Friday, April 13, 2012

MEET ME


MEET ME

Meet me where the rivers
never cross their legs
and the starwells entwine like snakes;
and the trees pin notes from the light
like leaves to a bulletin board,
and the sun is a blemish
of impoverished fire compared
to the mystic dark
that floods the far fields within
with the fragrance of the moon
as it makes lilies of the clouds
and sacred lakes of the two of us
realizing each other in the shining.

And don’t take off the world
when you come,
bring your shadows
and the rubble of your smashed masks,
and the dictionary of scars
you’re trying to translate
into a dead language,
and the silver snail paths
of the necklaces you wear like ripples of heartwood,
and the black bells
that ripen in the night
like the eyes of guardian dragons
and the shadow of the knife
that always points to you like north.

And I will bring my meteors and shipwrecks,
and the sorrows of my rain-sodden books
glued shut like eyelids and onions
and the broken yarrow sticks
of my thresholds and horizons
and the seed of the island I keep
in the locket of my skull
to carry into the next world
like a bird beyond its wings,
and we will make a bed on the wind like deer
and devote ourselves
to roseate oblivions of blood
that would make the orchards of the angels envious
of the roar of our imperfections
giving birth to the sea,
of the dragonflies and fleets of love-letters
that emerge from the hovels
we pieced together of decaying mirrors
and the detritus of junkyard autumns
to gerrymander a shrine of transformations
into a winged palette with two eyelashes for brushes
that sits like an easel on the lip of a flower
and paints the world with pollen.

I have had to become the sky
to bridge the space between us,
a junkie who snorts the stars
like a line of coke he’s railed into an arm of the galaxy
to reach out and touch you
in the rush of another dimension,
a gust of eyes in the back alleys of your neck,
the lustre of a ghost on the wing of a nightbird
that delivers itself like the message
that hurls itself into the abyss like a bottle.
I have drunk to the lees of tomorrow,
and eaten the visionary worm
enthroned in the fire-robes of ecstasy
and signed the moon in my passage
with a scrawl of harvest geese
to let you know
you are the black pearl
that has become of me
like a grain of sand
on the urgent tongue of the night,
the raven palace of plundered silver
you grew from the stone
in the brittle blossom of my heart
like a veiled planet
that I wander like water,
like a sleepwalker in a waking dream,
calling out to you from the inside
like the fountain of fire
in the heart of the earth
that unspools its longing like continents.
I don’t know what love is
when you unfold it like a map,
I can tell you it’s got your eyes
and your blue-tipped hair
and a gearshift in its pierced tongue,
four on the floor with overdrive
that can pop the clutch like a grape
and lay rubber or wine
down the main drag of a reckless mind.
And I want to touch it with the fingertips
of tender emergencies
and the feathered caresses
of homeless doves sweeping over its skin like morning,
and kiss its scars open like shy irises
and hidden starfish
and ruin myself like a kite in the hive of a storm
to taste the tine of its honey and lightning.

Your absence is the empty vase
of a flowerless cosmos
when I search the abyss of fugitive shadows
for a feather of your own
to exceed the wounded ink of my blood
with the eloquence of the wind
trying to light your candles
with a flaming arrow of the virgin bow
I cut from the forbidden grove of my voices
to sing to you through the night.
How often have I stood
in the doorway of your poems
like a city lost in the labyrinth of a stranger
and wanted to belong to you like an address,
or the ghost of the moondog on the window
you veil with your breath,
wondering if you’ll notice when I leave?

Do you know how many times
my mouth has turned into a furnace of poppies,
a holocaust of bees and coffins,
how many times I’ve drawn a razor
across my throat trying to bleed
my way into an afterlife with you
like a slash of milk
from the sceptre of the dream queen?

I shed lives like a serpent sloughs
the surgical gloves of terminal eclipses,
or the cherry beds its blossoms
in the rain cradles of the gutter,
or the moon pulls away
from the wharf of its hills like a ferry
between one abyss and the next,
to pour my life into yours
like stars and rain
and the death-bed wish of a thousand secret extinctions,
an ancient wine crowned and anointed
by all the deaths and candles
I have wept my way through like a window in a morgue
to stand breathless in your shadow again.

