Friday, April 27, 2012

WIRED TO LOOKING FOR GARDENS OF EDEN


WIRED TO LOOKING FOR GARDENS OF EDEN

Wired to looking for Gardens of Eden at the wrong end of my dopamines.
Want to move back to the country
and live in a secluded place
you couldn’t find unless I led you there.
Want to take pride again
in knowing all the names of the trees and stars and flowers
as if they all lived in the same small community
of intimate immensities that I do
like pebbles on the edge of an avalanche.
Tired of playing Russian roulette with the asteroids.
Want to live somewhere even the animals know
the plants know more about healing than they do.
And it would be great
to have a woman who knows how
to think and feel and make love there with me
to laugh at what a brilliant idiot I am
to know how to make soap out of the sap of flowers
that smell like their names.
Bouncing Bet.
Pride of London.
Lady at the Gate.
I’m not looking for purple noons and honeybees.
I’m not trying to make a big splash like Basho’s frog in Walden Pond.
Just want to lie down in the tall yellow grass of a September hillside
and feel like a freshly baked loaf of bread
cooling on a windowsill
like a philosopher’s stone
as the sun goes down over the hill
and the dust of many roads
gets in the eyes of my starmaps
like gusts of stars
that makes them water with the wonder
of being here at all to know how lost and homeless I am
even in the depths of the dark womb that first imagined me like water.
I cling like a tree to my lucidities
and I’m rooted in the light
as much as I am the dirt
and I sprout poems and paintings like flowers and leaves
and even when I’ve been struck by lightning
the dead branch blooms like the moon
and you can hear the drums of silver apples
marshalling at my feet
like a troupe of white-winged horses.
Like the pulse of the windfall
when death first entered the garden
to let me know how alive I am
in this present moment
that has no death or birth in it
no beginnings
no ends
and goes on forever
as the only feature of time
that doesn’t need a calendar.
But I’m not waxing Biblical about the brevity of days
and I’ve always been grateful
that I was born too stupid to be a cynic
and looking up at the stars from anywhere
one of the greatest wonders of life to me
is that so few people are amazed.
They’ve never listened with their eyes to the night
so that when their eyes speak
they don’t understand
the mother language of the light
and the fireflies forget how to talk to the stars
and everybody’s looking for an interpreter
to tell them the meaning of things.
They don’t know how to enjoy
being alone
with everything they don’t understand.
That’s why I like New England asters and purple loosestrife.
That’s why I like being kept at home by snowbound roads
and unanswerable fires.
I want to sit at a carved picnic table
under a locust tree in the morning
when it’s in full bloom
and humming with thousands of bees
and wonder aloud in a poem that’s writing me why
whenever you find nectar
there’s always thorns
as if my life depended upon it.
I want to approach my material confinement
with the suppleness of water
given that’s what I mostly am
and have no fear of spiritual evaporation
after I’m dead
and gone beyond into
the transformative darkness of my original watershed
because I’ve seen the same thing happening to the shapeshifting stars
that everyone says are fixed.
I am not deceived by appearances
into believing there’s any kind of reality behind them
as if a mirage were lying to a desert.
Water’s no less of a window
when it reflects the moon on its surface
than it is in the depths of the sea
that grows it like a pearl.
If you can only see with the eye
and not through it
as Blake suggested
then you’re inundated with visuals
as impersonal as the camera lens
that follows you through the city
like an upgraded form of state shadow.
But out in the country where no one’s watching
but the occasional squirrel
