Tuesday, March 6, 2012

IT'S STRANGER TO CONCEIVE OF ME


IT’S STRANGER TO CONCEIVE OF ME

It’s stranger to conceive of me as I am
than to imagine that I’m someone else.
There’s more largesse in the early spring air.
You can tell by the tears that well up in their eyes
the glacial stars are beginning to thaw splinter by splinter
withdrawing their claws from the corpse of the snow
like thorns from the Lion’s paw overhead.
I can hear water in the creek tuning up
for the dance to come as soon as
the first violins of the crocuses get here,
the trout lily, the purple passage of the wild violet
under a leaf it took like a page from the book of autumn,
trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, grape hyacinth.
I like it here because it doesn’t matter who I am.
Things are alert and vivid with life because
they’re not threatened by the possession of it.
And time is a lot more honest
here where it lets its hair down
than it is back in town
where it’s always now, now, now,
and the streetlights, blinded by their own blazing
turn their backs on the stars
like the distant fires of native peoples
who preferred to dance to see
where they were going at night
than watch their step
like the next best real estate deal.
Even without intention, every time
I try to shape space with my mouth
and say this is who I am, this is me
whatever similitude I use I always feel
I’m exhuming a dead metaphor
from the coffin of a word
that’s been taken out of the context of the world
and put on display in a dream museum.
It’s as if I can relate the history of smoke
but not the flame that lived it.
As if one of these half-submerged skulls of rock
that have been trying
to pave their way across the creek
for as long as I’ve been crossing here
were to try and understand the mindstream
that’s been ploughing around them for lightyears,
not realizing what they’re rooted in like cornerstones,
are islands on the moon, mere shadows of water,
mirages on the tongue of those who have
never tasted it like their own blood
to know whether it was hot or cold,
blue or red, sweet or sour, real or not.
The earth can sleep a little longer yet
under this tapestry of snow while
the dreamweaver at the loom of the moon
is unravelling the threads of a thousand loose night creeks
the sea will gather up again into an oceanic consciousness
of the flying carpet of wavelengths and life themes
we’re riding on well out of reach of ourselves
like waterlilies in winter when it’s coldest,
and snowflakes on a furnace when it’s hot.
It’s as fun to say it as it is to play with hula hoops.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator
at the equinoctial colure and it’s spring
in the northern hemisphere. Canada geese
thread their way like rosaries of snake skulls
through the stars in the eyes of northern lakes
peeping through the cataracts of ice and clouds
breaking up like mirrors that can only
hold this pose of starmud for so long
before it’s time to change studios again
to keep up with the light
that’s trying to capture your likeness
like the whole of the sky on the skin
of a drop of the water of life
that reflects like a mirror
but sees through appearances
into the deeper darkness
like a gravitational lens of pure insight,
the lamp in the hand of the light that leads it
like a blind lighthouse to the perilous reefs
of morning on the moon among the corals.
Was I born to wonder what, who I am
or not, as is more highly probable?
Is the persistence of the question, the way
it makes you suddenly look up
from a seemingly unrelated matter
at the moon in the black walnut trees
or a bird in passing that commands your attention
without in the least meaning to
until everything but it feels like the intrusion.
Is the question on the agenda of the answer
or does it have a life of its own,
a journey that doesn’t end in a key?
I look at all these twisted forms of life,
not cast out, but abandoned, these
deadly gray limbs of swamp wood
silking their legs in the moonlight,
these mauled pines that look more like weather
than evergreens, the sparse, despirited crimson
of the ground willow paintbrushes
that have lost their handles in the snow
waiting like a newly primed canvas
for the first rose petal of blood
to fall from Virgo as a sign of consummation.
Things, forms, things of the world,
things of the bodymind that shapes them
out of starmud, out of the outer receptacles
of the five senses on each hand,
that conceives of a bee like a hollyhock
calling it into being like the fragrance
of something that was said, but wasn’t
meant to be heard by anyone else.
Animate and inanimate alike
a grammar of things, ritual magic
and we’re the diction,
we’re the verbs and nouns of the spell
that keeps us creating the world in tongues
so even as strangers we end up speaking
the same language as stones and stars and birds.
Maybe the question is just an answer
that’s travelled back in time from the future
to ask the prophetic skulls of its own ancestors
if any of them had foreseen what was to come?
Or the question is all and the answer is negligible?
Or left speechless, you achieve wisdom?
Or left unanswered, you awaken
your own creative freedom
like a world you didn’t know
you had it in you to make any way you want
in case this one doesn’t fit, you don’t have to bear it.
Absurd as it seems to seed your dreams
and expect to harvest them when you wake up,
and yet I’ve seen it happening all around me
every day of my life, objects, symbols, stars,
insights casting shadows of themselves
into the darkness as far as the light
they’ve been given to go by,
sowing the available dimensions of the future
with a world that isn’t so much said into being,
but arrayed lucidly before us
like eyes full of mystery that don’t reveal a thing.
I sit on this rock and I watch the night creek
until I can’t tell which one of us is flowing
and it occurs to me that maybe the question itself
is the crucial essential of my existential dilemma
and the answer’s only the temporary afterlife
of who I’m becoming now. Not as I appear;
not as the psychic life of a heart-broken mirror,
not as the mirage of a snowblind seer
who approachs the desert on my threshold with a broom
as if I were trying to keep house in an hourglass.
I don’t sweep the stars off my stairs.
I don’t follow a trail of breadcrumbs
in the corners of the eyes of last night’s dream
as if someone had been here before me.
I don’t pass myself off like counterfeit leaves in the spring.
Honesty isn’t a fact. And clarity isn’t a starmap.
And love’s only another religious con
if it isn’t wholly unconditional and inclusive.
I’m not looking for asylum in the abyss
like some petty alternative to living this
without knowing what this is or I am
or at least trying to get my ignorance
as close as humanly possible to it as I can
whether it’s aware of me, these stars, this
broken thatch of wild rice, wheat, and cattails, or not.
Then I will celebrate the creativity of its absence
with reverence and compassion for all
that it’s left in its wake like a sleepwalker
shaping this mindscape like a retreating glacier.
All that abide here with me tonight
like the gateless gate of an open mind
wondering if there’s anything left to catch up to
that embodies the dignity of the beginning
in the dead of winter, as apparently it does in the spring.
Or if we’re all words in a language
we’re just learning to speak on our own
that can point to anything, say anything
except themselves to themselves
whenever the question comes up
about whether they mean anything at all
when they’re not leaning on the world to exist
as we all do, trying to make sense of it
in this dumb-founded dialogue of wonder.