PATRICK WHITE

I'M GOING TO STARE


I’M GOING TO STARE

I’m going to stare the sweet, white oblivion
behind the purity of this page down
until it breaks its vow of silence
like the hymen of a nun
and there are little scarlet letters
of red-blooded apostasy
lying like rose petals all over the snow.
I’m going to track birds all over this page
like the linearity of an unknown Etruscan alphabet
everybody’s trying to translate into their native language
like the lozenge of a sacred syllable
that disappears on their mother tongue
like the first spring thaw of the year.
I don’t care if the hunters in my rear view mirror
scratch their heads at the strange signs they’re tracking,
I’m going to expand their vocabulary
with beasts that have never appeared
on anyone’s wall before.
I’m going to teach the Neanderthals
to paint like Hieronymus Bosch.
I don’t really care if it means anything
because someone somewhere
is going to interpret it as something.
So I’m going to follow the circuitous blossoming
of my own mindstream ignoring
the sexually frustrated logic of those who think
if you link a lot of empty words like cattle cars
up in a row syntactically
somehow that makes you a grapevine
and the smell of diesel is not that far off
from the bouquet of the industrial wine
you think you can serve up to Dionysus
without having him spit you out of his mouth.
Doesn’t bother me if a lot of half-wits
want to break their brains
trying to see what the other one means
biting into black walnuts
like the prophetic skulls of Rinzai koans,
this is my poem
and it’s going to mean what it sees.
I’m going to ride this wavelength of insight out
until it breaks like the arm of a spiral galaxy
on the shores of sunny California.
I wouldn’t abuse the prayer mats of those
who want to touch their knees
and foreheads to the ground
like the landing gear of space modules
making a lunar touchdown
but I’m going to ride this poem out like a flying carpet
as if the direction of prayer were everywhere
and nowhere at all at the same time.
I’m going to veer, bank, soar, and glide
down the bannisters of my own thermal stairwells as I will
and let the wild, unwed daughters
of joy and freedom move me as they will
like a red-tailed hawk until the air cools down
in the late summer sunset above the abandoned fields
rumpled as unmade beds with bruised pillows
and Venus is the first to carry her radiant candle
down the long darkening hall to bed.
I’m going to do a ghost dance on the moon.
I’m going to leave my footprints heaped up
like junkmail that found its way back to your threshold
like a cat that you just can’t get rid of.
I didn’t learn to go on the warpath
like Sitting Bull or Geronimo
by following the footsteps painted on the floor
of a Fred Astaire dance studio.
This poem’s going to expose
the sterling lies of the good guys
and undermine the romantic myths
of their anti-heroes like house flies.
Profusion of white, albino prairie
I’m not going to just sit here
staring at this empty page like the first time
I saw the cover of the Beatles’ white album
and my first wife on acid.
I’m not going to o.d. on all this white
rejectionism that sticks its nose up
at all colours of the rainbow
or look at it like the last thing a junkie sees
like an overexposed flashback of his life
before he passes out permanently
like a snow globe that’s learned to breathe underwater.
I’m not going to freeze to death
like a blizzard in a syringe.
I’m going to piss on it and bleed on it
and cast my shadow upon it
like an extra dimension
that knows how to stand up for itself
like a heretic at the fire stick of a stake
who rubbed all that’s suspiciously
homogeneous and pure about death the wrong way
just to get something going
that would spread like wild fire
and leave a mark upon life as indelibly black
as this page is intolerably white.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHALL NOT MISTAKE THE SILENCE


