Thursday, March 8, 2012

TOO LONG IN THESE DEPTHS


TOO LONG IN THESE DEPTHS

Too long in these depths, sullen and sublime.
So dark you’ve got to be the light
if you want to find your own way around.
No moon. No colour. No star. No sign.
And even my presence doesn’t help
to humanize the place. No day. No night.
In this space eyes almost seem redundant.
No seer, no seen, just this seeing deeply
into a dark mirror you have to drown in
if you want to see your whole life
flash before your eyes like a school of silver fish.
Even the ghosts of the dead candles
don’t linger here for long
and the brittle sticks of incense
find the lack of smell here
a fragrance too strong to be borne.
Almost muggy, a viscous summer night,
when you can almost hear through your skin
things humming to their own ripening
like iron on the nightshift being poured
out of the igneous crucibles of earth
into the shapes of the fruits by which
they shall be known. Pear. Apple. Apricot.
Wild wrought iron grapevines and blackberry laurels.
And there’s always a death shroud over the face
of someone who’s about to be revealed
on the other side of your eyes
where the sacred wounds are sealed in blood
and concealed like dice in a bone-box.
You can feel worlds yet to come
resident within gargantuan transformative power
like lightning at peace with itself in a gathering cloud.
The pressure gets too much. The darkness
too smothering. The solitude too overbearing.
And once you realize there’s no object
to the search, nothing to achieve, attain, find,
except your own way back to the surface empty-handed,
time to catch a ride on a bubble up to the top again
where the water teaches the moonlight
how to dance lasciviously for salvation and rain.
Where starfish are elected to constellations
and expected to shine, and the fireflies
refuse to be governed like blips on the screen
of an air traffic controller in a lighthouse on the moon
keeping an eye on things like Big Brother.
Time to bask in the extraordinary ordinariness of things
like ants on a blade of stargrass, willows
that left the dye in their hair a little too long
and now they’re strawberry blondes
waiting for their roots to grow out down by the river.
What a marvel of domestication a bath is
and what a joy to collapse into it like a bridge
and just think of how mystically amazing,
what a holy ablution of birds in a fountain,
the mere act of washing your hands must seem
to an aqueduct that carries water
all the way from the mountains of the moon
but has only ever known the rain to compare
with what it must be like to feel
so spontaneously lavish with it.
Time to aspire to a medium I can play in again
with the dolphins and the flying fish
running before the prow of the moon
with a painted mermaid ploughing the waves
like a marine fertility goddess without seeds
raising the skull and crossbones
flying from the masts of the shipwrecks below
higher than the supernovas or surrogate angels
have ever been hung like dreamcatchers.
above her immaculate conceptions
of what her innocence might be like
when it’s in on what there is and is not to know.

