Monday, March 19, 2012

SOMETHING DEEPER THAN TEARS


SOMETHING DEEPER THAN TEARS

Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that’s sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn’t already the dead language
of an absence that can’t be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you’ve gone.
No black hole that’s as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye’s too optimistic and farewell’s
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I’d make it black. I’d raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn’t return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren’t enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other’s wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn’t come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you’d just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn’t lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn’t long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren’t coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I’m still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren’t a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I’m trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I’d write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn’t there anymore.
I’d sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that’s been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they’ve seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I’ve tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.

PATRICK WHITE

OUT OF NOTHING


OUT OF NOTHING

Out of nothing, out of space, the abyss,
out of thin air, the fluids
my mother and father were
at the sacred junction of two rivers,
out of the vital organs of distant stars
empowering the darkness
like kingmakers,
out of enlightened delusions
and deluded illuminations,
out of the sea-wrought passions of an island
and a tragic propensity
for the more romantic
desecrations of originality,
and a natural Virgoan capacity
for truing the lies that others told,
shouldering the swamp
in a robe of the sunset,
I am ecstatically baffled by everything.
To be alive among birds and stars and trees,
to watch the moon smearing its way
across the bedroom window
as if it were a snail
undoing itself like a ribbon of silver
and know and feel and witness
in your blood
how strange and extraordinary
the naked awareness of the moment is,
life silently enraptured
by the vital mesmerism
of its own reflection;
and that reflection the whole of you
almost always drunkenly staggered
by the incredible specificity
of your own empty vastness
making you and the world up
as it goes along
like an intimate stranger on a country road at night
improvising a song, a chrysalis,
out of the random detritus of his life,
to announce his presence like a shy warning
and keep the dark at bay
by pretending he’s alone and happy.
Billions before me, billions after,
and not just humans, not just
what we can recognize of ourselves,
the biophobic homogeneity
of our cellular singularity,
but microbes and waterlilies and wolves,
all the arrays of life
that have rooted in water and sky,
or bound themselves to the Promethean agony of a rock,
generation after generation,
autumn after autumn,
bell after bell of the tide coming in
and going out,
as if someone were breathing,
as if there were a dark intelligence
more subtle and refined than light or water
saturating everything like the night,
summoning eyes out of its own torrential abundance
to greet the stars in wonder;
as if there were a single pulse to everything
that birth after birth
has authorized worlds within worlds,
to risk the dangerous beauty
of their own brevity
and overcome it
by realizing the astonishing perpetuity of change
is the unknown road
that leads them back home
to their own feet
like the only two cornerstones of here and now
that were fit to make the journey. Billions born
and billions dead
and still I am as dumfounded as the sky
after all these eras of living and dying
to say what the dawn is,
what the dusk might be
and who am I to enquire
if the night can know its own stars.
Sixty four in another year,
I can feel myself expiring,
all my diamonds sublimating into vapour,
and fewer and fewer birds
returning every spring to the pond.
It would be an insult to the face
of the ambassador of the obvious
to try to deny it
and like the moon
my face has been insulted enough
to plead for accuracy as a last resort
and go on waning through my phases.
Say it. With a little wishful thinking,
two or three decades left
and those arraigned
by the law of diminishing returns,
and I’m either ashes or in a hole.
But to me death has always seemed
an absolute constant
faster than the speed of light
because it devours time as well,
it eats the clocks
and the eyes of those who consult them
and the hands of those
who wind them up again
like babies and genomes and galaxies.
And who could deny,
observing the armies, the famine, the hatred, the disease,
the incessant tearing of flesh,
that the true business of government,
the deepest concession of civilization,
those we marvel at under our feet
and those in bombers overhead,
is an inept attempt
to manage death,
that death doesn’t litigate for the living?
In a hundred years
almost everything alive today,
this living weave of myriad forms,
these threads of blood
shuttled by a heart
on the loom of the moon,
will unravel like the smoke of a snuffed flame,
disappear like the compass of waves
in the enlarging wake of a waterbird
into an uncircumscribable openness.
The facts of existence today
are the rumours of the augurs of tomorrow,
and everything we lived as indisputably us,
the very ground and watershed of our being,
the love and the grief,
the wonderment and the terror
and all that we wrote in fire and tears and acid
like homeless delinquents under a bridge,
will swallow us incrementally
like a gaping serpent of quicksand,
unlock its jaws
and receive us like the obsolete keys to oblivion.
Turn away if you must. Change the wallpaper.
Tear down the windows and the view
like the closing night playbills
of a long-running comedy
with an unhappy ending,
or fuss over your afterlife like a pyramid,
or shout out in the darkness
across the boundless sea of this abyss,
believing there’s a lifeboat
drifting out there somewhere,
a new body
you can be hauled into,
a universe that’s still got room for you,
but carry the bride of your life in your arms
however you will across the threshold
on your wedding day,
tomorrow the only emergency exit
will be the flame
that leaps up to catch the bouquet.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES THINK


SOMETIMES THINK

Sometimes think I’m always
a life too late
to catch up to my own
walking away weary of waiting for me.
Or I’m a star too far ahead of my own shining
and that’s why it’s always dark.
I know the agony
in the stones of an abandoned bridge
that shoulders the world for nothing,
upholds nothing but its own mass
and waits for things to pass.
And even when I fall into the river
to flow along with my own mindstream
without consulting the leaves like maps
I still can’t get the moon off my back.
Look at all these orchards
littered along my banks
from the tent of a single blossom.
And there are nights
when I can smell snake on the wind
as if everything were about to happen again
and I still haven’t milked the fangs of the moon
for an antidote to the pain
or put out the third eye
of the irrational surveillance camera
that oversees the sorrows of the insane
when it’s full.
I like my perfections whole enough
to include what is not
and if I am immoderately empty
it’s so I can make space for the world
like the blood-sea of the rose
that flows out of nothing
into tides that shed their waves
like the eyelids, brides and petals
of a human heart.
My breath is silver.
My breath is gold
I’ve mined from the mystic mountain
that got in my way
whenever I tried to cross
the valley threshold.
I had to evaporate to rise to the top;
I had to get myself together like a cloud
to transform my own delusions
into a glimpse of the other side
that didn’t take a scapegoat for a guide.
Now space is my only familiar
and the being behind the face
of who I was a moment ago
is just another snake in the furnace
of this star that sheds my skin like fire.
Streams of insight
that are not predicated like mirages
on deserts of thought
trying to spin themselves
into mirrors and silks of glass
like a new religion
sweeping the world like sand
advance the gardens
of the water-givers underground
who teach the flowers how to bloom
and drown like stars
in the infinite opening of their eyes.
And I’ve mauled the nets of the constellations
like a man in the morning
walking through a high field
radiant with spiderwebs
and if there’s anything
left hanging in the wardrobe
that used to house my masks and cloaks
they’re veils I’ve torn from the light
to better see into my darkness.
I’m still looking
but nothing has appeared yet
and no sleight of mind
that’s ever mastered me
has ever taught me how
to realize the inconceivable
except in the proportions of a human
whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable
whenever I turn the light around
and discover the dispersing stars
I have followed so long and far
into the unborn darkness where I begin
shining within.

PATRICK WHITE