once you let the light in
your seeing isn’t just
a phenomenological reaction
to photonic randomness
but a creative response to chaos
that makes images out of visuals
and symbols out of visions
and facts out of purposeless experience
like tiny mouse skulls
and abandoned herons’ nests
that don’t make a liar
out of your imagination.
I want to live somewhere in peace
without thinking I’m selfish or a coward
to observe the world around me
as if it were the expression
of the beautiful absurdity
of this reclusive artistic discipline
that keeps making me up as it goes along
to fill in the lyrics
of a half-forgotten song
it’s singing to itself like water.
I’m tired of the gibbering of the sacred monkeys
who don’t know what’s holy about life
unless it’s washed in blood.
I’m tired of the intrusion of the good and bad
into my solitude
as if the mob
and the government
civilization
culture and education
had a right to homogenize
the taste of life in my mouth.
Not the same.
Not different.
Not exclusive.
Not effacing.
I’m sick of gaming the rackets of life
for my daily bread.
Sick of the maggots
laying claim to the pedigree of butterflies.
Sick of the tapeworms
trying to convince me they’re spinal cords
and shoelaces
or downed powerlines that are the envy of cobras.
Sick of never underestimating
the violence and ignorance of humans
without always being right.
Are there ants that go to sleep hungry tonight?
Are there bees in the hive without honey?
Just want to walk out late at night up to a high field
with a broken gate
by myself
or with someone else
that hasn’t been closed in years
and delight in going creatively mad under the stars
exalting in the radiance of human eyes
in an exchange of lucidities
that proves we are not strangers to the light
here on earth
or in any other place
where we greet each other like guests without a host
wondering why we are gathered here to ask.
My heart is torn under its own weight
and all my dreamcatchers
have turned into unsustainable spiderwebs
by accumulation.
My soul is the swan of the full moon
unfeathered on dark waters
by a snapping turtle
that keeps rising from its depths like the world.
I’ve walked so long down this long road on crutches and stilts
it’s forgotten the feel of my feet
and all the mystic auroras of my spirit
robe me in meat
and chameleonic anxiety.
Sick of technological progress
that is the equal and opposite reaction
to the devolution
of what’s beyond comprehension
into the truth
into wisdom
into knowledge
into facts
into data
into lies
that upstage the myths of the stars
with mutative alibis.
Want to go somewhere I can scream
and the hills will understand the echo.
Want to go somewhere I can look at the spring columbine
growing out of the green moss toupee
on the lichen-covered rock
and not see it covered in the blood of children.
Want to walk out into the darkness
even on a starless night
and feel like a vulnerable mortal
made wary by the innocence of natural dangers
and not the deranged perversities
of ghouls off their meds in the cities.
Want to get away from the maggots and tapeworms
that govern the body politic within and without
like the corrupt flesh of a dead horse
that died of exhaustion
pulling the milkwagon uphill.
Don’t want to walk any more roads that turn into quicksand.
Just want to kick my cornerstones like pebbles
down a dusty lane
as if I had all the time in the world
not to explain to anyone
why it seems so crucial
to get the colours of the New England asters right.
And I know it’s a dream.
I know it’s an illusion.
A mirage of the way I feel.
But sometimes even water
is wounded by this desert
where the only roads are snakes
that make paths in the sand and the stars
and it takes a mirage to heal.
Sometimes it’s better
to let yourself be decieved by appearances
to be relieved by the compassion
inherent in the way things seem to the mind
like a cool herb on a severe burn
than go blind.