PATRICK WHITE

AND YOU SHALL FOREVER BE


AND YOU SHALL FOREVER BE

And you shall forever be
all that could not be said of me
though I spoke for myself as long as I could
to answer your absence in paint and words
like this night creek talking in tongues to itself.
I see the maple leaves rotting in manuscript
like the dead civilization of a mummified language
that never made it into print.
And though I know every name
of the wildflowers that did, and of the stars,
their perennial myths of origin,
and of the fireflies, their efflorescent haikus,
tonight I walk among bones and pelvises of ice,
the desecration of forms, limbs lobbed off
like the right arms of offended trees and the eyes
of small skulls plucked out like stillborn moons
that never made it through the winter.
Alone with this emptiness which yet remains
the biggest clue I’ve ever found
to the whereabouts of myself,
I am not estranged by my usual compassion
for outcast things with no voice of their own.
There is no pillow of snow over the mouth
of what can’t be said without me.
The dead don’t hold their fingers
up to their lips to bid me keep silent.
They’re all dancing wildly to lyrics of their own
in a winter carnival of deathmasks
that have shed their bodies
like the hags of the withered waterlilies
trying to wash the brown out of their gowns
like sunspots from the memory of the stars.
As if there were an eloquence
in the radiance of their rags
that overwhelmed the silence
with the sacred syllables of a mother-tongue
that has no word for time or death.
No word for life that distinguishes them from me.
Not just moonlight on the barkless limbs of mannequins
that have shed their skin seductively.
Not the dead of a northern Pompey
frozen in ash and ice and snow
catastrophically posed for generations to come
but the hymns of the homeless
who’ve finally found common ground
with the tent cities of the stars high overhead
and the gypsy moths in the Dutch elms.
The long vowels of the living joining hands
with the skeletal consonants of the dead
to make one whole word we can say in our sleep
like a secret we keep between ourselves.
And for the moment I feel almost complete here
like the first draft of a book
that the dead have yet to rewrite.
And though I’ve said it thousands of times before
in as many ways as I was inspired to,
like a fire that reared up at the mere shadow of the whip
to outrun the starlight for the sheer spirit
of challenging the will of this body
dug like a spur in its own ribs,
it was clear from the very beginning,
as clear as poppies and marigolds
in the summer of their oral traditions,
no more can be said in the dead of winter
than can be said by the living
to coax the wild crocuses out in spring.
You might be a lone night bird
that inhabits the woods like a magus
with too many stars to follow
to follow any one of them
and gratify your life by stargazing
and calling the faithful to prayer
like a muezzin in the morning
with the voice of an underground river.
And for all your lucidity you might never find
the long shadows of your ancestors
erecting the waterlilies of their tents
along the riverbanks of those rivers and lifelines
you keep returning to every year like waterbirds.
Or you could find no sign of anyone
for light years who could recognize you
for who you are even as you change time-zones
like a child with ageing eyes
who was raised by the alone with the Alone
in an incomprehensible solitude that included everyone.
Here where distinctions break down
and the dead and the living both draw
from the same source as they’ve always done
each is known to the other
by attributes that neither of them have.
The warm heart of a black rose
looking back over its shoulder
at a bend in the night creek,
the moon rising up over the valley,
a pearl in partial eclipse,
taking one long, last look
at the broken cages of ghostly tree limbs
and shattered ladders of lifeboat wing bones
that drowned on the way to their own rescue.
Is one side of a window truer than another?
Inner and outer, I and the other,
truly separated by this mere hole in my eye?
Do the stars streaming through my mind
feel a subtle change in the nature of the sky
when they do, a different feel to the darkness,
something strange about the flowers
they open like loveletters, sensing someone
has been tampering with their mail
as if the message were still the medium
but with a different return address?
Is my absence any less baffling than my presence?
These with the hearts of departed things
any less whole or real or displaced
or death any less of a prelude to time
than any other point in its passage is?
Even in death, even when the sun
shines at midnight it’s always dawn.
The waterbirds go. The waterbirds come back.
Like an ongoing dialogue in an hourglass
where content is the same as timing
and the most enduring of things
are the things that most readily pass
between the bright vacancy
and dark abundance of life
like the moon that keeps growing
without coming or going like a journey
standing in the doorway
of its own vastly expanding threshold.

