Tuesday, April 17, 2012

OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN


OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN

Over and over and over again
you return to me each time
made more beautiful by the pain
I embrace you with
like the aura of fireflies
in the afterlife of the lightning
that was struck by you.
Over and over and over again
I have watched the birds leave in the fall
and come back in the spring
and whether they were coming or going
especially at midnight when you couldn’t see them
high overhead like the souls of the dead
I’ve always heard the same longing in their call
for something I’ve never been able to wholly comprehend
except as the way I miss you
on this journey without end
where the destination isn’t always
the friend of the road
as the stars foretold it would be.
And I don’t know why
I always associate pain with lucidity
like the price of shattered glass
when you hurl the moon through it
from the inside
to let the light in through the damage
and you back into my life again
like the radiant sorrow of a lonely tomorrow
that today already lives in vain
like a weathervane
trying to give the wind a direction
it’s never taken before.
Over and over and over again
I have looked for your hidden mystery
in the history of gone
for some living intimacy that lives on
but I’ve run out of doors and gates and windows
flowers and skies I can leave open
hoping you might find your way back in somehow
from those spaces greater than skin that fit you now
like the dress you were buried in.

The random singularity of death’s one demand
might shake the tree
into the soft hooves of the highest fruit
that gallop off like wild horses
spooked by their own windfall into the silence
but over and over and over again
I turn the fact that you once existed
like a jewel I once knew from the inside
into an act of insight
that over and over and over again
rocks me like the aftershock of an earthquake
as if your death weren’t once but many
and I would live my way through them all
listening to the geese depart at night in the fall
wondering which one embodied your soul
like a star-bound angel in earthly feathers
and whether you noticed me as you left

over and over and over again
standing in the light by the window
a tiny dark figure down below
listening for you in the darkness
like a vase full of ashes
wishing it had wings.

