Saturday, June 23, 2012

I GRIEVE ELUSIVELY SOLO IN THE COMPANY OF ROCKS


I GRIEVE ELUSIVELY SOLO IN THE COMPANY OF ROCKS

I grieve elusively solo in the company of rocks
whose skulls have been glacially removed
as a chipper breeze intrigues the trees
with the rumours of distinguished extinctions to come.
O my prophetic heads, my exilic deaths,
is the moon an ally or not as she adds
her waterlily to the swamp like a nautical poem
that agitates the ricocheting shadows of the bats.

Witch broth looking for human body parts.
The night broods over the death of a wren
like someone just getting into the arts
hangs on the hook of the muse with bookish allure,
but nothing bites. The fish are wide-eyed and wary.
The wonder of stars applies a poultice to my heart.
We reciprocally heal for a moment. Dark woods
and the wolves are howling over the corpse of the hills.

Snapping turtles sleep in my starmud like the helmets
of World War One, and I dream of wild swans
passing overhead like Albireo and Deneb
in the Summer Triangle wedging its way west.
My life inches toward its setting like an astrolabe of bones.
Mortal arcs of dubious exaltations. No constellation
marks the spot like a seeing eye dog in the dark,
and love dies cowering in sighs of lyrical bewilderment.

PATRICK WHITE

BLAND PERFIDY, YOU WILL NOT MASTER ME


BLAND PERFIDY, YOU WILL NOT MASTER ME

Bland perfidy, you will not master me. I shall
cultify my resentment into a an insurrection of one
and feed you like keys to the fireflies in the zoo.
And the black lions savage you like a fake rose of blood.
I shall write about the colours of the flowers you abused.
The lethal spreading of your goodness like manure
over a garden that hasn’t bloomed since childhood.
The way you’ve gagged the mouth of the sun
with toxic clouds that don’t remind you of anything.

Distractive lie, polluted moonlight, I shall
turn the oranges on your breakfast table
you write about in grisaille, into the black dwarfs
of imploding stars, ambush your newsreels
and sword dance on your grave in a wreath
of stinging nettles just to hear you howl once
like a real poet when I rip the stitches out of your heart.

How will you angle your toes like a misstep in a dance
when you hear the harpsichord of shattering glass
as I throw the moon through your window
and watch it bleed like a beer bottle in a street fight?
Nuclear winter in a wasteland, the dawn
of a new species of fire with poetry in its glands.
A violet wind will sweep you like mirages off the sidewalk
into the dunes of the shad flies of North Bay,
and even the thieves who’ve come to melt
your gold death mask down into nose rings
won’t bother to exhume your pyramid
like a publishing house not worth breaking into.

By the immutable coincidence of the contradictories
because you did not breathe life into the drowning
and fed your mouth in the mirror before you
even heard the child-faced birds dying in the trees outside,
I shall use your skull as a doorstop in a hurricane
to keep the backdoor open to the weatherfronts of the furies
that are mustering under your windowsill,
black holes without an event horizon.
And the unapproachable night air we let out
of your mythically inflated tires will be saturated
with the oracular apostasies of hostile prophecies,
and your proverbial drop out and crawl all the way back
into your anthology of nepotistic verdicts
that are afraid to tell the judge what they really think.

I see how you slaughter the playful intensities of life
by throwing bad meat down the wells of the muses
and the effluvia of your poems contagious as radioactivity
slyly insinuating yourself into the drinking water.
The spider I wear like an eye patch on my third eye
wants to get you out of the way of the sun
like the slag and cinders of orbiting dirt
you kick in everyone’s face like a meteor shower
that fizzled out even before it took the plunge.

Someone’s got to tell you like a warning from your shrink
you’ve got the emotional wingspan of a scenic calender
for places to be when you’re reading out west
they give away for free in a real estate office.
I want to chew on a wad of your heart to see
if its’ really gum or not, and if it is
I’ll cut it out of my hair with the same scissors
you use to clip and paste the spinal cords of your poems.
I want to stick C-4 to your incisors
as if I were blowing up a bridge in preoccupied Toronto
and see if anything explosive might come out of your mouth.

