Saturday, April 7, 2012

PROMETHEAN CONTENTIONS


PROMETHEAN CONTENTIONS

My life the wardrobe of a shabby star; here,
take this carnelian pomegranate
that has hardened into a heart
and appease what blood you can, take my tongue
that turned yellow with arsenic in the fall
and was torn down like the flag of an ancient catastrophe
by the denuding expletives of the wind.
I’m tired of the ashes and the cemetery wine
that pollutes them; I’m weary of the view,
this worm-eaten map to nowhere
and the lies it must live to fulfill.
I’ve exhausted the patience
of the bookish rain,
waiting for my shoes to stop talking
about journeys they’ll never take,
so that I can tell them I was a man
with a tarnished direction
that led me off the known roads
to taste the wild blackberries
that ripened in brambles of razorwire.
Here, take the petrified paperweights,
the mephitic moons of my eyes, still stained
by the dead seas that wept themselves empty
to the end of seeing; I once mistook them
for summer sapphires in a mountain crown
but things have been rubbled since then,
and my sidereal aspirations have toppled
to graze on the mannered portion
of the crumbs of light
that survived the avalanche
at a foodbank for wheelchairs and thrones. My mind,
gum under a desk
in an abandoned schoolhouse
and my voice, the graveside elegy
of an extinct species
that couldn’t attune its maverick genes
to the suggested forks in the path of an eloquent serpent,
I am unspooled by my own undoing
as frame by frame
I marred my life with perversions of salt and light
to contaminate my bruised confessions
in asylums of lipless inquisitors.
I am still the ore of the sword in the rock
they couldn’t extort from my ambiguous impurities,
even after the stake and the fire
that moiled the gold of my bones. Blighted by the truth
of a heresy of wounded water,
I was true to the rain
in a holocaust of cabbalistic arsonists
and even here in this fetid ditch of time,
the scattered orchard, the pageant of my blood
is not a danse macabre
or transformative contrition
of flagellant lilies. I am innocent as night
of the stars they impute to me, the lies and legends
of the man who once lived me,
a ventriloquist of physics.
Here take my face and skin, my mouth, my hair, my ears,
and if you still need
a gesture of confession
to glut the cannibal of a creed, here,
take my faith in the expired frequencies
of the universal hiss, or the charred guitars
of my carboniferous impieties. I fumbled the song
you asked me to sing
and limped from the stage
an infamous king of jesters and fools
who overthrew me for a laugh
when the minister of mirrors went insane.
Now I am a smear of sky
on a broken windowpane,
a rumour of hesitant lightning
in a choir of tone-deaf fireflies,
the fraudulent tear
of a leftover saint
who weeps sewers for the poor
to wash the planet off their faces.
I rummage through the garbage
of the aftermath, the decrescent beak of a vulture
reaping the urgent organs of tumescent roadkill
that once cast the dice of their own infraction
to steal their genius back from the gods,
to cool the fire of their solitude on the other side,
to lift the veil
from the star-worn face of the apple
and look into eyes that no one’s ever see
before the worm interrogates the vision
at a carnival of undertakers. Here, take this old taboo, this curse,
the thorns and horns of these dragon teeth
that sowed the forbidden ground of the secret
with armies of fanatical commas
in the service of a virgin period
deported like a holy relic
to the erection of a foreign capital
adorned by the marbles of carnage.
Here take this future from me,
the accident, the crisis and the shock,
the randomness, the tyranny, the sneer
of the heart-crushing boot, the rational madness
of political lovers raised for annihilation, and take this ruse
of happy endings, the chrome and glass
cosmetic face-lifts of a flagging science,
and the indecipherable grammars of the generals
who speak like triggers and the hurricane corporations
who lobby to own the rain
and want to market oxygen as an inert gas,
a logo on every gene. You can have my eyes,
you can bottle my tears
and send them off on the tide, a message and a warning
not to risk a rescue,
and leave me the sole custodian
of my own isolation like a bird in a furnace.
You can plant spies in my semen
and colonize my chromosomes with zoos;
you can introduce me like the skull and crossbones
of a designer virus
and hack into my horde
of piratical ideas to clear the coasts of consciousness
of superfluous corsairs. You can administer
last rites in rosaries of chalk
on ghetto sidewalks and doctor the autopsy
with the platitudinous gangrenes of moral turpitude,
the nemetic karma that plays muse
to your inspired amputations. Bring on the surgeon,
bring on the laughing pathologist
back from a late vacation, unhand me
with the ostrakon, the passport of pariahs,
and distinguish me with a fence, a wall, a camp,
the unmarked grave of a dismembered terrorist
who had no evidence to add
to the celebrity histories of acknowledged slaughter.
Make a token of my head, my prophetic skull
on the platter of a flat earth
to sweeten the sins of your adulterous daughter,
or let me fall upon the sacrificial blade
of the waning moon that lies before me like a sinister eyelid,
I will undo the ribbon of my blood
on a gift that arrived like a stranger
you couldn’t trust. I will endure the abuse
of a premature grave
or enter the vehement emptiness
of a third-world cupboard in a fever of hope
that proves critical, but no demon of your will,
no whim of your capricious brutality,
no reflex of your hatred of love and life, no
acidic austerity of your organized indifference,
no starless wound of any sky
that dawns like bleach in the roots of the rose
that withers like junkmail heaped
before a bolted door on a condemned threshold,
will make me renounce
for the soft immunity of a prosperous lie,
one era, one god, one vulture
of this mountain range
where the apex and the alley are the same,
one adamant link,
one feather of fire or locket of thought
on the planetary chain
of my liberated disobedience,
the enlightened insanity of this sacred malfeasance.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS IS AN OLD SORROW


