Sunday, May 6, 2012

O THIS MORNING MORE THAN EVER


O THIS MORNING MORE THAN EVER

O this morning more than ever
I want to disappear into my life
like a bird into the blue oblivion
of a migration of one
that’s never coming back.
Things aren’t solid.
They’re real.
And tonight I will appeal again
to the subtle intelligence of the dark matter
that resonates throughout space
like energy musing upon itself at rest
after long labour
to let me evaporate with the stars
like a breath somebody took
deeply into themselves
and then breathed out.
Did my eyes sweeten the windows
they looked through like women?
Did my looking help ripen the stars?
Strange wounds.
Stranger scars.
There’s no end
to the myriad afterlives of water
that a human lives through
like the weather
of an undiscovered sea
and time just keeps
carrying things forth into the carrying forth
like a clepshydra of severed heads
bleeding like buckets
one into another.
An alphabet of prophetic skulls
that never finish a sentence
because the things we say
already have more in common
with the dead
than they do with the living
from the very first word
that falls from our mouths like an apple.

If I have spoken in tongues and symbols
and mixed occult elixirs
like secret constellations
to heal the injured night
my voice never forgot
that it was a mere gesture of moonlight,
a mystic adagio of picture-music
dancing alone in its own shadows.
And if I went crazy in the pursuit
of an earthly excellence
it was just to pass the time.
Anyone with a spirit needs a cosmic hobby.
Anyone with a mind
needs to let go now and then
like a universe that expresses itself completely
and then stands a human up
like a finger to the lips of a prolonged silence.
And what can you say
to those with a heart
that wait for blood to return
like the wind to their sails
with good news
like oxygen from Atlantis
that things are beginning to look up
except drink up
until you’re sober as dry land again.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator
at the equinoctial colure
and it’s spring again
in the northern hemisphere
where the crocuses
are poking their noses
through holes in the snow
like bruises beginning to bloom.
If there is no wonder in your love
you will never know
the profound delight
of being grateful for your life
and the stars won’t humble you
when you ask the night who you are
into knowing what they do.

Stop listening to everything with your mouth
and sit down beside the fountain
like a road or a sundial
that’s found its way back
and hear what your ears
have been saying for years
about the coin you lost in the mindstream
like your passage across the river of death
coming up like the moon
over your left shoulder
to take your breath away.
Wisdom renounces the wise
and therein lies enlightenment.
Ignorance embraces the fools of the spirit
and there are no words for it.
The best is clarity.
Clarity is all.
This is a doorway.
This is a wall.
And this is all the gold of India
I would give if I could
to sit down with Hafiz
by the banks of the Ruknabad
among all those Persian roses
and steal musical riffs from the stream
to say what we impossibly mean
to the young slave girl
with the mole on her cheek
who’s learning to speak our language like a muse.
If I have longed for things all my life
as if they were out of reach
it was one of the dark jewels of my childhood
that died like an eye for a lack of light
that taught me
longing is more creative
than fulfilment
and the nightbird
on its broken branch alone
sings like a wine closer to home
than all the daylight choirs
of happier wings in the vineyard
that inspires the liars into blossoming
like loveletters on the wind
they don’t know where to send.

So I tell them without believing
they know what I’m talking about
to take a page out of the orchard’s book like I do
and when spring’s in the air
send them everywhere.

PATRICK WHITE  

AND SHOULD I RECALL WHOSE EYES


AND SHOULD I RECALL WHOSE EYES

And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,
and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies
a moment there and gone and come again like light
in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift
wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,
where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried
in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,
trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,
where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,
out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,
here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,
and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,
waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,
the waterclock in the nightbird’s song of longing?

And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her
when she was brave with hunger and my body
all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands
and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies
that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,
and though it was not wise to begin a new life
on the last night of the past we were ending together,
like a bell and a cannon that had been melted down
from the same dark ore of a life we were cut out of
like a wound in a loveletter we left unsigned for one another,
because good-bye was harder to write than just to let things go,
what words could I use that weren’t already
denuded of their shining like a windfall
of black dwarfs on the windowsills of time,
and the stars that night that clung to the sky
like bubbles in the evanescence of glass
or the grass to our flesh, all washed off now
as if they were grime, the quiet patina of time
gilding the dust like rainbows on the wings of flies?

And the wind asks, and the water sylphs want to know
and the wild willows are holding their breath like a veil
and the Tay is pulling a curtain of water aside in its wake
to hear about another stranger the earth swallowed
like a sacred syllable in the mouth of a snake
that envied the waterbirds their wavelengths and wings,
and though the skeletal birch and prophetic skulls
in the riverbed plead like the end of a dream
for one more lullaby in the ghost story of the moonrise,
I show them the black pearl of my heart
lustrous as hard coal to burn again in the furnace of dawn
on the dark side of the moon in partial eclipse
as I weep like a dragon for the secrets I keep
like myths of origin in the urns of things that are gone
like the irrevocable flightfeathers of the words and waterbirds
under the lost petals of fire that bloom in the eyes of the flower moon.

PATRICK WHITE