Fire-swallower in a circus morgue, hic sunt dracones,
snakes with wings, flame-throwing wiverns
angered by the desecration of their shrines
and fangs like flowering scalpels rooted in their jaws.
Gratuitous infirmity. Termites in the foundation.
Too much straw in the haystack to go looking for
your needle of identity pointing true north
to a vast pristine land of squalor and drugs.
The quicksand cornerstones of your unzippered fixes.
Moonrise and sunset on the blacklists of your eyelids.
I should compile a hive of killer bees
and when I’m talking to you without a grant
charge admission to the Eleusinian Mysteries
of how to write without a camera or a mirror,
and start a buzz that would leave you
with nothing unmagnanimous to say
about the dangers of pouring curdled honey
into a wound as raw and vicious as you are dull.

PATRICK WHITE

RED SHIFT SOON INTO THE DARK, BUT NOT TONIGHT


RED SHIFT SOON INTO THE DARK, BUT NOT TONIGHT

Red shift soon into the dark, but not tonight
out of these longer wavelengths of insight
into the ongoing mystery of everything I’m aware of
and what I’m not in the lifelines on the palms of my blossoms
and in the roots of these abandoned orchards of stars.
Unattainable the things of the earth that were given for free,
I long for dark abundance, bright vacancy.
Beauty meets me everywhere eye to eye
on my own terms, and we speak in metaphors
that occur all around us like fireflies and wild irises.

O evanescent river of night, unpartitioned waterclock,
keep time with my heart even as you unravel the past
like a ribbon of blood I’ve brought to you as a gift.
Keep it supple and fluid and let the light on your waters
mingle in the sweetness of its fruit. Let no cruel day
embitter the wine of the efoliate nerves
of the wild grapes greening their tendrils
like the treble clefs of a living music
that can only be heard with the eyes when you listen.

Off road awhile, let me wander as you do
through these labyrinths of circuitous blossoming
and lose myself in people and things and wonder
at the black and white wisdom of being here
to marvel at all, and give the stars a reason to search.
Keep my wits close to my senses and my instincts
like holy books written on the wind like the smoke
of distant fires I will sit around again
listening to stories told in the tongues
of the polyglot flames. May I always
cherish the pain of separation as my most
sincere teacher, the one who beat me the hardest
for the foolishness of trying to come up for air
while I was still in the womb. May compassion
always come on the winged heels of insight
the way pears come of their leaves
or the heart grows in the hands of its thieves.

Hard, the longing to know. Harder to know you don’t.
Hard to be the dunce in the corner of your own illumination.
The persecuted voodoo doll of a witch hunt.
The shabby philosopher with a heart of gold
who took the long way round to the back of the abyss.
Or an eclipse with its thumb out trying
to hitch hike down the Milky Way like a punk rocker.
And those who live to see death in their children’s eyes,
as the ferocity of their frozen tears breaks
into little plinths and roseate splinters of shattered sky.
Hard to see people uncrazed by their own creativity
like a wet book of matches frowning at solar flares,
sceptics doubting the crazy wisdom of their own stars.
To see friends who were the pillars of the wharves
you said hello and good-bye on, pull away one last time
like empty lifeboats with nothing left to save.

And the lovers who know each other like junkies
on the same drug, love potions using the same alibi
to excuse the mystic delirium of being caught
by their third eye, exalting in their passion
for whispering old-fashioned things into each other’s ears
on the thresholds of enlightened taboos. Imagine
going through withdrawal from your own imagination
burning little black holes through the windows
until they look like starmaps that forgot the way back home.
And the hasty bones that were buried en masse
like yarrow sticks in an incriminating Book of Changes.
Poverty, atrocity, war, disease, and these we ignore,
and these we praise for trivializing our attention span.
Hard to be human and embody all this in your heart.

But don’t stop. Keep flowing. Making your own path up
on the fly as you go, knowing it’s going to get harder yet.
Let me live it like a dream I’m always waking up from
with no regret. Let me cherish the terrors
for the dark jewels they sowed like dragon’s teeth
in their wake, and celebrate the fools of my doubtful virtues
like a poet in autumn dancing with the last of the flowers
as if they still had the voices they had in the spring.

PATRICK WHITE