Thursday, April 26, 2012

I WILL NOT BEGGAR MY VOICE


I WILL NOT BEGGAR MY VOICE

I will not beggar my voice to plead for spare thorns
from the bloodbanks of the docile roses.
Nor will I remove those from my hands
or the strawberry of my heart
like the broken fangs of old tattoos
I came by honestly in a prison of somnambulists
who kept their trigger finger
on the first crescent of the moon
to make sure nobody got the last word in
even in their sleep, whatever that meant to them.
And the sun is shining gloriously, albino peach,
azure blue of Alpine eyes, the sky,
and nothing within reach I want.

Four days now this dolorous bell
recast from the swords I’ve plunged through my heart
to remain honourable, and save face
like my empty place at the table below the salt,
making me feel as if I were only an elegy shy of grieving
without knowing why or for whom.
Me, the world, another, unknown, or the cosmic wound
that has deepened with the passing years
and has learned to worship the enlightened arrowhead
of the human condition it’s buried in like sacred scar tissue?

Five days ago I was inestimably young again, a meteor
slashing across the nightsky, all light and fury,
writing alif on my flesh in Kufic script as if
I were about to make myself a blood brother to the moon.
And I brought oxygen with me like a renewable atmosphere
to forgive my intensity, and a big, wide, open space
where the crazy sages and their lilaceous initiates
could chill out like waterlilies in a thinktank
where they could say anything they wanted
they didn’t have to mean twice. I was
a quick-witted thief of fire coming in through
the back window of the house of life like a grave-robber
with only a firefly for a flashlight
and my own intuition for a starmap
wherein lies the buried treasure under the feet of the gods.

But the sadness of the seer and the seeker
has descended upon me like a cloud of unknowing
and the mountain I was climbing has disappeared
as if it just evaporated into thin air, and, despite the fact
I still give off enough radiance even as a white dwarf
that imploded on itself turning the light around
and going deep inside, eyebeams shining
in all eleven dimensions of hyperspace at once,
I can’t help lighting up as much of hell
as I do of heaven in my search for the source of myself
as if neither I nor it exist except as the habit
of an old relationship that has kept us too long apart.

PATRICK WHITE

MY HANDS WERE ONCE


MY HANDS WERE ONCE

My hands were once the afterlives of birds

that caressed the cheeks of the sky
and brushed back the wind from its eyes,
and took a finger to intercede with a tear
not to start a pilgrimage without a little laughter,
and I am of the stuff of three stars
and a fire in my loins
that inseminated space with planets
and wrought red iron into bells of blood,
and leaned on calcium for ladders of bone
and taught the four-armed shivas of carbon to grasp life
and dance for the wheat and the grapes and the poppies,
and man lying down with woman
in waters urged by the fires of thought
furiously rooted in the gardens of the stars.

I am the ancestor and offspring of everything
and even my solitude is the loneliness of the mountains
sleepwalking over their own seabeds,
and the way I love, a trigger of oxygen,
and the way I see, a whisper of time and space,
a feather of moonlight dipped in the ink of the night.

I have within me,
deep in the vaults of my wounds,
swords from the wars of the grass and the trees,
and words that sang like arrows in the sacred groves
to answer why I live and what I’m looking for
and why all my foundation stones are shoes worn out with roads,
and who is it looking back at me like a dark echo in a dream
to see if I’m coming like a shadow with a voice.

And there are mysterious robes lighter than a breath of silk,
auroras and lightstorms, waterskins of the water-walking stars
that have plied themselves like the rings in the heartwood of a tree,
journals of light and rain, to sailor my spirit in a chronicle of flesh,
and be a brief thing in a brevity of eras, to know
why the tiger dies looking into the open, its eyes
yellow lamps in the bluing of the early morning
as if its death were already achieved a breath behind it
and a man crawls toward a meaning on his knees.

All the deaths are mine, the births, the names,
and my heart is the shrine of the moonrise and the dawn,
the blue honey hive of the stars and the wildflowers in their fields,
and the wind takes down what the mute rocks repeat for my sake,
and every face is a blossom or a leaf or an apple from the bough
of the orchard that seasons my emotions to advent and passage,
to the transformative oceans that drink to the bottom of themselves
and leave their empty cups on the moon to be filled again.
I have within me a beginning and an end
that open like the wings of a single gate
I passed through long before the birth of time
like the prelude of a world I hadn’t read yet
because I hadn’t finished living it in tears and blood,
running my fingers over it like the tender braille of a breast,
lapping it like blood from my own skull to see what kind of drunk I was.

