Monday, June 11, 2012

AND IT COMES AND IT TAKES, IT LEVELS AND IT DEFIES


AND IT COMES AND IT TAKES, IT LEVELS AND IT DEFIES

And it comes and it takes, it levels and it defies.
And not all the sorrow in the world
is enough to cool the burn. Will death make
as big a splash as birth did when it jumped in the pond?
How will you die? At home in bed
with your kids banked around you
like a zodiac of grieving signs, head on
at seventeen into a drunk ambulance
like a suicide you backed into like a ventriloquist
afraid to call your own bluff? Heart attack, cancer,
eating the Angel of Death like the wrong mushroom
in a rainy spring, your extinction, one of seven
horrible oddities of random selection to make the news
like a public health warning not to take the chance?
And you, having just finished medical school?

The wise man dies, the fool, the lover, the glutton and baby.
Death plays solitaire by opening and closing doors.
Death is not amused by the meaning of our lives.
Death doesn’t read the menu
of what we’ve avoided and cherished.
It comes and it takes, it levels and it defies.
Are you going to die like an old woman
evaporating in her sleep like a dream lingering on a lake
until the dawn mistakes her for a ghost
and brushes her aside like a spider-web?
Pity the poor body’s infantile helplessness at the end.
Pity the terror in the eyes of the imprisoned one
who could feel his chains slipping away like a spinal cord
into an immaculate freedom ungoverned by circumstance.

Even the stars, chalk on a blackboard, and death,
the brush that wipes them away before the next class.
As it is with the flowers, the jewel of life is slowly
pried out of our hands with soft crowbars of sunlight.
God, how we labour to leave something behind
like a fragrance of our having been here once
like a human on a hillside deeply in love with the clouds.
Death panics us into believing we’re achieving
something enduring and benign, but truth is,
given that one good can adumbrate another that’s tragic,
we’re just setting our heads on fire like matches
to add our blazing to the darkness of the blind.
We strike, we ignite, we flare, we fade like a daylily
into an abyss of stars we’re all apprenticed to
and the light goes out like a firefly in a black hole.

Or we’re as indelible as a menage a trois of water.
The triune identity of existence, three phases of the moon.
No onceness to our being here forever.
Persist in beginning and you condemn yourself to death.
The jewel turns you in the light of your infinite facets.
Your eyes turn to you and ask what they’re looking at.
Death wants an explanation for what you’re up to.
And life couldn’t care less whether you had one or not.
A dead child can lead you to enlightenment
and a live one to despair. Two hinges of the same gate,
putting their hands together in prayer like birds on the wing.
We live in pain. We live in unexpected bliss. But what we are
is imaginations beyond this. We embrace life. We dis death.
We separate. We hold lanterns up to the fog
like empty lifeboats far out at sea at night but what if
everyone swam safely ashore as they did
in their mothers’ wombs? We aren’t drowned out
like the cosmic hiss of negligible wavelengths
that once accomplished mighty things. The senses
don’t age into old colours and old sounds.
Whatever you reach out to touch is as new and forever as now.
Has it ever been this day before you woke up to it?
Did yellow die overnight? Did red have a heart attack?

Inside. Outside. There are no walls in this palace of space.
No doors you have to enter seriatum. No locks to undo.
No ordeals to endure. No sod to turn over like a gravedigger
to lay a foundation stone that’s the whole of the building
as if you buried a turtle under its own shell.
A song bird under an iron bell. The sacred syllable
of a black pearl under the tongue of an oyster. To no avail.
The wave rides you like a flying carpet, not a sail
that has to wait for the wind to arise again or the tide to crest.
It’s just like a photon of insight. When you look at it
trying to grasp it as something fixed in your mind,
it acts just like the particle you were expecting to see,
but as soon as you turn your eye away from it,
it slips away from you like the cosine of a snake
back into its own chameleonic medium of water and light.
Everywhere is the centre of your boundlessness
like the nave of a wheel on a hearse
that doesn’t equate once around the sun on its axis
with the distance of the journey in time and space and mind
it takes to realize, whatever size of the circumference you make
like the ripples of interlocking bracelets of rain
or tree rings in the heartwood of a black walnut
that all fixed points in the wheeling world turn on zero.
That there’s not a wavelength of difference between
what is and is not, that you’ve been attributing an identity
to things that emerged with you from the polymorphous perverse
in order to recognize a self distinct from the universe
that mothered it into existence out of nothing
but the dark nature of life to fuel the mind
with the radiance of diamonds burning in the light
without anyone or anything ever being consumed
or the night diminished like an ageing constellation
by even so much as a single vital sign
of unending exploration carrying forth of its own accord
The lamp bears the flame that lends the lamp its eyes.
When the flame goes out, everything it’s every seen
and been and tried to mean goes with it into
worlds within worlds that keep adapting themselves to you
like stars to the eyes of those who keep looking back at them
as the source of their own shining by a river
that’s constantly changing shapes in its flowing
to reflect the mind’s protean approach to the inconceivable.
And it comes and it takes, it levels and it defies,
but you can look upon it with the luminous eyes
of enlightened mirrors that can see whole worlds
abounding in every piece it breaks to improve the view.