I SHALL NOT MISTAKE THE SILENCE

I shall not mistake the silence
of a small town on a winter night
when only the cold stars
work the nightshift of the lightless windows
for the mordancy of a ruined bell.
I will not fletch the arrowhead of the kingfisher
in its own feathers to strike it down
as if life were merely the art of knowing
how to use others against themselves.
I will not drive
the first crescent of the waxing moon
like a tusk into war with the waning heart of the last
for forgetting where it came from
and where it must go to die.
But I remember what Muhammad said
and the early Muslims under Omar
the second caliph of Islam took to heart,
the angels won’t visit a town at four in the morning
if anyone in it went to bed hungry.
Lack of bread was a sin against the whole community
if you kept the fact to yourself
when every door was knocked upon and asked,
so as not to deprive the people of the angels’ blessing.
And they felt this for real
not in the half imitational touristy way we do
as if we were just passing through town
looking for tea and antique butter churns
we could buff our coke in
as soon as we got to Peterborough
or Havelock, to pick up the go-train to Toronto.
They didn’t horde their lack of anything.
But now we’re all standing in line
shoulder to shoulder with angels at the food bank
trying to second-guess who it is we should thank
if there’s anyone to thank at all.
And you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone
who went to sleep tonight in this small town
who wasn’t hungry for something
they’d be ashamed to admit to their neighbours.
And since the angels have mingled with the daughters of men
and Enkidu has lost the ability to talk to the animals
and Gilgamesh lost his one organic chance
of shedding one skin for another
like a waterclock on the moon
to an opportunistic serpent
who took advantage of him
while he was catching his breath,
and thereby rendered those
closest to the earth immortal and not us,
I’m going to crunch through the snow
like I’m walking on eggs through a field
in a clearing among the quiescent pines
on the highest hill on the Scotch Line
just before you get to Westport
and as indefensibly human, fallible, and brief as I am
compared to the lifespans of the stars
and the rocks in these fields
that broke the tooth of the plough
and the spirit of the ploughman
for thinking it could dislodge and wound them
like the Fertile Crescent
when even the glaciers tried but couldn’t,
I’m going to sit here on a fallen tree and wait
for the stars to divulge the esoteric teachings
of their nocturnal perspective on life.
But I’m not going to impugn the night air
as sharp and unfeeling as a diamond cutter’s eye
for its lack of angels
or excoriate the frightening absence
of any explanation as to why
all we’ve been left with
to show for the centuries we’ve laboured
in those unpropitious star fields
or these underfoot with the dead
in the cold-hearted cemeteries and fields around Perth
to make the earth bring forth its bounty
is nothing but fools’ gold in the sky’s dead pan eyes.
Now you see it.
Now you don’t.
Like me among the living.
And those who aren’t.
Empty spaces between the stars
like frames that have had their pictures cut out
like the bad parts of constellations that used to hang there
blind-folded face to the wall with their backs turned
to a firing squad of fireflies.
I can tell by how wrecked the pines are
even though the moon is applying itself like a poultice
to their fractures and wounds,
that the wind’s really put them through it this time
and that life is grave and violent and serious.
You can poeticize the facts
but picking up the skull of a baby racoon
like a moon rock that reminds you of the paintings
of Georgia O’Keeffe
and a woman you once lived with
who was deeply influenced by her work,
you can deny, distract, or abstract yourself
anyway you want for awhile
but sooner than later it hits home
that this small animal,
this empty nugget of bone
was once such as you
who felt the bewildered miracle of being alive
to sense it could turn into a curse at any moment
to make things cruelly and abundantly clear
wonder’s no more of an excuse
in the eyes of the uncompromising
unarticulated spontaneity of its laws
than ignorance is.
And you realize
how futile and twisted
the wildflowers seem in the snow,
and how life keeps blowing smoke in death’s eyes
like warm breath on the cold night air,
a gust of stars, a ghost or two,
the million silk seeds of the milkweed,
and the terrible finality that confronts the temporal
with every breath, every step we take.
From the moment anything’s born
even its own afterbirth can turn on it.
And what makes it ambivalently worse
is that’s it’s beautiful being here.
The stars, the juniper,
and all the little tracks that radiate
like aberrant lifelines out of them,
the groundwillow, the snow, moonlight
on the last gasp of leaves on the dead aspen,
the eerie wailing of a young porcupine
that isn’t used to the solitude
and climbs a tree to go off intermittently
like an air raid siren that isn’t sure of itself,
and won’t know what there really is to be afraid of
until it’s too late to evade it,
and not least of all nor different from these
the idea of angels not visiting a town
where anyone goes to bed hungry at night.
So could be a curse, could be a blessing
as an old Chinese boatman used to say,
and maybe this godless freedom
the angels don’t show up for anymore
is the greatest gift and grace of them all,
the third wing on the bird
that no one ever looks for,
the middle extreme of the immensity
that’s wholly open
to creative interpretation between us
like the dead souls in the bodies of Canada geese.
My eyes include the stars in their story
and the stars include my story in theirs.
Same with pioneers, baby racoons,
the moon among the wounded pines
making plaster casts
to mend their fractured limbs,
or that gathering of solitudes
along the narrative theme of a river
that makes for small towns like Perth
where everybody’s been talking for two centuries
about going somewhere else
as if their canoes were always half in
and half out of the water,
one cloven foot on Devil’s Rock
and the other stretched so far out over the Tay River
it thinks it’s got wings on its heels
and keeps trying to migrate with the water birds.
But with all the gates and locks,
canals, bridges, dams and waterwheels
you’d get the impression
Perth was running a prison for water
that’s been given a life sentence
without a chance of parole or appeal.
We’re better than beavers
at brainwashing water to go
wherever we want it to
even against its will.
No doubt a reflection of the temperament
of the first people to build in this place.
Make something in the vastness of this solitude
that was recognizably useful.
Build a town.
Turn the dangerous wilderness
with a weapon in its hand
into a tool everybody could use and understand.
The swords of retired British half-pay officers
into imperial plough shares
in the hands of Irish immigrants.
Giant insects of hay balers and iron rakes
rusting in the fields with horse faced tractors
like an extinct species slowly being engulfed
by the reclaimed starfields of the end times
returning to the wild as the wind
and maple saplings change
the expressions on their faces
to something more relaxed and reassured
than military, resourceful and precise.
Displaced people like me show up out of nowhere
And after they’ve stopped asking everyone
where this place is on a starmap of the multiverse
they begin to ask
who is this place
and it’s at that moment
the graves all over town
and those lost under maple leaves
along narrow trails deep in the woods
with the names of children on them
over by Black Creek
give up their dead like the sea
gives up a message in a bottle from the past.
And you can hear them gibbering in the birch leaves
silvered by the wind with excitement in the moonlight
as if they were all clapping hands in anticipation
of some big insight into what became of them
and of what they did and didn’t do.
It’s only fair when you’re finished
looking through the telescope
at how unimaginable it all is
to give the ghosts a chance
to look into their future as well
so they can see that you’re living what they did
story after story, death after death,
that the cones of the jack pines
still wait for a forest fire
to open their eyelids
even after twenty years of dreaming
to weep their seeds in the ashes of their urns.
So my big idea
around four o’clock on a Wednesday morning,
remembering that story about the angels
and not really caring
whether I sort the chaff from the grain,
the hungry from the fat,
the scales from the feathers,
thinking every good story
has its villain as well as its hero,
its black holes and its radiant star clusters,
its poison oak and its New England asters,
and that’s what makes
for the character development
of our place in the universe,
I’d add a spider thread
like the tiniest filament of a tributary sub-plot
to the main theme of a dreaming town
eleven miles away
and let it find its own way around
like a night creek flowing into deeper waters
where an intensely visual imagination
actually does things in the depths of reality
with the slightest of radical adjustments to its roots
that no one ever suspects
by the time the effects come into bloom.
I’m going to unspool my heart like a fire kite
caught up in the wind like one of Van Gogh’s stars
until it hovers like a flying saucer
where the angels used to appear over the town of Perth
and though I know I’m making a farce of myself
trying to live up to an enlightened legend
of the common humanity
of our most contagious emotions,
just for one clear night
like an impossible probability
I’m going to feather myself in fire
like a fact in the image of Icarus
and whether it’s real or not,
take an angel’s place,
and in its huge absence
bestow as many unconditional blessings
as I can get away with
under the eyelids of the sleeping town
like pine-cones sowing the fires of life
in the nurturing ashes of those
whose homely contribution
to the story at hand
is to know how to burn out
like a demonic poet
and hope somehow you got the job done
that no one who wasn’t
at least as half as mad as you could.