And there are lifelines on the palms of everyone’s hands
valleys, rivers, nerves, creases, roots, deltas, lightning
that together make a map to every dream I’ve ever lived,
all the tragedies and joys of fugitive spirits
trying to shoot the rapids with a broken oar,
and secrets that put a finger to the lips of the dead
like the horizontal threshold of a man who stands
like an infinite pause in the doorway of waking up
and just looks at himself with nothing special in mind,
a commotion of swallows in the radiant spoons of last night’s rain.

But there’s you now, who is not me,
because I long for you like a tide longs for its island,
and can find nowhere within myself the likeness of your face,
and though I know the water knows you like an ancient migration
it leaves no trace of your vines on the lips of its waves,
and there are skys where you shine among the stars for hours
where I’ve found threads of your shadow
torn on the thorns of the constellations
like rivers unravelled from your wilderness skin,
and even once I found your footprint like a boat on a beach
but you were not in it, and the emptiness was out of reach.

And I think if I find you, if I look hard enough,
if I stare into space as still as a lizard or a telescope,
if I check every leaf the doves bring back in their beaks,
every eyelid of snow that lowers the pines into sleep,
and lace the wind with fragrant spells and tragic pleas,
if I can break the code of the rocks that ore their silver secrets
like love-letters, like poems, deep in the throat of the earth,
if I grow new eyes for the seeing from the oldest wines of my being,
and the sky has to turn black forever not to have you pale like a comet,
not to lose you like a chandelier of fireflies in a galaxy,
not to reach out and touch you like the creatrix of the creator,
I can part from this life like a gift I left in the night on the stairs.

PATRICK WHITE

HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY


HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY

Heal softly, lover, burn gently,
the moon is full on your windowsill,
and the stars haven’t gone down
over the eyes of your bells
or made a fool of your tears
over a jest of ashes. You are
the nightbranch that reaches for me
and I’m the bird that returns
to your cherry chandeliers,
the ripe goblets of your fire-plums,
and the stars in the quince of your eyes.

And there are blackberries in your blood
thorns and vines, simmering eclipses
broken gates and lonely doorways
where I’ll always come to shine,
where I’ll wait like a ghost beyond death
for the eyelids and bridges
in the breath of your wine.
Eternity isn’t time enough
to hold the sea I bear you
nor a mountain robed in snow
nor a valley heeding voices in the depths,
more than a wound and a toy
to the love I feel for you.
Heal softly, lover, hear me, see
in this dreamtime of the flesh,
how the lanterns
of the lady slippers glow with honey
that fill the hives with light,
and the doe sleeps softly
in the silver grass that jewels the water,
and the fireflies outlive the brass
of graver monuments than these
that write our names on the moon in shadows.

I say it in bees and bruises and orchids
in apples and eglantine,
in roads and doors and thresholds,
in skulls and scars and sunspots,
in grapes and scarlet runners,
in the slips of the cucumber seeds,
and the lips of the velvet borage
that kiss and overflow the stone,
you’re the harp in the throat of time
the spider weaves
to hear the morning play.

No widow of burnt guitars,
no journal of summer
pressed between the pages
of the nightshift shales,
no blood on a chain,
or raven lost in the rags and ribbons
of her own black sails, not
frost on a garden that fails,
or a lock that’s lost it keys,
or a rock that grieves for its plundered ores,
you are the candle and the seal
of all my mystic urgencies,
the gentle thief of my confessions
at the circuits and sessions
of a doomed man’s last appeal
to die in the bay of your arms,
a dolphin, a bottle, a snail
that craved its way to you.

Heal softly, lover, turn with the herbs
that follow the sun like clocks
and when your day is done
bathe in the dusk with the birds
that fly through the air like autumn,
and scented by the apricots
and peacock blues that pour out of my heart
like the eyes and inks of a prelude,
a painter, a pitcher of words,
rise from your ancient solitude renewed
and dressed by the wind
in your scarves and veils,
in your nets, your shawls and auroras,
in anklets, chokers, loops and chains
in your nebulae and orbits
and the lunar rain of your earrings,
wait for me as I will wait for you
where the nightjar sings
to celebrate his lover’s soft approach
with every quill and feather of his wings.
And no world will deceive us,
no flame expire, no radiance cease,
no fracture mar the jubilant fire
that recast its heart in hell
to love you long and well.

PATRICK WHITE