


A GHOST IN A MOONBOAT

A ghost in a moonboat,
what has become of your heart,
that vase, that urn, that furnace
that slept at your feet like a dragon?
When did you depart, when
did you fling your bouquet of stars,
like the wedding vows
of a widow behind you,
the lone rose of your blood,
the polyglot mother tongues of the flowers
you liked to translate once
like an archaic science of silence
into the flames for good
and walk away like a grave
that fit you like a shoe
with journeys yet to come
through the realms of the talking dead?
Did you let what came before
break the heart of your afterlife
like a wishbone caught
in the throat of a chimney
that couldn’t get the song right
until one day just before false dawn
the bird just up and died in its cage?
A loveletter from the gods
that had aged way past its prime.
I remember when you were diamond
not a dime a dozen, a species of coal
that doesn’t give off any heat.
I can remember when an ice age
wasn’t the only window
you looked through at the world.
You were tropically sexual,
you were the black panther
that stalked the jungle at night
like a new moon on the make.
You were the princess butterfly
who could kiss the head
of a venomous snake pit
fanged like crescent moons
and make it bloom like a daffodil.
You could weave dreamcatchers
between the horns of any demon you met
like spider webs between two blades
of stargrass in the morning.
You could bead a requiem of rosaries
into solar systems of music on a loom
that always had a song in its heart
like the harps of the celestial spheres
in the ear of a radio telescope
looking for an extraterrestrial emotional life
to make first contact like love
in a universal language of laughter and touch.
And you could cut a throat
like a sour guitar string
that couldn’t hold a high note
like a box-kite at night on fire
to reach the stars beyond the powerlines
where the birds sat like a choir
of open whole notes in a total eclipse
of upstaged back-up singers
like chakras on their spinal cords.
I never knew a phoenix
had a three octave wingspan
until I listened to the fire in your voice.
And you could take a light bulb
with a broken filament for a lifeline
and heal it by turning it into
a firefly of insight in the hands
of a faith healing glassblower.
Now you’re the dark ore
of a sword swallower
that’s poured her metal out
like the slag of the bells
you melted down for cannon
in a holy war of troubled mirrors
that fought in the image
of an imageless God
who abhorred metaphors.
And what happened to those features
of your bodymind, those teachers of yours
that were always planting pines
on the barren slopes of world mountains
like Zen masters with nothing better to do?
Were you beguiled one day
like a mirage of heaven in an hourglass
and break your neck against it
like a red-winged blackbird
against a glacial windowpane
it trusted like a true reflection
of someone who didn’t open up to you?
Whatever the unreason of it all,
Whatever compelled the rose
to tear her soul and her flesh
on her own lunar thorns
like a junkie with a razor blade
performing a Caesarian on her eyelids
as if they were the little wombs
of a recurring nightmare
of embryonic hearing aids
born like voices in your ear
with no one there to listen but you
to what they said in their sleep
in a dead language on the night ward.
I once trusted you
like I trusted the wind,
like the sea trusts its own weather,
like a skull trusts moonrise to happen again.
Now all your radical lighthouses
are the pillars of a headland temple
dedicated to an unknown cause
that warns the gods and the swallows
to keep their distance from your lunar reefs.
You’re a garden of slogans
on protests signs gone to seed
that haven’t been weeded in years.
And I know you count me a fool
to remember how our waters
once mingled on the moon
like spectral wavelengths of serpent fire
on the same frequency as our tears.
Years and years and years ago
before things fell apart like an ice floe
headed for the deep south
in a holy month of heat
that changed my direction of prayer
like a compass needle at a Sufi intersection
that saw you everywhere I turned.
And there were letters
I wanted to send you like night skies
that were scaled and feathered by the wind,
and things I wanted to say to you
like a thousand epitaphs
of what we were all about,
mason jars of fireflies and poems
I wrote like a prophet in tongues
in the eternal flames of separation
I hoped that you might blow on
to keep the fire alive
in the ash pits of our graves.
And now you’ve come back
and I can tell you’ve bruised
the music in your voice
like the skin of deadly nightshade
and scarred your eyes
to look like crescent moons
with no signs of life.
No stars in your eyes
that aren’t the holy relics
of an extinct constellation of saints
that went over to the dark side.
A whisper of worms,
the din of wasps hovering
over the corpse of an apple
in the Indian summer of its waning.
And yet I can still see
a green star with habitable planets
shining deep in the heart of death
like the sacred syllables
of the seeds of life
stirring like tendrils of gold
in the ore of a starless night.
And you might fake it
like a sign of a zodiac
far off the beaten path,
and keep your black halo on,
or take it as an echo of mutual respect
for what we once tried
so lyrically to mean to one another
that the threshold you left by
for a higher rung on the ladder
is as earthbound in autumn as ever
to the ghost in the apple orchard
that uprooted my heart in the spring.
I offer my arm to the falcon.
I offer my bough to the nightbird
I once answered to like longing
answers an unnamed muse.
I offer landfall to the dove
and a silver earring of rain
to the eye of the crow,
just to hear you sing again
of what we had to risk
and what we had to lose
and what a sadder, happier
surrealistic mystery of a world it is
a wingspan of light years away
from the one we used to think it was.

PATRICK WHITE