Saturday, March 10, 2012

HOW RARE THAT ANYONE


HOW RARE THAT ANYONE

How rare that anyone prefers the real,
fire that can drown, water that burns;
the whole of the night sky
form-fitted to your face like a skin
of translucent cellophane
that takes your breath away.
My heart marches like a little drum in a vast darkness
toward a war
it is important not to win.
The stars are strewn like white sweet clover
along the roads of brave men in masks,
but the true holy wars are faceless
and the martyrs always die alone
like leaves without names,
like a species that went extinct
before it was discovered
to be the only known antidote
to terminal literalism.
Follow your thoughts far enough into delusion
and they’ll fray like ropes,
like the deltas of ancient rivers,
like the burning bushes of evolution
under the mammary bell-curves
of thermophilic bacteria,
the voice of God, denuded of its mystery,
the magmatic venting
of a deep sea fumarole.
The fools enthrone themselves like rivers
in a palace of salt in a desert
that withers like lightning in the root,
but the wise know they play with their lives
long into the late afternoon
like toys that don’t belong to them
and will be taken back
by the lengthening hands of the shadows
that approach us like slow dreams.
And what’s the body if not
a bag-pipe full of water
leaking out of itself like the highland lament
of a widow in the rain?
Flesh rises and falls
like the curtain on a bad play
as one by one time ushers
friends, lovers, family out of the audience
until not even the echoes are listening.
Most die like the understudies of stars
that never made an appearance;
darkness falling like the eyelid of a stage
booked for a dress rehearsal of ghosts.
We’re the flame of a little flower
marqueed for the blink of a lightbulb
in the nightclubs of the stars
that go out like fireflies in our tears.
And the mystics wait like massive coronaries
in intensive care
for God to come like a heart donor
only to find she was the wrong blood type,
and the scholars study themselves to death like desks,
and the teachers espouse
their ignorance with authority,
and the lovers get drunk on the blood of snakes
to hallucinate roses and wine,
and most of the poets
desert their own shadows like blossoms
somewhere along the vine
to crush their eyes like emeralds
against the anvil of their palettes,
their mouths the skeletal hulls
of overturned lifeboats
that threw their words overboard like passengers
to save themselves,
desperately hoping
a village of magic lanterns
would run down to the shore in a storm
to salvage savage little me.
Everyone licks the empty, lustrous stone,
the simulacrum of love,
for a taste of life,
but who can draw their tongue out like a sword
from the ore of the dragon
that keeps them from the secret
of what they are?
Who can hear what the nightbird isn’t singing?
Little doors, little windows,
gulfstreams of weeping glass,
when will you ever learn
to sail your own eyes
over the edge of the known world,
transcending all your stars
like starmaps configured
by a random throw of the dice
pocked with shallow graves
like the fangs of a blind snake
that swallowed you in utero,
mistaking your cubist cornerstones
for the cosmic egg?
How else can you hope
to turn your scales into feathers,
stop crawling like a ripple of blood on its belly
to die like another ladder of bone
that couldn’t right itself
like the mast of a waking dragon
in this desert of shapeshifting winds
to climb up to the urgent beds of the rain?
And how rare to meet anyone
this deep into the silence
with the spine
to play the harp of their own lightning,
whose life isn’t the voice of a barnyard bird
they put up against their heads like a wishbone
and pull like a trigger.