THIS IS AN OLD SORROW

This is an old sorrow, almost beautiful in the way
it underwhelms me from above, a sky caving in
like a circus tent under the weight of the rain,
a ghost of fruit that could not bear the weight of its tears.
This is a random sadness that’s got me as its only friend
when it thaws like a mirror
looking back over its shoulder
at its glacial past, ex-lovers, friends, certain pets,
and eyes that were glass weeping
in the intense mystic heat of a blast furnace full of stars
for how little they understood at the time, things pass
like Canada geese migrating across the moon
like a river you can’t step into twice.
Though it doesn’t make any sense to say so.
This is an ancient sorrow. And though one direction
is as good as many, I’m still following
the herds of the grazing stars as far north as I can.

O we shall sit down on the good earth half lotus sometime
and cry together for the wound of being alive.
The rose has teeth. And celebrate the scars
in the herb garden as if they were crescent moons.
Or the eyes of a powerful wraith of sadness
saturating the atmosphere with the pathos
of a lament that’s been sublimely burning
through its heart for lightyears
like some deep emptiness it knows can never be filled.

As if God would never be enough for herself
and the whole of the universe were
one long maternity of endless creation
that is manifested in its entirety in each one of us
the way the moon’s reflected in a drop of blood
hanging from the thorn of a rose
with the last of two beautiful sunsets for eyes
like the sheen of auroral silk glancing off the scales
of a black watersnake at nightfall when the swallows go in
and the bats come out on the nightshift
like the winged heels of some demonic messenger
with minions that squeal in a frequency too high to hear.

But however you send it, by sound or by silence,
by light or by night, be assured the message you send
however time and space bend things
is the message that’s received, like a bee by a flower
or a star by the eye that transcribes it creatively
into hieroglyphic metaphors of picture-music
following a dream grammar of starmud
with a bird stuck in its voice like a phoenix in the Arctic.

Time washes the dust of the road off
by shedding the moonlight like a snake’s skin
and skinny-dipping in the fathomless lakes of eternity
it finds along the way like eyes along the mindstream
full of stars and fireflies and what blooms in the soil of its sorrows
beside the stairs at the back doors of all those tomorrows
that left the way they came without saying good-bye.

Volcanic lunar oceans that are only as deep
as the dark tears I have left within me
when I dip the leaking cup of my heart
like the goblet of an impact crater
into a watershed of compassion that looks like the holy grail
and share it with my fellow mirages in this desert of stars
as if they were all as thirsty as I am and everyone
deep down inside somewhere within them
like the green star you can find at the core of an apple,
had a fountain within them like a moon dial or a wine glass
they smashed on the high notes of the nightbirds
just to express their joy as a kind of defiance
in the face of their lots in life, though, in fact
nothing is longer or shorter than anything else in eternity
just as there’s only so much time and then there is forever.
And it’s the black magic in the roots of a demon
that blossoms like Venus in the west
or New England asters up around Westport in the fall.

And though there’s something beautiful in this sadness
that eludes me like a Braille starmap
I can’t quite put my finger on to see what’s shining
like Aldebaran through the tree line of a bride in a widow’s veils,
as I listen to a whisper of flesh
pleading in the darkness not to be excluded
from the presence of time, or left behind by the spirit
like a false clue of cast off rags on a hawthorn bush
to say where it’s gone forever and ever and ever
as if whatever the spirit and the flesh had
going on between them never mattered,
whenever the clarity cuts through
the thin-skinned mirror like this
as if it were trying to slash my eyes open
like an insight into what’s beyond the obvious,
immediately out of a wounded mouth
I am healed by the balm in a voice of compassion
that rises sweetly like the new moon from the womb
of a scarred guitar that didn’t know it had such music in it.

And it says in moonlit windows and nightbirds
that make all the dreaming children wake up and listen
to the intimate strangers that speak as gently as fireflies
to the vast nightskies of their own imaginations,
that the world that casts these shadows on your wall
like a crow preening its feathers, or a bell
that’s lost its faith in knowing, and plunges like an apple
into its next afterlife, are merely the holy petals
and sacred syllables taken like pages from the Book of Life
left out like an orchard in a nightwind for every one to read
like a story each of us writes for ourselves
to help us drift gently off into sleep again
to find out how it all ends in a dream that goes on forever
like the fragrance of lilac in an old woman’s memories
or the marrow of the apple bloom
that clings like the moon to our bones
or stars to the flypaper stairwells of our chromosomes.

No other way to explain the shining of this sadness deep within
as if my very blood mourned the passing of the things
that have drowned and disappeared into it over the years
like honey-bees in the lees at the bottom of a black tulip
full of rainwater, and by that I know
this is a sadness common to all
that’s worthy of the stars in its windows,
and the dreams in the mirrors that paint our faces
like quick watercolour life studies of rainbows in tears.

PATRICK WHITE