Thursday, June 28, 2012

SUMMER TRIANGLE THROUGH THE LEAF COVER


SUMMER TRIANGLE THROUGH THE LEAF COVER

Summer triangle through the leaf cover
of the birches and pines, Deneb, Al Tair, Vega,
a swan, an eagle, and a lyre, and the sun
headed toward Vega at l8 km/sec. Arcturus
sinking into the west. Knowledge disconnected
from the stars. How could they know how
I see them paradigmatically, how they’re shaped
into the legends of our seeing on a starmap,
the powers that have been attributed to them,
though for me my solitude evaporates
into their lucid immensities like dry ice.

I hug my knees on a moonlit outcrop of rock.
More lichens than a suitcase has travel stickers
or a bike gang has patches and rockers. Grey green
and a muted arsenic orange. Alien aspects
of the rags of life from Mars. Cold temperatures
and high carbon dioxide atmospheres and they’d thrive.
Now they’re a wardrobe paupered by the Canadian Shield.
Fossils of moondogs. Decals of lunar seas.
And underneath the pines, a graveyard of compass needles,
rusty eyelashes, amputated hands of analogue watches.
The woods are alive with shaking cattails
and snapping branches, shedding and falling,
the occult hunting magic of the lake
that keeps everything eerie, wary, and estranged
as they take what they need from each other
with a yelp, a howl, a shriek, a squeal to sustain
the lives they’re meant to be living at life’s expense.

You come to mind as the reason why I’m here.
Just a fragrance, the auroral cachet of your image
on the temperate night air. The great blue heron
might embody the silence and the stillness,
spearfishing among the nocturnal water lilies
but me, I’m catching these glimpses of you
like a seance of fireflies among the birch
as if happenstance had a hidden theme up its sleeve.

A resonance, a nuance, as if I blew on a dandelion
and it scattered like a gust of stars out of an urn
into a constellation waiting for me to adorn it
with a myth of origins that might explain it to us both.
The old ashes of the fire pit strewing
dragons of passion again, and it’s ok to speculate
but I keep a bridle in their mouths. I’m not riding
bareback yet. I’m not rescinding my last immolation.
Though there’s something ingenuously thrilling about
the creative commotion of the approach of another galaxy
and the way the fireflies keep stoking my devotion
as if my intensities were about to go supernova
after so many years of emotional implosion, I’ve been
singing lullabies in braille to black stars
just to get to sleep at night without anyone noticing.
I’ve been wearing a halo of X-rays around
the omnidirectional event horizon of a black hole
I thought I’d given myself up to by acclamation
like the incommensurable solitude of a singularity
that had escaped itself into an alternative universe
every bit as absurd as I was, with equanimity.

I’m sick of pain. Too many squalls arising
out of nothing, too many red dawns, too many
shipwrecks turning into coral reefs that rip the hull
out of the moon like Caesarians, hearts bashed
like pinatas at the birthday parties of the sacred cartels
and everyone’s simple, quiet dream of everlasting love
and all its attendant protocols, observed with genuine feeling,
lovers mesmerized by the shadows of the things they want
but can’t quite be. Unconditional love, if its abstractions
are blooded by experience, crueller than
the sado-masochistic discipline of a saint.

Never abandoned love, just somehow came to feel
erosively disqualified, as if my starmud,
though it bore other fruits, yielded harvests
and danced under a blue moon like a scarecrow
left out to face the winter alone, would never bring forth
those flowers again. As they faded
like Confederate money into a more perfect union
of absurdity at peace with itself. Approximately.
Everything being the interpretation of an interpretation.

PATRICK WHITE

MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT


MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

Mad you must be and delight in it
like mating killdeer in the spring,
lyrical love-making in the epiphanous air
and one flys into the bumper and dies.
Tears flowing down your cheeks
as you drive on into the incomprehensible
horror and silence of the act. And later,
your girlfriend will elaborate the fact
into a beautiful piece of art. Radiance
thrusts a shard of glass through your heart
out of the blue and there you are
with a baffled pain in your eyes
crying on the easel in paint. Poor man.

Mad you must be and delight in it.
Revel in the absurd. Logic, the shakey stool
of a man trying to hang himself.
Quicksand cornerstones sinking into a miasma
of conditioned chaos. What does it prove
that would have made a difference to the outcome?
Nothing to stand on anymore. Even less
to lie down for. Nature a postcard.
A recurring calendar. And one of those months,
a close-up of a killdeer in intimate detail.

Mad you must be and delight in it.
Uproot your hidden harmonies. Give up
your golden chains. Throw the swill
out of your fountains like wine
from the night before. Ignore your dreams
as the phantasmagoria of sacred clowns.
Everything passes in a riot of stars
before you’re aware of it. Where are they now?
The aerial ballet of the killdeer. Roadkill.
Random encounters with the irrational.
The clarity cruel. The darkness immense.

Mad you must be and delight in it.
Stare at the wall until something appears.
An orphan of mirrors. An estranged elopement
trying to get away with it all. Throw
the moon down from the tower first
and after it your skull. The hearse awaits
and the horses are plumed with black feathers.
Space is warped. Time’s corrupt. And the light
isn’t on some kind of goodwill tour.
Over the newly ploughed field,
where are the killdeer that were there
a moment ago, a year, forever, a figment of time?
So beautiful in the way they impressed each other.
First warm day of the spring. Even the silence
overjoyed with the liberation of water
of earth, of sky, as the stitches came out of the wound
and winter, the scar of a worn out topic.
One of those moments it was intense bliss
to be alive on earth, unasked for,
and delightfully irrelevant the reason.

Mad you must be and delight in it
to embrace the crazy wisdom of the incomprehensible
as a spontaneous medium you’re not involved in
except as the one who suffers what you see,
the terror and the lucidity, the rapture, the monotony
and the worst you could imagine it could be,
the abyss, the car, the killdeer, the unreality
of there being no amends for the tragedy
to fall back upon, not even the pity of the poetry
or the beauty of the painting. And the tears?
What of the tears? What are we to make of them?
Water off the wings of the killdeers? Time
just another water clock that heals nothing
it wounds by accident? Annihilations
of the spirit encountering anti-matter?
You can entertain yourself as delusionally sane
by explaining the stars to the stars,
or you can spend hours trying to decipher the scars
like glyphs on the stone calendars that knew
timing revealed the content in the blink of an eye
and in the cherry-sized heart of a bird
smashed against the sun and the sky
flashing off a chrome bumper at 80k,
who knows, a moment before impact,
if it felt it had desecrated the absurdity of the event
by dying inchoately innocent of its own bewilderment.

PATRICK WHITE