PATRICK WHITE

EMPTY-HANDED I COME


EMPTY-HANDED I COME

Empty-handed I come; empty-handed I go.
The road has no name.
The destination doesn’t exist yet.
By my side, no one. Little bird, you want to drink
from the dragon’s chalice, but faces from now
I will not know you; the mirror
will not breathe. Unlovable, strange, some
warrior mystic under an expanding sky
where the stars move further and further apart
I hammer swords of light out
on the igneous anvil of my heart
folding the metal
like the first edition of a holy book until the edge
draws blood from space
with a slash of lethal intelligence.
The clowns of God are rehearsing for a play like this
and you have your lives, your disgraces to live;
your clock of lies that says
it’s always a lonely time to forgive. Now and here, never
anyone or anything, all objects turned to thought;
ahead, the eerie seduction of living for nothing
and all behind, the auroral dispensation of delusion.
Did you do well? Did you do poorly?
Are you clad in the rags or robes of life?
Is your mind wired to lightning
or are you just another flake of heat in the desert;
a gesture of extremes, hallucinating?
I’ve never liked people much; they
bruise the eye of the wine
and keep the flowers of night in a straitjacket.
They don’t know how to take themselves seriously,
mistaking maggots for magi. Their diamonds
don’t flow; across the streams of their being
they build dams out of crutches, houses of God
out of the bones of the ethnically cleansed.
Their children sit at the feet of eggs
giving lectures on the perils of flight. Offered wings
they cling to their fear of heights
and dread death like a crack in the sky.
I’ll take the hawk over the barnyard every time;
the wolf over the house-broken dog, I will not
masticate shadows in a well-trained field.
I may be only a drop of blood
hanging from the horn of the moon, a nail
of salamander gold regenerated in the fire
to plank a leper’s coffin, all my work, the invention of the wheel
for birds, a leader that follows, always a needle off north.
I would rather see what the widow sees
in the petty eyes of her beloved
when he’s laid out in the living-room
like a gambling debt even death couldn’t pay.
I would rather be impaled in hell
on the tip of an eyelash of true insight
than wobble my way through this gallery
for the blind
begging donations from the light. Let those
who have gerrymandered their minds
into emergency wards for the heart receive
silos of what they’ve sown, seven years
of lean and fat
and a mini-series of death certificates
notarized by a grave-digger
taking invitations at the door. I would rather
rage like a pagan wind in the orchard of my own face
than to have even the slightest of my solitudes
whisper one word of falsehood
at this trial of seeing. Let the dead give witness,
let the blind swear, the ignorant insist,
the cripples lie and the cowards balance; still
you will be sentenced
by a knock on the door in the silence; still
you’ll expire like a parking meter
or a pensioned saint
on the way to paradise, mermaids in the wave,
maggots in the rose.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE NAMELESS REALMS OF MY MINDLESSNESS