PATRICK WHITE

MAKING PEACE WITH MY FATHER


MAKING PEACE WITH MY FATHER

You could be dead by now.
How would I know?
Last time I saw you
was fifty-five years ago.
My first day of school.
Your last with us.
You’re the little man now, Paddy,
you said
then got on a greyhound bus
in front of Tang’s Pagoda
as I watched the door close
on that fuselage without wings
as if the whale had just swallowed Jonah whole.
The last time I noticed we had the same eyes.
The end of your reign of terror.
As I remember you fifty-five years later
you were brutal, violent, cruel,
a con-man and a drunk.
You hurt people then laughed at their pain.
You were the lethal meltdown of a radioactive brain
that made the grass glow at night
from thousands of miles away
and poisoned the rain.
I went to jail with my mother to bail you out
more often than I was pushed into going to church.
And when you got out
you were always as angry as a killer bee
in the soggy autumn orchard of your hangover.
Life for you as it is for any coward
was one long complaint you took out on us.
My first seven years
I watched as many ambulances
take my shattered mother away for months
as many cop cars washing up on our doorstep
with all those messages in a bottle
that had your name on them
like a federal warrant for your arrest
as I recall the clinking horse-drawn milkwagons
with their coloured cardboard bottle caps
or the tinkling neighbourhood ice-cream trucks.
Remembering you now at this late date
is like fingering the fossils of a Tyrannosaurus Rex
and feeling the faint resonance
of your ferocity even yet
through my fingertips
like a warm-blooded mammal
in the menacing shadow of a reptilian law
whose last judgment was always a jugular in a jaw.
If you’re dead,
if you’re truly dead,
did you die alone?
Did anyone grieve?
Did you change over the years
and become a good man
as righteous as the stroke of midnight
and atone for anything
before you boarded the next bus for the abyss?
Was your last flashback of life
the sunami you drowned in
after your psychological fault lines
flintknapped an earthquake
that brought the whole planet down on us
everytime you barged through the door
back from the bar
and turned a home into an avalanche?
Did you remember your children?
Did you remember me?
Did you ever wonder
how I turned out without you?
Who knows?
Maybe I’m way too late for your funeral
and this wreath of blood and thorns I bring
to lay on your grave
like the bitter irony you fathered in me
is not a fitting obsequy for either of us
because maybe, possibly, improbably
as you aged like an acid
time defanged your thunder
like a white cottonmouth
and the moon took back its crescents
and the lightning began to make crutches of the trees
it used to split like cedar shakes
with double-bladed bolts of light
that scorched so much more
than they ever illuminated in the darkness they returned to.
As if the whole of the little earth I knew then,
my mother, me, my brother, my sisters
sported the wounds you gashed
on everyone’s heart and a skull
like chopping blocks
under your bloodied blunted war-ax.
For longer than autumn’s been keeping time now
with rosaries of geese in passage
like the secret names
of God on the run
for bouncing rubber cheques,
I have carried you around inside of me
like a chromosome in a coffin.
It’s a kind of genetic locket
I sometimes open
to remember you by
when I’m mythologizing my scars
like blackholes among the stars
or the empty eyesockets
on the wailing walls of the dice
you loaded like the prophetic skulls of a bad choice.
And I still don’t know if I’ve come
like an eviction notice
to this dismal place
to condemn you
or exorcise your ghost
I have despised you for so long within me
like the sloughed skin of a snakey oilslick,
the black blood of a hemorrhaging eclipse
that covers everything like an executioner’s hood,
the birds, the sun, the sea,
every tarnished cell of me
in a darkness that won’t wash off.
Or maybe I’ve just shown up again
like Empedocles on Aetna
to jump into the collapsed caldera of your grave
like the last flower.
Ambiguous homage with seven kinds of meaning
to a spent volcano
buried in itself
that once knew how to preserve the dead
in all the twisted shapes of prolonged agony
that has characterized the living ever since.
Every day of my life
I have wanted to give you back your name
like a white cross on a black plague door
that isn’t me anymore
and never was.
Or maybe I should
jump down into your grave and say
Hey, Dad, isn’t this sad for you and me
this is the way we take leave of each other for good
like chainsaws snarling
through the heartwood of the family tree?
Isn’t it just so incomparably sad
that a son being honest as a deathbed
with his father as he dies
over and over again in his imagination
as I do now here beside you
should lean over and whisper into his father’s ear
with a heavy heart that regrets it was ever born to mean it
Hey, Dad, I want you to know
when it’s my time to go
and I get to the other side
of all that was
and can be abandoned
time will heal everything
you did and didn’t do
and all these severed bloodlines
reach their final watershed,
all the weak threads
of what was unbound
like rain in the river
fall into the flowing
and be made whole as strong rope again,
and the eye that offended be plucked out
and an old fist be opened up like the new palm
of a better afterlife than the one we had here,
and reunited families everywhere
break bread together in love and laughter
and every father be a strong rafter
and every mother be a lamp in a tent
and a cool night wind
as intimate and near
as stars in a desert,
and every son
say farewell to his father
as I do now here beside you
on this re-useable illusion of a death bed
where I am trying so hard to listen
to the voices in my heart
instead of the wise-guys in my head:
Father, farewell.
You gave me these empty eyes.
My mother filled them with compassion.
May peace marrow your troubled bones at last
and God soften the stone
upon which you lay your head.
What has passed has passed
like a storm out over open water.
You were my father at noon.
I was your son at midnight.
You withdrew like a shadow
that dreaded the light.
May God grant you a deeper insight
into these lives
we pass along to one another
like candles in the doorway of a dark night
and the courage to see
when they’re blown out
and death comes to sever even this little thread
of earthbound lucidity
that exists like blood between you and me
why even if these eyes of yours you gave me
were washed up like the survivors of a shipwreck
on the eyelids of the same shores
we started out from together,
asked whose son I might be
and who among all the generations
of the unborn and unperishing gathered there
was the road that fathered my journey,
I would answer
my life was a river with only one bank
that flowed from a sea of shadows on the moon.
I would embrace my mother in tears
if I saw her standing there
for all the long, hard, humiliating years
she always sat on the edge of the bed
the last thing at night
before we fell asleep under her eyes
and quietly lowered herself down
like a ladder into a snakepit
so we could climb out
without getting bit by the same viper
that had struck her like black lightning
in the heel in an orchard in spring.
About you I wouldn’t say anything.
I’d swallow my voice like a sword.
I wouldn’t sacrifice a word
on the altar of the silence
that waited like a god
to hear himself named.
I’d shake my head.
I wouldn’t look for you among the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

STEEL TEARS


STEEL TEARS

Steel tears that have hardened out of the April showers
of crystal chandeliers I’ve shed over the years
for others who suffered like me. Pain makes
strange bedfellows, and when you’re twisted up inside
with your umbilical cord wrapped around your neck like a noose
and you know things just aren’t going to come out right,
or strung out like some old shoelace of dna
that’s lost its telomeres at both ends, frayed
and trying to thread the eye of the needle,
because all the cells in your body have risen
from their ashes one too many times. When

some hydra-headed anaconda of suffering
that held you in its coils like childhood,
hunts you down again long after you thought
you’d cut the last head off
like a dandelion gone to seed,
and you see it grinning
like a gleeful malignancy in your sleep
as it crushes the life out of you as if
you were pearl diving for the last gasp
of atmosphere left on the moon,
and you don’t even know why, if you did,
what you did wrong that this background universal hiss
of ancient radiation should have
held a grudge against you for so long
so cold, so vast a vacuum of starless time and space
and then have the guile to plead
that it’s innocence is impersonal
whereas yours is immaterial.