PATRICK WHITE

MYSTIC REGENCY

Blue hole in a swarm of afflicting emotion,
I cannibalize my own event horizons,
to turn off the glare of the lifelight
that boils my brain in delusional bleaches
that present themselves as the truth.
I have known nothing
but the fragility of a tolerable hell since I was born
so I am not fooled into believing
anyone stands on more than quicksand.
And yes, there are women and stars and flowers,
orchids in the shadow of an outhouse,
eclipses that draw the veils
off faces and hearts like shadows and eras,
gold in the bones of extraordinary people
who move like swans across the mind
easy in the grace and dignity of their excellence,
and sometimes, for brief islands of serenity
I am one of those, but only briefly
and only long enough for me to disallow myself
the luxury of thinking I’ve arrived anywhere.
If fireflies were once
the souls of unbaptized children, still-borns and embryos
flirting with the night for salvation, now
they’re the unbound abacus of joy
that has lost count of the days and nights
I’ve stood by myself before a winter window
and looked out into the darkness
and wondered if I am
what I seem to myself
or some other man
I’ve been looking for all these years
better than I am, more courageous,
able to absorb the bitter light
and sweeten it like wine. I can endure
the miseries and sorrows, I can act
when there is call to act, and I can see
into the dark corners
where the spiders age their poisons without malice,
and I can be a tree in the morning
just before moonset, and hear in every bird
the lonely bell of blood that rings like time
advancing the night with departure;
and feel the incredible onceness of being alive,
the igneous beauty of the black virgin
buried in the wound of my own mortality,
and the terrible longing that arises and wants her forever
knowing she’s unattainable and yet prefers this folly
over every other delirium of desire,
certain only of my own demise in the attempt
and the fanatical universe that decrees it
as if it were heresy to try,
but never, never in those depths
have I ever understood so much
as a hair on her head, not even
an eyelash of insight to show for all my agony, not
a word from her lips
for all that I have sung and seen of her,
that wasn’t a falling rose-petal, a kiss upon the skull
that gapes at her feet
like the cold stone
of a full October moon rising over
the lean fields, the empty silos
of my devoted desolation like a crown.

PATRICK WHITE