IN THE NAMELESS REALMS OF MY MINDLESSNESS

In the nameless realms of my mindlessness
where everything that could be said
has been spoken
without being understood
the multiverse keeps repeating itself
like the decimal point of an incommensurable.
The needle of an early sixties record player
worn down like a diamond with cataracts
in orbit around a black LP of the old celestial spheres
still trying to waltz to the picture-music of their chandelier tears.
I’m expanding the available dimensions of poetry
to give myself more lebensraum
without goose-stepping across Russia
as if I had a golden egg up my proverbial.
I conquer in diaspora like the stars.
And I don’t really care
if anyone believes me enough
to understand this
but if they look into my mind
without a mirror between us
they’ll find their own
as clear and unique and homeless as space.
And the darkness that scrys
their prophetic skulls
will conform to the lines in their face
like a love poem
deep in the heart of the night
when it’s raining crystal balls.
And the dirt on the window
that was drawing all day
people the size of its thumb
will show its masterpiece to the stars
to be hung like a new constellation.
And the green bud who cut
her throat on the moon
to free the rose in her voice
will speak to her lover
like a scarlet ribbon
around a gift that she meant to send him.
And you who judge these affairs
as mere rumours of the heart
will come to know
what longing means
when fact falls in love with art.
In the nameless realms of my mindlessness
there’s a room that is waiting for everyone
to show up like a door.
And in the vastness of this mental state
their feet are the threshold and floor
of the last address
of the nightbird in the tree
that waits for the moon like mail.
And you can hear its impassioned reply from here
like the kite that just flew out your window
to solo on its own.
If you look the dragon in the eye.
If you’re not afraid
to stand like a stranger in your own doorway.
If you’re fanatically desperate enough
to thread the eye of the needle
like a noose in the knot at the end of the road
where the world stands on the shell of a turtle
waiting for the big moment to make a move
taste this thornapple of your own madness
and I shall make a gift to you
of my freedom and solitude
and everywhere you walk
like a nightwatchman
lamp in hand
the candle will not be lost
on the long road it’s been following like smoke
and gold will pour from your wounds
like bliss from the ancient ores of your sadness.
I shall not take you by the hand.
I shall not allure you in the wilderness.
I shall not walk beside you
like a mountain or a lighthouse
or reassure you when it isn’t
that it was all just a dream.
In the nameless realms of my mindlessness
there are no holy wars
among the godless telescopes
trying to explain what they don’t understand
by quoting sacred books
like laws they make up
from the prophetic gossip of man.
There are no teachers.
There are no guides.
No signs.
No starmaps.
No cosmic paradigms
to snare the psyche in its thesis
by reassembling all the pieces
like a butterfly in a spiderweb.
But I will offer you this black pearl
of a new moon
like the primordial atom
of a spontaneous beginning of your own
and from the wellspring of the first moment of creation
you will know the agony
of the inspiration
and the expanse of the abandonment
in making a world
where all things lead away from you
like stars and people and water.
But you will feel deep in your heart
the intimacy of a stranger’s gratitude
for the immeasurable giving
of an inexhaustible abyss
that’s been going on for lightyears.
You will stare at the hair in the brush
in front of the mirror
where your dead sister
used to renew her virginity
and you will call out a thousand names
as if they were all the echo of your own
clones on the telephone
but none of them will answer
the same voice twice
until you’re alone with the Alone
and there’s no need to ask.
Here you will recover
the crazy wisdom of your lost clarity
like the comet of a long forgotten memory
that will come blazing back into your mind
and gazing up at it
like a sign from your sister
you will realize
the original nature
of your own mind
is the engine of change
in this world of time and passage
and to have been conceived of once
is enough to outlast eternity.
In this space
the guest does not lament
the lack of a host
but understands it
as the apex of grace
to make him feel completely at home
by leaving him alone
to make it his own.
Does the dream age
into a waking adage of bone?
Are you tempted to wake God up
when you’re sleeping alone?
Are you screaming so high
you’re breaking eardrums like wineglasses
but no one can hear you
like a dogwhistle
that calls nothing home?
You can’t cling to your misery here
like a voodoo doll
you raised as your own assassin.
There are no bullet-holes in the mailbox.
And no one gives the dice
a second chance.
Like the wind
when it’s wild in the trees
there’s an address
but no identity.
And no one’s an orphan
because there’s nothing to belong to
that can let go of you
as if you didn’t exist.
The raindrop isn’t separate
and the river isn’t one.
Between the moon and its reflection
between the candle and its flame
between the person and their name
between the chaff and the grain
there’s no distinction.
No one lucid.
No one insane.
And if there’s a routine to follow
it’s that there’s no path
that leads away from you
that isn’t the spontaneous discipline
of the effortless mastery you were born with.
Inspiration sets up its tent
like the capstone of a pyramid
rooted in wind and sand.
And there’s no way to explain it
because there’s no one
who doesn’t understand.
In the nameless realms of my mindlessness
the deserts aren’t a way of counting stars.
And whether you look up at the sky
or down at your feet
the light can’t be measured
in the wavelengths of snakes
that aren’t on the same frequency as your eyes.
There’s only one law of physics here
and that’s
that everything is a complete surprise.