PATRICK WHITE

IMAGINE ME


IMAGINE ME

Imagine me being here now this very moment just as I am slipping through my own disembodied awareness like a silver dolphin alone in a sea of shadows on the moon on the eyeless side of the mirror. And you. Just as you are. Doing the very same thing because it’s in everybody’s nature to swim through themselves as if they were shoreless, looking for islands in the mindstream among the stars. To be free. To delight in the mystery of exploring themselves like a new medium they discover they have an unknown talent for beathing life into. Beyond reality, beyond delusion, beyond enlightenment and ignorance the knowable human divinity of pure sentience omnipresently at home with itself like the homeless everywhere. Everywhere within yourself even at midnight can’t you see the aura of the gold in the ore that dreams of being dug up? Or how the fireflies are always trying to get your attention like tiny lighthouses off the coast of continents that have already run aground like mountains? Or gone down with Mu and Atlantis? How many lost civilizations are waiting in the overgrown jungles of yourself for you to let the dead use your voice to decipher their ghosts at a seance of whispering hieroglyphs? If the one word the wise never use is complete then you’re a fool to think there’s an end of you in sight. But that shouldn’t discourage you from looking.

And isn’t that what we were born for? To see and be happy. To attain a transformative insight into the tragic innocence of seeing itself that let’s the witness go free to delight in its eyes without accounting for anything? Even if you’re trying to wash your reflection off your face like a deathmask in a mirage in a desert of stars. Even if you’re scooping up the moon to drink from your hands like a lifeboat in the rain. Even if you’ve crawled into one of the wormholes of space like a prophet in the belly of a snake whispering in Eve’s ear things that weren’t meant to be heard by anyone other than yourself. Even if you’re the most fucked-up, twisted, mutated, incontravertible perversion of yourself, a black dwarf that ate its own children after it had starved them to death by keeping its light to itself. Even if you’re dropping breadcrumbs like asteroids everywhere you go or threading the eye in the needle like a spider in a labyrinth to figure a way out of yourself like genetically inherited dice. You’re still not a victim of gravity. Whatever excruciating transformations you must undergo like the sea enduring its own weather. Nothing can get you down. Nothing can bring you up. Because the whole universe in all ten directions is wired to surround-sound listening to itself like an old recording of what it had to say at the beginning of things before it discovered its voice. But it’s not a Big Bang when nothing’s come into existence yet to compare it to. It’s not the sound of one hand clapping or the crash of a tree in a forest when there’s no one there to hear it. And even if you’re holding on to your religion like a superstitious grudge against the world. And it may be hard at first to discover the universe God the Zeitgeist the Cosmic Id whatever you want to call it never had a motive from the very first that wasn’t invasively human. But that’s just you being godlessly unconvinced of your own existence. That’s just you trying to believe in your own inconceivability like an established fact. That’s just you trying to spread your angel wings over the earthly turbulence of learning to fly on your own.

So what if you’re a dead civilization before you’re seventeen? That doesn’t make you any less intriguing than the living ones. It’s the tragic heroes we remember the most not the ghosts of the bookends who lived to the end of their long and boring biographies wholesome as twelve grain bread. So what if you’re gnawing on yourself like a bitter black crust of starwheat? You’re still shining. You’re still breaking yourself into loaves and fishes. Some people are bright and light with stars in their eyes and smiles that can only be measured in lightyears. And some are dark and deep as Solomon’s mines hiding their wealth from the graverobbers in gnostic caves of black matter no one’s thief enough to enter. Here’s a Zen koan I just made up specifically for you. If a thief stole the moon from your window would your window miss it? If you ever find an answer that doesn’t let you in on the know as immediately as your mind. Let it go. It wasn’t meant for you.
You get up every morning and you open your eyes like storefronts and informers and for all that appeared and disappeared in plain view before and through them have you ever heard them complain that anything was ever missing from the seeing? Whatever you’re looking at. Awake or dreaming. Whose light is cast over everything and then withdrawn like day and night? When it’s gone. Stars. When it’s here. Flowers. When you fail at finding happiness you discover peace as a way of consoling yourself. When you fall a god or two shy of perfection you master an earthly excellence that’s out of reach of the angels. Cornerstones and quicksand. Everything here stands solidly on the unsubstantiated reality of everything else. The defeated don’t stand like shadows in the victor’s light. An eclipse isn’t midnight on the sun when the clock strikes Cinderella with a pendulum like an executioner’s ax. You can call it praying if you like but from here it looks like swanning on the block for betraying yourself.

Or is it Chicken Little when the sky’s falling in all around her like Leonid meteor showers? Did you raise a false alarm? Did you let the world down? Have your zeniths caught up to their nadirs like snakes with their tails in their mouths? Zero. Forever. Did it become inconceivably unholy to tempt yourself with the earth’s believable fruits because they fall back on their dark roots like pregnant rain to climb up the waterslide again like clear fountains everyone can drink from like clouds and birds that pass without a trace? Is that blood or lipstick on the mirror? Was your last loveletter a suicide note full of agitated compassion for what you’d done to everyone else by killing them into life with your absence or were you just kidding when you said life was too hard for the living and what’s the point of swimming when the lifeboats are full of the dead?
It’s too late for the Mayan calendar to do the Mayans any good. And Nostradamus’ worst guess on a bad seeing day is just another unenlightened truism at the wrong end of a telescope looking for signs of intelligent life. And maybe we’ll destroy ourselves out of hate and ignorance long before we get any answers that might have prevented the onslaught of doom like a prophetic skull that had spoken. Everything is broken. Fractious. Raptors in rapture they’ve made a comeback at last like Nazis in the Black Forest. Like Dante in a dark wood. Like children all over the planet tonight turning into young men and women who remember war like the scar of a childhood Caesarian that marked them for life like that which has been rent asunder. Like an olive tree by lightning without thunder. Or the Israeli airforce. A flash of insight without wondering what they’ve seen that makes them want to kill themselves in a holy war of mirrors vying for perfection of the reflection of a God that escapes detection like a cosmic Houdini whatever chains straightjackets or suicide vests or religions you want to dress him up in.