PATRICK WHITE

I LEFT YOUR IMAGE OF ME SHINING


I LEFT YOUR IMAGE OF ME SHINING

I left your image of me shining
just where you wanted it
in that glass menagerie
of broken mirrors
you’ve hung from the ceilings
like chandeliers
like constellations of frozen tears
in the thirteenth house
of the misbegotten
on the wrong side of the tracks
off the beaten paths of the zodiacs
that sometimes like to go slumming down here
when the sun shines at midnight
and the moon’s out of town.
I left the light on
but that star is long gone
past these extremities of shining
into the abyss of an unforeseeable future
that disappears into its own illumination
like an eye into its own seeing
or a bad likeness of God
into a human being.
I leave you handcuffed to the dead
like the Standard Model of the Universe
that lost it all
like the physics of the Mad Hatter
to the singularity at the bottom of a blackhole.
I would have met you half way like anti-matter.
I would have found a way
to bend that negative space
that so often distorts your face
into a more comely illusion of time
that isn’t stitched together so clumsily
like some patchwork bride of Frankenstein
taking it out on the mirrors
that keep dodging your reflection
by turning their eyes to the wall
everytime you insist
you’re the most beautiful of all.
So be it.
You are.
Good-bye.
You’re trying to impose
a habitable order on the universe
like the cube of the sphere of life
that would allow you to get by
like Tolstoy
who built a shoemaker’s hovel
in the middle of his aristocratic palace
to improve the commonality of his inferiors.
You’re like the Taj Mahal looking for a room to rent.
You’re a shore-hugger trying to teach
a jumper how to fall toward paradise
without a parachute.
And if I ignore your raging advice
as I do now and have done
it’s only because I play Russian roulette
with the lightning
and you come to the table with a cap-gun.
And I’m wholly at home
even immortally alone
in this compatible chaos
that improvises my life
sometimes as a dirty joke
I go along with for a lark
and other times
raises me up above
the web of my furthest horizons
like a spider that’s transcended clinging to anything
and dancing in my radiance
like a star that isn’t afraid of the dark.
Listen to me, woman.
I’m singing.