PATRICK WHITE

I TRY NOT TO CARE THAT IT HURTS


I TRY NOT TO CARE THAT IT HURTS

I try not to care that it hurts
that everytime I find a branch to perch on
and think about putting down roots
I send myself into exile
as if I were condemned
to keep abandoning my mother
like my father did
though I suspect
that’s too profoundly obvious and neat.
It’s not a true eureka moment
if it doesn’t liberate.
It’s not a true insight
if it doesn’t shed light photonically.
If it doesn’t burn holes in your starmap
it’s only another mirror.
Stars through the dirty windowpanes
on a sweltering night.
And down below on the street
drunk cowgirls on coke screaming
and pulling each other’s hair out
after the bars close
rather than go home
to lead lives of quiet desperation
the way they do the rest of the week.
I lie to myself about how things are looking up
as if I were adding another litre of oil
to a dying engine.
I still love the stars
but I feel like the third eye
of a blind telescope on crutches
tapping his way along the Road of Ghosts
with a white cane.
Somewhere along one of my lifelines
I must have seen
my chromosomes copulating like snakes
to live in the prophetic darkness I do now
like some eyeless Tiresias
being lead around
by this tiny homunculus of a child
that never ages inside of me.
I am the bastard alloy
dethroned from the royal quatternio
of the alchemical union
of the king and queen
who failed to turn base metal into gold
in the coniunction of man and woman
signifying holy matrimony
and the residue at the bottom
of the Vas Hermeticum is me.
I taste like the hot tears
of a demon in its solitude
knowing it doesn’t do much good
when you’re up to your eyeballs in hell to cry.
I’ve met a lot of messiahs
out here in this wilderness
I was driven into
like a scapegoat for the Jewish tribes
hoping I would show up and tempt them like Sarah Palin
but they’re all snakeoil salesmen in disguise
with cash registers for eyes
so I don’t even try.
I leave it to the politicians
and the corporations
to do the dirty work.
They’re better at leaving children to die than I am.
Christ’s blood streams across the firmament
like a wounded banner
in a crusade of immaculate logos
spinning their greed into a holy war
against the lamps and candles
of individual human lucidity
that engulfs the planet like big oil.
The dragon is slain.
An eclipse swallows the moon.
But it never rains.
When God was declared dead
the prince of darkness took to his bed too
and all his court jesters
who made fools of themselves
just for a laugh
were replaced by evil buffoons
who mistook themselves so seriously
for the real thing
the maggots forgot
they were the descendents of houseflies
and ran for office
like butterflies on the wing.
But Beelzebub knows better.
He rules their genes down to the letter.
And then there are creatures like me
who revel in the subtleties of seduction
like Ovid in Tomis at the edge of the Black Sea
trying on one metamorphoses after another
like alternative identities
to escape the Promethean agony of what he had to be
to steal fire like an industrial secret
from the libidinous gods and hypocrites
so everyone could hold the cold mirror
of a stolen passion
up to their lips
and kiss her like a frying pan.
The last mad sad sacrificial gift of a poet in exile.
You can judge the depths
of his silence
by the quality of his sorrows.
You can hear what could not be said
by putting your ear up
to the keyhole of what he did
and watching the shadows of picture-music
he keeps casting under your door
like a personal loveletter
he knows is bound to fail
because you keep throwing it away
like just another tree
wasted on spiritual junkmail
recognize that it’s your voice not his
that keeps the secret to itself
like an illicit affair you’re having with life.
I don’t know how much love
there is in it
but there comes a time
when a smile turns into a knife
and you run your tongue along it
in your immaculate lunar solitude
like a cultivated taste for blood.
And you put love aside
until a day later
like the last fire-hydrant in hell
that might have a chance
at ringing your bell
but the day never comes
like a phoenix in full plumage
to the ashes of your urn
and you burn your poetry
as if you were prosecuting heresy
for believing there’s always been more to you
than you were willing to let on.
The rain beats on a shallow drum.
And the cowgirls have gone home
all bloodied and muddied
to their hobby farms
and I’m sitting up here
the only homely light on the block
watching my goldfish swim
around his aquarium
like a thought
I just can’t get out of my mind.
Is life just a scar
at the growing edge of the universe
trying to remember which came first
the eye or the star
the herb or the wound
the offence or its redressal?
Is it mad
to stray from the air corridor
of the flightplan of the word
like Icarus who flew too close to the sun
carried away by the elation of his freedom
and try to earn your own wings
all the way down?
Icarus falls like this dark rain tonight
all over the inconceivable earth.
Those are his tears
running like mirrors down the window
with the broken shutter.
And those are mine
snaking through the gutter.

PATRICK WHITE