Tuesday, May 29, 2012

SOFTLY, SOFTLY, NOW


SOFTLY, SOFTLY, NOW

Softly, softly, now; here there is no beneath or above, no hell
for miscreant flowers opening for the moon, no ghosts
who can’t find their way back to the grave. No one
is unacceptable in this place where even the dead dig
for the blue bones of heaven, cracking
them open like fortune-cookies
to taste the light gold of the marrow. This is the kingdom
of empty cups waiting to be filled
by the black wine of union that ripened
in the skull-shrines
of a thousand drunken buddhas
begging outside a brothel door
for the same holy candle to show them the way home. People
are seldom grateful for what they don’t know
and thought is only the dog of reality
if you can catch my drift in this back-alley
where I’m dancing with a gust of wind. How lightly
you step off my tongue into your veils and shadows
dropping your masks like petals all over the asphalt
until you can’t be seen. Is that freedom or death; do you
bathe in your grave or your heart
when you remember the sorrows you’ve buried like daggers
in the wounds that widowed you? Do you tremble
like a kite at the end of your own life-line
waiting to be found by the witching-wands of the lightning;
or have you forgotten your madness, the dark jewels
in which you took sanctuary for the night
like an orphan in her longing, the crazy wisdom
that put on the costume of a dead clown
and offered herself to the blind and humourless
like a chessboard? Do you still swim naked in sapphires, raise
gardens of fish on the moon, perform
open-heart surgery on paralyzed serpents
that wake up from the anaesthetic between your legs
like a spring thaw, believing they can walk and then
come crawling back, veteran amputees
demanding crutches? Wild moon on a lonely river, night-lotus,
flesh and stars, every moment of you is origin; why doubt
your own reflection in the mirror of my voice? I’m
not selling snake-oil on the midways of eternity, filling the sails
of a slave-ship and calling it the love-boat; this is not
a wardrobe of auroras I buy up cheap in Montreal
and hawk from the back of a truck in Sunday parking lots. If the words
dance, if the wind plays lightly in the leaves, if the fire sings
and the diamonds flow and the rain falls musically
like phantom fingers on the spotted touch-me-nots, should I impugn
the graces of perception that sing, unseen, in the deep woods
because they fly without a limp, praise without a stutter?
I see in whispers; I hear in glimpses. Nameless affinities rooted in silence
bloom in the saying and fall back into themselves,
fountains within fountains, pursing their waters
to kiss the light as it breaks like glee against them. Fountains,
not pedestals. Deep sky-dwellers ride the helix of their own thermals,
their wings spread from dawn to dawn, and if they build,
they build from the sky down, not footstools, scaffoldings, and temples,
not ladders of bone at the bottom of dry wells, but tents of light
in the secret grottoes of space, supple as life.
Up is not up nor down, down, when you dream in the seed, neither
born nor unborn, yet nothing missing; creation within the Uncreate,
the intimately impersonal holy mother that is born and perishes
with us. I walk this vastness alone; who, then, to impress or pedestal
in this empty, pathless, mouthless, dark bliss of a world
where even the silence is speechless before it? If
the ignorant see the world as an open hat on a lonely streetcorner
begging for change and prizes; let them. That is their hour,
their seeing, their word. All seeing is a kind of love.
Orchids and dandelions alike. All that is loved is seen to be beautiful
but not all that is beautiful is seen to be loved. I see
a blue rose, shedding lives like petals and skies,
night skies, freaked by stars tattooed on heavy eyelids, falling
into dream and destiny. Graffiti Mona Lisa mother Bacchanal,
mad, menstruating, moon-dump bag-lady, I see you
vaulting topless over the horns of lunar bulls in ancient Crete,
or lady of the lake, royal witch-bride, bored with weddings
and vase-tamed bouquets, waiting to grasp the hilt
of magic swords whose power is older than the stones
from which they’re drawn. And there, in the window
of the thirteenth house of the zodiac, isn’t that you
plucking dead leaves off the herbs you grow on the sill, hanging curtains
you’ve pirated thread by thread from old mythologies
and woven again like the moon into light? Crow-weaver,
tell me, have you ever stolen silver from the mirror to heal a wounded vision,
or known an appetite so great, so incomprehensible
it consumed the galaxies like krill? Death is the dark inspiration,
pure energy, radiant and whole, the mute mirror that reflects nothing
that stands before it in an arrogance of forms; the face you wore
before the beginning of faces. Already achieved,
not something up ahead, a black star on a white night, the dark mother
who fills the wombs with gestures of light. Death is the ancient future
that passes instantaneously, the crone-nymph, oyster and pearl,
the miner in the ore that releases the child like a bell. The dream that wakes you
from a dream, the dead tree that gives birth to a bird. Death is
the terrifying abundance, the terrible joy of perfection falling
into perfection, the honey and the horror of the sacrificial wound. The child
that carries her mother in her womb. Death is no less life, no less us,
than a wave is water. Death has no beginning so life is never
finished. One afternoon, in an autumn garden, the air shuddered with mine
and I knew that it was already done like the stars above the flowers
of gardens to come. What death, then, to stare into
that isn’t already under your feet? Wombs, waterclocks, and coffins;
can you tell me the difference? Here’s my skull. Break it.
The bird’s already out singing you like a handful of joy
hurled well beyond itself into the dawn, and in the morning market
among laughter and apples
the phantoms array their illusions.

PATRICK WHITE