PATRICK WHITE

I REMEMBER LOVING YOU


I REMEMBER LOVING YOU

I remember loving you.
You turned my heart into a koan I haven’t cracked yet.
You were a muse of dark matter.
A Mayan phase of the moon
that kept your predictions to yourself.
You were the unified field theory
that made me feel I knew why I was here.
That my abysmal ignorance
was the ore
of infinite enlightenments to come
each one a world of its own
we were free to start with each other.
I remember touching your skin
as if I were reaching out to a ghost
to see if it was real.
Even now after all these years
I can recall the sensation
as if I were holding
a first folio edition of Shakespeare
that no one knew anything about.
A kind of preternatural reverence
for the profound and rare
so intense that whenever we were together
I was always in the presence
of something more than real.
I saw extraordinary beauty and power
in the most ordinary things you said and did.
My will wasn’t so much
bent to yours
by force desire or cupidity
as made irrelevant.
And I remember being astonished
to see how little effect
gravity had around you.
How I bounced around
like a helium balloon
on the ceiling of any room you’d walk into.
How every time I saw you
I could feel my eyes evolve
to accommodate the vision
and see deeper into the dark.
You were such an intriguing planet
if I’d been Jupiter before I met you
I still would have gladly
abdicated from the solar system
just to be your orbiting telescope.
You were all those species of life
the Amazon keeps a secret.
Cures for diseases
I didn’t even know I suffered from
until I met you.
You were the mystery made tangible.
You were the lightning insight that cracked the mirror.
You were the perennial avatar of woman
in every universe
that was worth returning to.
I remember seeing you in the late sixties
sitting in a windowsill
with nothing but a gun and slip on
as the song Spoonful by the Cream
blared out from the heavy hippie drug house
at the top of the hill
over the whole despairing neighbourhood
like an anthem and a challenge all in one.
You smiled like the Mona Lisa
with a midnight special
enigmatically bored with the adoration
you commanded from the blind
who’d never seen anyone like you before.
You looked at me like a silver bullet
but the silence was crucial
and I knew it wasn’t time to go off.
Someone told me your name
as if they were trying to frame
a dangerous alias
but I knew you knew way back then
I could see through them
and the best way to be your friend
was to stay a stranger to the end.
Eight years later in the mid-seventies
I was invited to a field-party
that turned out to be
a snakekpit of holy rollers
baptizing the faithful with a dirty syringe
as they tied you naked to a stake
to burn you like a witch
because you were the most flammable woman in the room.
But I knew you were safe
because fire doesn’t burn fire
water doesn’t drown fire
and danger isn’t afraid of itself
but I broke a few glass fangs
like toxic chandeliers
that had gone into a trance
just in case of an emergency
to cover your back
as the whole place went up in flames.
You said I guess you expect me to say thanks?
And I said no
I don’t run trap lines
to lure my friends
into cages of gratitude.
Put your clothes back on.
I’ve got nothing you want right now.
And it was three years until I saw you again.
And it was then we connected like stars
in an occult constellation of two
and I made love to you
as if we were both on death row
for the same heresy at last.
You were the first
to reverse my spin
in a charged particle field
and show me that love isn’t perfect
until the annihilation is rapturous.
And look at me now
wherever you are
laughing or in tears.
I’ve been singing in those flames for light years
and I haven’t recanted yet.