When all your swans are swimming in an oilslick
and the Great Square Of Pegasus is going down
into the La Brea Tarpit like a new moon you were betting on
to secure your passage out of hell like a coin on your tongue
and you come to death and find out
you’ve been tragically short-changed,
and it’s lights out even before the music starts playing
the electric requiem that keeps shorting out
like your own personalized national anthem of one,
and you’re too angry to feel sorry for yourself,
just as a house fire doesn’t ask for water to put it out,
and even when you do coming running, it’s white phosphorus
and it laughs in your face at all your futile heroic efforts
like your reflection in water, and sneers like a nuclear winter
at all your transformations to stay alive creatively against the odds,

you might do what I do and make a mighty effort to dig
the last of my first magnitude stars like spurs into its eyes
the way you do when you’re trying to get a shark to let go,
befriend one of those black holes you alienated from yourself
and ask them to come over and bend time and space a little
and getting a good grip, break its jaws like the pelvis of a wishbone
that got the short end of the stick with the help of a little muscle.

When you find the wings on your heels crushed underfoot
like a killdeer under the weight of the world,
and all your false idols have driven you into exile
like a scapegoat with the sins of the tribes on your back
at the cleansing of the temples in May, and even the Milky Way
sweeps your shining like the gift of an unwanted child
like stars off the stairway to heaven into a dustpan,
don’t stop to ask for an explanation, or as the Buddha said,
don’t ask for the name of the archer
before the arrow’s been taken out, or why
the lightning should kill the messenger like a weathervane
before it’s had a chance to crow at its grand entrance,

come with me, don’t wallow in what you’ve laboured for
and lost like the afterbirth of sorrow, or a wheelbarrow
of what’s been pulled up from the garden like a weed
and heaped on your heart like the death cart
of a spiritual refugee with a starmap to nowhere.

There’s a gate on one hinge, overgrown with wild grape vines
on the far side of the high starfields, that’s an exit out of here
that hasn’t been used by a domesticated animal in lightyears.
And the constellations that burn like shattered mirrors
come to terms with their own tears like gypsies
sitting around their own fires, and break into flower
when you least expect it from the least expected quarter
just to add a little auroral flare to the affairs of the night.
And soon you’ll be up on your feet tripping the light fantastic
in a danse macabre of fossilized constellations
from another era of shining when the whole sky
was a dance floor with a musical sense of timing.

And whatever farce you’ve made of yourself
here in your own mind is the legend
of your own ongoing creative myth of origin there.
And the nails they’ve driven into
your old growth forests here are tenderly removed
and the muzzled chain saws no longer gather
at trunk of the bleeding sequoia
like snarling hunting dogs trying to
break the bones and lap the marrow
of waterproof telephone polls in the making.

Every journey’s a lottery of small steps you take
through a dangerous gate until you’re on the other side
and then you hit your stride like a white-tailed doe of light
the arrows and the shadows of life just can’t keep up to
and take up fletching flowers just to get back to their roots.

I’d tell you a big secret if I could, but saying
nothing about it is the best way to get the point across.
I’m not going to string you along like another spiritual wavelength
from a snake oil salesman who doesn’t even want to taste
his own medicine, too aware of what he put into it,
to take the cure himself like a bath in his own grave.
And I’m not saying the house is on fire, and there’s
only one doorway out to escape being consumed.
You could always jump out the windows of your world view
or stay and hope you’re a phoenix
that can get used to the taste
of eating your own ashes by the urnful
or wait for the prophetic fire-ladders of paradise
to come to your rescue as the windows thaw in the heat
like the pent up tears of an ice-age of bitter emotion.

I’m just saying deep within you there’s a starfield
laid out like an embroidered flying carpet
and at the far end of its boundlessness, there’s a gate
hanging on a single hinge like a killdeer or the loom
of the wild grapevines that weave them and unweave them
like the phases of the moon, and it’s not trying
to keep anything in or out, even if it could
on one wing and prayer, it’s just an entrance to a space,
the pupil of a third eye, where you’re not asked
to scrape the starmud off your shoes when you enter
because even though you feel your roots are homeless
and everywhere you go you’re
walking on quicksand in an hourglass
the trees won’t ever let you forget
you still need somewhere to stand and bloom
and come to fruition like a ripe koan
of compassion and insight into the creative fact
that every beginning is the last step of the return journey home.
Whether anyone’s there to believe it or not.
Or even give it a second thought.

PATRICK WHITE