PATRICK WHITE

MY HEART SAID YES TO EVERYTHING MY MIND DENIED


MY HEART SAID YES TO EVERYTHING MY MIND DENIED

My heart said yes to everything my mind denied.
Certain women, poetry, doorways, cosmic risks,
a few back country roads that knew enough not
to ask me where I was going that late at night.
My absurd familiarity with sacred clowns
and this ghost dance of stars I see in their eyes
whenever one of them makes me cry in remembrance
of some old rag of laughter that ran before the bulls
like a rodeo clown in a whiskey barrel of fermented sorrows.
I said yes to exile. I said yes to my homelessness.
I said yes to the reflection of the kid
in the broken window of the burning orphanage
he’d just pecked his way out of like the shell of a phoenix.
I said yes to the abyss, to nothing, to emptiness
to the purr of the tides of sand in a desert
combing out the manes of lion-fire
that bloom like spiritual ferocities on the wind.
And I said yes to the rocks on the mountainside
who repeated what my secret teachers had said.
If you’re still clinging to one placard of your freedom
you still haven’t truly let go. And I said yes
and jumped like a snake at cruising altitude
without a parachute into a sudden enlargement of everything
and said yes to the dragon of that transformation
as it took to the wing like a fire in a furnace.
Yes to the altars when it was time to sacrifice the hero
to the unattainable he surrendered in the name of.
Yes to the dark niches of love
when the candles have gone blind
so much like eye-sockets in a skull beside a wishing well.
Yes was a way of sharing what no
had a tendency of hoarding for a day that never came.
Yes is doing it for everyone. No
does it for no one and can’t even make it on its own.
There’s something fundamentally revolutionary
and heretical about yes that burns in cleaner fire
than the dirty holy water no washes its hands in
to rid itself of the matter once and for all.
No takes account of every injury like a mandarin
standing off in the shadows of a rain dance of willows
to see who prefers the moonrise to the lightning.
Yes hasn’t even figured out it’s wounded yet.
Yes is the sacred syllable that all others words aspire to.
Yes opens more eyes than there are stars to look at.
More flowers and doors and hearts to the mystery
than there are keys in the spirit’s lost and found
outside the gateless gates to paradise on earth
where no throws its crutches down as things
of no use anymore, and yes, the seed
that everything shape shifts out of
plants them all over the barren mountain side
like rootless trees with a path and a voice of their own
such that every time the lightning strikes another one down,
they say yes, and drop another pine cone
on the fire that will give birth to them
like an encyclopedic fortune-cookie
whose cup runneth over with assent.

And, yes, even as the night approaches me
like an animal it no longer has to be wary of,
as the shadows of the trees lengthen into rivers
that disappear into the oceanic deltas of the night
like the leafless boughs of the trees of life
slendering into the sky like smoke from a sacred fire.
And, yes, to the crazy wisdom of this life I’m dreaming
I’m living on behalf of someone else
wholly inconceivable to me, not shallow, not deep,
neither near nor far. Not the intimate familiar
of fireflies, nor yet a perfect stranger to the stars.

PATRICK WHITE

ANSWERING THE WOLF


ANSWERING THE WOLF

Answering the wolf.
Its agony, my own.
Its long howl of irreproachable pain
enough to silence the mountains
with trepidation before something holy.
Desecration. A photo. Two dozen wolf corpses
pouring over the tail-gate of a pick-up.
The bounty of two happy hunters
kneeling beside their rifles
as if something had been accomplished
it would be worth telling their children about.
Hard truth. Here is a human. My species.
It can do this to anything that lives.
From blue algae to Auschwitz,
Uganda, Syria, Wounded Knee.
Whales, buffalo, Sabra and Shatila, the Amazon,
twenty-five million famished children a year,
an avalanche of wolves at the back of a pick-up.
Beyond wanting to know why
there’s this black spot
in people’s hearts and minds,
where sentience turns rabid,
where intelligence seems
the most inspired enabler of death,
where the wine of empathy turns into an oil slick,
how do you answer the innocence
of the wolf, the child, the old growth forest?
Life gets in the way of our enterprising hatred of it?