PATRICK WHITE

CHEWING ON MEMORIES LIKE BROKEN MIRRORS IN HER SLEEP


CHEWING ON MEMORIES LIKE BROKEN MIRRORS IN HER SLEEP

Chewing on memories like broken mirrors in her sleep
tears of blood run from her eyes.
She doesn’t know I’m watching
but I’ve got windows everywhere.
But for her
just for her
because nobody else cares
third eye satellites with unlimited airspace
in her choice of skies to match her eyes.
A haemorrhage of sunsets.
Fly little bird fly
as if you weren’t the shattered sparrow
God took his eye off
when you fell.
Sometimes the mystic oversights
have more to say
about the great revelations of the world
than all the burning bushes in the valley of Tuwa.
Rumours and news.
Fly little bird fly.
Be an apostate waterbird
and let your skull skip out over the lake
like the moon through a glass house
that’s been asking for it for years.
There must be stars
that haven’t bloomed yet
somewhere in the corner of a leftover garden
that no one’s trampled on
like moon rocks
on a firewalk with a spoon
that hisses like the head of a viper
boiling with venom
at the tip of the tongue of a Zippo lighter.
Fly little bird fly
into a state of grace
that isn’t tainted by your experience
of the taste of humanity
that threw you like bad meat
down your own wishing well.
How they pried your innocence out of you
like a flower before it was ready to open
like a keepsake from a locket
your mother gave to you on her death bed
like a silver bullet that would keep you safe
from the grave robbers
the moment you used it on yourself.
Fly little bird fly.
I don’t know why
people attach more of an emergency
to the exit
than they do to the entrance
but I guess you’d have to ask a junkie about that
who’s used to coming in through the back door
with a ticket to ride
that’s better than a forged passport
to Disneyland
after you’ve done business with the Pentagon.
Fly little bird fly.
Don’t lose your nerve for enlightenment.
There’s the Bodhi tree.
There’s Venus in the dawn.
And there’s all this emptiness.
Isn’t it sweeter
than a hot fix
once you’ve gone beyond
the last judgment between right and wrong
like the pick up sticks of the I Ching
into the nirvanic bliss
of discovering nothing
was your best guess after all?
Fly little bird fly.
Disappear into your own eyes
like a candle
that’s stopped sticking its tongue out at the darkness
looking for a new place to hit.
Fly little bird fly
as if you weren’t tarred and feathered like Icarus.
And may the sun that shines at midnight
find you a lot more approachable
than apple blossoms
scattered like ashes on the wind
or fireflies that can’t hold their fixed positions
like the stars.
O it’s so anatomically true
that life on earth hurts
especially when you’ve fallen
out of love with love
like a baby out of the nest of a lullaby.
Down will come baby
shaman and all.
I see your bruised body on the bed
like the embryo of some past miscarriage
that taught you how flesh
can grieve for its own death
while it’s still alive.
I see the black haloes.
I see the bright horns.
I see the butterfly feelers
that have burnt out
like the short-lived filaments
of your average light bulb
and the place where you were anointed
with holy oil that hissed.
And it’s hard to miss where the apple sat
when William Burroughs
shot you through the head
pretending he was William Tel
like your crackhead boyfriend did last night.
Luckily he missed your heart.
He should have hired a firing squad
instead of relying on a sniper.
You don’t send a single viper
to do the job
of the whole snakepit
when you take out a contract
on anything as elusive as that.
I’ve made the bed
and you can lie in it alone
for as long as you want.
I’ll keep watch over you
like a mongoose or a lighthouse
over a bird that was stared to stone by snakes
and I won’t have anything to expiate
if I see their shadows
sliding hate mail under the door.
Fly little bird fly.
No more skies that lie like windows
about what you’re going through.
No more pretending
those bruises on your arm
are rare orchids of jungle love.
When you went to sleep
tangled up in the powerlines
you couldn’t teach to dance to your flute
and the rhythm of your body
like bullwhips
you might have felt
like a broken kite on a funeral pyre
but if my magic still works
by the time you wake up
I’ll make sure
you open your eyes like a phoenix.
So fly little bird fly.
The world won’t heal while you sleep.
Your lover won’t have a change of heart.
He broke you like a chandelier
he threw down the road
in a drunken rage
on a Friday night
like a bottle of beer.
One solitude denies another theirs.
Lovers take each other hostage.
The rest is the Stockholm syndrome.
One fanatic.
One addict.
It looks like devotion
It looks like a life raft on the sea of love
but the ocean’s gone rabid and mad.
Just look at the way it foams at the mouth.
Things are bad.
Fly little bird fly.
You’re not caught in the chimney
with no way out.
You’re the genie of the lamp.
You’re the one that tunes the power lines
that are humming along with you
like Mozart with a sparrow.
You’re the silence
that times the rhythm of the music.
You’re the tuning fork
not the lightning rod
of a wanna be god
in a pick-up truck
who keeps you around
to beat on like a false idol
who shalt not come before him.
Stop pecking at the crumbs of your dreams
like the leftovers of a garden
that used to be secret
That’s no way to get out of a labyrinth
when you’ve got wings.
So fly little bird fly.
Disappear into the depths of a starmap
that breaks into flames as you approach
the creative intensities of your own shining
like sumac in the fall.
Here’s the dead branch.
Here’s the green one.
You be the moon.
You be the blossom.
You be the firefly.
You be the hidden night bird
with the faraway call
that doesn’t make the distinction at all
because you’re too far gone to tell
by any feature of the light
you can often see things deeper
in a black mirror
than you can in a white.

PATRICK WHITE