So why are you crying like a broken teacup you couldn’t pour the ocean into? Is your mind too big for your skull? Look at how the trees bag all the stars in the sky into the tiniest drop of water and throw a hobo branch over their shoulders like a jolly swagman down under and walk away with the spoils of the victors like a windfall at their feet. You say you’ve lost your purpose for living. But here’s one that’s as purposeful as evolution. Begin. Anywhere. Now. Like a crowning achievement that returns to transcendence by getting over itself.

When misdirection comes to its senses where are you that isn’t always here and now? Because there is no other place to be. If you make goodness the standard of life then you’ll end up practising an occult alchemy looking for a philosopher’s stone to turn maggots into butterflies with the wormy afterlives of people obscenely out of touch with themselves. Knowledge feeds on ignorance and true wisdom doesn’t acknowledge the difference. Great enlightenment doesn’t maintain a teacher. You want to be a star. You want to rise and shine. As well you should. But remember this. The darkness is a star’s best feature. And beauty and meaning and art don’t mean anything to anyone with a heart if they haven’t lived through their own passionate annihilation. You won’t find a phoenix in an urn on a mantle. You want to burn? You’ve got to learn to eat your own ashes sometimes.

PATRICK WHITE

I'VE GONE SOMEWHERE


I’VE GONE SOMEWHERE

I’ve gone somewhere
wherever this is,
and I don’t know how
the roads I knotted to mark the way back
came undone
like a bagful of snakes,
like lightning in a cloud,
ribbons of fire
leaping like wolves
from ripples of wood,
all the targets
stumps of charcoal
in the ashes of the arrows.
I can breathe the whole universe in
with a single breath
and let it out again just as easily.
There are bells in my blood so heavy
they feel like iron oxen
grinding their teeth in the void.
And I am hurt inexplicably
and lonelier than dust in the rain,
and my heart is an apple of wounded magma
pared like the phases of the moon,
and I am trying
to evaporate graciously in my solitude
like a ghost exhaled by a lake
so that no one notices I am gone,
but I keep sinking like a continent
bored with advanced civilizations,
the big bang as flat as the cosmic sigh
when life is nothing more
than the afterbirth
of a hydrocephalic with a hangover
as it seems when I stand
like a winter branch at the deserted window
and peer through the cold clarity of glass
as if the world were no more
than the sediment of time,
the lees of the wine,
the mud of a puddle in turmoil,
the wind shredding
the tree on the moon
with a chainsaw of waves,
the thought brides of an interminable severance
that falls like snow
on the grounded wings of the pine.
I’m trying on coffins like shoes
that won’t blister like sunspots
on the heels of the sun;
I am coronated like an eclipse
in a robe of black air,
and my shadow is snuffing the lanterns
in the depots of the bees
I keep like a hive of stars
working these graveyard shifts
of emergency honey
well before their paling in the light.
I swim toward the lifeboat of the moon for rescue
and it throws me a line
that threads my heart like a hook
I have to push all the way through
like a word that needs to say me.
I’m gilled in the torn nets
of the trawling constellations
like a piece of driftwood
from an uprooted forest
that one day just walked out on itself
like a temple or a throne or a library.
Eventually the doorways just wander away
like the footprints
of freshly dug graves
into a night without eyelids.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING


EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

Even when the road is missing
like the absence of God, or a woman I love,
I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me
to create a way of my own like a river of stars
and for the universe it’s left me
like a travelling companion I couldn’t improve upon.

The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,
I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat
and say my house is your house anytime you call
and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.

And after awhile we’re laughing at ourselves,
rolling in the leaves like the groundswell
of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts
making off with our lives for free as if
we’d just pulled off some cosmic B and E.
without leaving any sign of culpability behind,
except for the joy of our felicitous crime.

And when my moonboat’s in port for repairs
like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of laundry on the line,
I don’t mind being land locked for awhile.
I just take a walk along the shore of the lake
and gather moonlit feathers
from the scales of the waves
that have evolved from raptors into swans,
and binding them together
like Daedalus did for Icarus,
take a joy ride into the sun at midnight
not really caring too much about whether
I’m at zenith or nadir as long
as I’m transiting something akin to a threshold.
The sun can hold Venus on a short leash,
and me on the chain of my spine
like a barnyard dog barking at wolves
trying to tempt it deeper into the night
but the last crescent of the moon
will cut right through them both
like the umbilical cords of a new life
where we can both roam free
like rogue planets from star to star.

Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by day
to a low place looking for fire
from the daylilies with a bucket and an urn,
because I’m so tired of what I’ve had to do
to stay alive for the past fifty years as a serf of poetry
to keep it a calling, instead of a career,
and suffer the consequences of not attending to it
as a business that makes a profit off the stars,
but by night I’m a starling of creosote in a chimney
singing my heart out as if I wanted to eat it
because it has all the virtues of a noble enemy
and there’s no poetry or protein in the junkfood of fame,
though I think that might be a trifle ingenuous.

Impoverished Druid, you lean on a crutch for a tree,
as a flying buttress to your sacred folly,
and running out of time to avoid
a head-on collision with eternity
all your devotions the ghosts of yesterday,
you kick the stool from out under your feet
and garotte yourself from the bough of an oak,
like the berry of a single moon of mistletoe
and the last crescent of a golden sickle just out of reach
of the harvest season of the King of the Waxing Year.

Poor heart, what a battered shoe
of a vital organ you’ve become, a bone box
for the sacred skeletons of hummingbirds and elephants,
a Burgess Shale for the creative fossils and footprints
we both had to evolve through to come to this
inconceivable moment without a time scale
to measure how far it is from then to now
like the last leap of faith of the waterclock of life
into the abyss without a bucket for a safety net
or any deep assurance of even having a bottom anymore
to fall out of the ongoing over the edge of a precipice
as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes
had to seek release from it all and fall
even without a parachute to candle
like an exclamation mark all the way down,
a descent into hell creatively much to be preferred
than stagnating in paradise with nothing but apples to eat.

But still you know you won’t do it, given
the number of times now I’ve come running
with a chair and a rope to let you down
out of the window of a burning building
not knowing whether we were committing suicide
or I was running to your rescue as I always have.

Your daring has always said feathers and falling
has always taken wing like Pegasus before,
and what a wild strange radiant white water ride it’s been
across the high unbounded starfields of the shining
with Vega and Deneb goading us on
ever further like spurs of Spanish silver
just you and me, my blood brother, together
in the vastness of a mutual solitude.

My God, when I think of the flights we’ve taken.
When I think of the things we’ve seen,
and the orchards of sorrow that found more bliss
in the fruit than they did in the blossom.
And what did we ever write about all those stars
that didn’t declare how impossibly illiterate we are
compared to the lyrics of light and time and wonder
they’ve been singing all these lightyears
since I first opened my eyes to why I’m conceivably here,
though here can be anywhere by now like a bird
that loses its bearing under the stars everytime
it tries to get a fix on where it’s going like a photon
jumping orbitals like tree rings in a flash of insight.
When you’re light, when you’re foolhardily alive
you don’t need to pay heed to where you’re going
because there isn’t a single stage, place, or phase
that isn’t the destination of what you’re shining up at.

And I never thought the day would ever come
when sadness would sweeten into wisdom enough
to take pity on the mirrors like the eyes under our lifemasks
when we went down to the river to drink
our own reflections like faces from the lifeboat of our hands,
like a rain of mercy far out at sea far from the sight of land,
when we first began to understand how clarity like unity
can be broken down into little pieces of sand
that reflect the whole universe as readily
in their mystic particularity
as the stars and the sun and the moon do
when they lay their swords and feathers
and flying carpets like wavelengths of light
down in tribute to our third eye weeping its way to the sea.

And you were surprised, admit it, weren’t you,
to find so many white horses like you running ashore,
mustangs from the waves, to check out the new guy’s wings.
And me standing there like an avalanche of winged heels
wondering why I didn’t make as big a splash
and if all we walked away with was a detailed starmap
who could say the journey really wasn’t worth it?
Let the shore-huggers do what they want with it
to find their way around in the dark like fireflies.
Leave it to them. We were ever explorers
from the beginningless beginning to the endless end,
and we’ll rise up again on a gust of stars
caught up like a dust-devil at the crossroads of earth
and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the stairwell
of a star-studded chromosome that could
take a coil of flypaper and turn it into a poem.

PATRICK WHITE