You kill a wolf. You kill a whole landscape.
You kill a wolf. And the moon marks you out
with an X on your forehead
for a thousand excruciating transformations.
You kill a wolf. And the rivers
will turn against you and bide their time
until you come down to the water to drink
from your own blood-stained reflection.
The sun will begrudge you a shadow.
The wind feel fouled by your smell
like dead meat in your own house well.
Even the maggots who will come
to your heart one day
like undertakers and garbage-collectors
will look upon it not
as the virtue of a noble enemy
but as an undertaking that’s beneath them.
They will not stoop to clean your body like a wound.

Wolf-spirit, wolf-heart, wolf-mind, wolf-mother,
even the white-tailed buck laments
this atrocity of psychotic caprice
that slaughters simply because it can.
I see the moon bare its fangs in proxy for these
and the stars dip their spears in poison.
And I will dance around the fire with you
mad with grief at this wounded eye of life
and smear my face with the ashes of a deathmask
to regret everything about me that is
pathogenetically deranged and inhuman.
To rid myself of the reek of those who could do this.
Do this to our own. Do this to natives.
Do this to wolves. Do this to the air and the water
they breathe and drink from. Do this ultimately
to themselves when there’s no one left to care or notice.
These kill to eat.
These eat to kill. You and all like you
who did and condone this, I ask you,
what will you do with the bodies of these wolves?
You never ravened for the meat;
was it their death that glutted your heart?
Were you compensating for some hidden impotence
giddy with the knowledge you could
extinguish life anywhere on the planet on a whim at will?
Were you urinating on your own wombs,
the graves of your ancestors because
you’re the illegitimate runt of your own myth of origins?
Are you angry at life because you were born?
Do you despise the rose and admire the thorn?
I see the narrowing in the eyes of the ancient taboos
you’ve violated like thresholds with your boots on,
bruising sacred ground without knowing
where it is you walk or the risk you take,
the danger you will encounter,
because you have been made deaf, dumb, and blind
robbed of your eyes, ears, tongue, heart, mind
insensate to what now lifts its nose to the wind
to find you when you least expect it
from the least expected quarter.

These you killed. You killed in the concrete,
and exonerate the act in the abstract.
These were blood, flesh, fur, bone, each
with a mystic specificity of its own,
wild, free, whole, intelligent, and communal
each the work of some unknown muse of life,
the spontaneity of some lavish genius,
the inspiration of the same dark mother
that never creates the same masterpiece twice.
These had seeing, mind, emotion.
These had been touched by the mystery of life
and in the shrines of the trees and the mountains
offered their delirium up to the moon
like drunks beneath a vacant window
singing to their own reflections. These
accepted their homelessness in this strange place
without doing it any harm as if
there were no other place they could belong to.
These were at peace with themselves and the earth
in a way you weren’t born with the courage to imagine.
These were alert and alive and quick with curiosity.
These were noble without lording it over anyone.
Were they executed for their innocence?
Was there not enough room in your cage
for their kind of freedom? Did you envy
an understanding they had among each other
you haven’t enjoyed once in the last twenty years
you stayed drunk as a gun lobby in a lazy-boy
staring back at the glass eyes of the animals
looking down upon you like a decapitated zoo
with the pity of the unaccusing
that anything that’s ever lived
could be so full of self-hatred,
so full of disgust at the inadequacy of themselves
in the midst of so much spontaneous sufficiency,
from blue algae on over to blue whales,
could be so estranged from their inalienable nature,
could be so vindictively blind
they’d rather shoot the eyes out of the stars
and finger the braille of the bullet holes
they’ve put in the side of their coffins
like a mailbox with a return address on it
than open their own and read the writing on the wall.
Does Cain still blame God
that his sacrifice was unacceptable?
The farmer! The farmer! Not the hunter?
The meat of the hunter not sweet to Her nostrils?
So you murder your brother
and then you murder the animals
as if they somehow let you down.
And in the death shroud of the dark mother
she sends a crow not a dove,
not the wolf, nor the eagles of Rome
to teach you how to bury the dead,
to teach you how to sow the earth you’ve salted
with meat and bullets and how they only bloom
and come to fruition in you
like self-inflicted wounds square
in the third eye of your own infertility.
There used to be hunters wise enough to know
the animals they stalked were meant as a gift of a gift
not something they ripped off like a petty thief.
Now when they catch a whiff of you coming
it isn’t a hunter they run from but
that sickly-sweet freakish smell of death
that clings to the skin of an undertaker
who moonlights as a serial killer
in the deathmask of a terminal disease.

PATRICK WHITE