PATRICK WHITE  

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS


TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss
and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead
and draws the fever of the day out of the night.
I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.
When I’m burnt, I make a blister
and cushion myself with water,
a more useful approach to tears.
The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances
that thin my blood, but a soft wind
is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.
The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.
I want the stars near enough to overhear what they’re whispering.
Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought
as if they were my idea in the first place
and feel humbled and exalted at the same time
by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.
The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I’ve let go of so much
the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.
I’ve forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.
Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness
return to surrealistic perversity
to explain the shape of the universe
and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom
of squandering their lives on voices in the distance
leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis
that haunts them like the face
of a beautiful woman they once knew.
Don’t we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though
we don’t live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch
like dead branches screeching across
an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night
that let’s us look at the fire, but doesn’t let us in?
Where do you go with your serious spirit
when you’ve been rejected by your solitude?
Do you know the secret art of being enhanced
by the qualities of anything you’re not attached to,
without killing off the desire for what you’re missing?
Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart
it’s impossible to fill like a grave
that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.
You can be humiliated by your victories.
Coming and going, your path can be strewn
with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.
You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am
savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,
because it includes everything within it
like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.
Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light
or an atmosphere with ocean to match,
this last touch of clinging before you evaporate
into the mystery of everything you’re leaving behind.
No more than you can pour water out of the universe
through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time
into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror
you’re looking for an image in tonight
in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,
knowing our starmud is just as old as their light
and we’re not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.
We’re firewalking on water like stars in the shapes
of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable
from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin
we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.
Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,
inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates
that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,
you’re vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion
like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.
Don’t underestimate the creative potential
of the dark genius of death to come up
with new paradigms of seeing and being
that make us feel we lived our whole lives
confined and blind in the coffin of a seed
that stored a harvest of what we’ve reaped in a silo.
Out of the dead ore of the moon
pours the white gold of wheat
like metal from a stone in a starfield
that yields more life than can be lost
in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.
Isn’t it in the nature of our evanescence to move
like light and water and wind from urn to urn
of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth
like a water clock that runs so urgently
from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding
like the human heart just to contain it
so when the cup’s broken like a skull
you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky
in every single drop of your mindstream
and the stars will still be climbing your roots
up to the flowers within that bloom every year
like a deepening insight at zenith into
the dark generosity of becoming something
even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct.

PATRICK WHITE  

CINDER IN THE SUN'S EYE


CINDER IN THE SUN’S EYE

Cinder in the sun’s eye, there’s fire in your tears.
You plunge into the light like a moth on a mission
and it’s the sun that disappears to shine at midnight
in the black mirrors of your eyes. Dark light, intense,
starling, charred swan, you know as well as I do,
the occult approach to the optimism of an eclipse
is to act radically in the name of things you can
only unattainably conceive of. Love on your wrist
like a hawk whose wing you healed, dwelling
in your homelessness without a fear of eviction.
No truth in the mouth of the snake that’s pulled
the fangs of its conviction out of the sky
like crescent moons, pins from the eye
of a voodoo doll you’ve nursed for light years
on the nightshift of a morgue that’s aroused by death.
Milk of your left breast kills. The other practices compassion.
Whole snakepits in the shrines of the wavelengths
mourning the death of Medusa, as if snakes too
had something to mourn that makes them shine within you.

Ten thousand photos from an orbiting satellite
with X ray vision and a spectrographic trajectory
couldn’t improve upon the license of your beauty
like a black pearl at the magmatic core of planet
trying to make herself as habitable as she can to visitors.
And for those who aren’t used to your kind of light,
you hand out sun-visors and starmaps
and black candles to show them the way home
through the same old doorway they came in by.
You’re an ambassadorial firefly from the third eye
of dark matter where the roots of the light are embedded
and you’ve got a message for the blossom
that looks like a love letter. The moon
budding on a dead branch like a crack in the door
you left ajar like an orchard in waiting on a cold spring night.

And who but you could stand eye to eye with the bravery
you practise like a World War II canary
in an underground armaments factory that isn’t bomb proof?
There’s nothing yellow about the skin of your ammunition.
You confront cosmic dangers in the intimate details.
You ignite and defuse the supernovas and black holes
that endanger the lives of those who follow you like a cult
and though you like their company, you’d much rather be
maculately alone with someone who can see for themselves
that those who were driven out, exiled
into the emptiness of the unknown extremes of the mind
often return with their hands full of the strangest gifts
that time and distance have ever offered anyone
to prove how off course the shore-huggers are
in assessing the course of a life as far out
and comprehensive as the sea. Deeper than stars.
Emotionally more expansive than the immensity
of any shining that can be palmed off cheaply
in the pawn shops of the retinal tidal pools clutching
to the relics and icons of disembodied crab claws.
You don’t live like the collateral damage of the sun
and the sea. You don’t ask amputees to show you
a way out of the labyrinth by the light of spent candles.
Cinder in the sun’s eye, there’s fire in your tears.
A luminosity that flows unceasingly
from the watersheds of broken mirrors.
You just have to cry. And dragons as immutable
as diamond cutters take up flower arranging
in a Zen teahouse enlightened by the rain.

PATRICK WHITE