Saturday, June 30, 2012

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS


BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows.
A respite in time and care. A hole in space
I can escape through without setting off any alarms.
And I don’t care what this poem is going to be about
I can write it with no preconceived deceptions,
no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects.
For a moment, the ice age is thawing
and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies
like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches
are a riot of Queen Ann’s Lace and Viper’s Bugloss.
Temperate consolations modify my mood
into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life.
I’m gulled by the sunshine. I’m a schill of the mindstream.
The killer bees are away from their hives.
Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins
without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable
in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details.
Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths
of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom
in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame.

And later tonight, if I’m still so entranced,
I’ll make my way down to the Tay River
to see if the fireflies are out dancing pianissimo
with the abandoned lighthouses of the stiff-necked cattails.
I’ll sit on a rock that doesn’t aspire to lord it over
anyone’s kingdom, and I’ll stare at the stars
until they’re tattooed like an indelible starmap
on the back of my eyelids, to keep my tears
from diluting them like smeared watercolours
or my more igneous aspects, from shattering them
like the menagerie of a zoo with glass bars.

And o, basking in the freedom of my own madness,
hilarious as peace, the infinite homelessness
of knowing I come from everywhere all at once,
and there’s nowhere I’ve walked alone in my life
down any road beset with assassins, or feathered
like strippers in boas of white sweet clover,
I haven’t been stepping across the threshold
of another wilderness always as vast
and cautiously intriguing as I am mysteriously lost
when the human intimacy of a longing heart
encounters the sentient impersonality
of an infinite mind that isn’t aware of anything
the heart doesn’t bring before it like a child’s drawing.

And there are themes you can follow
like bush wolves through the back woods
trampled down by the padding of their circuitous descents
into the dangerous pantries of the farms
pseudomorphically nestled between the hills.
It’s an itinerary that’s serviced the pack for years
with a sufficiency that’s got them this far against the odds.
And each to their own way, go with the gods
and I’ll rejoice in hearing you howl among the trees
to the chagrin of your detractors listening
with a begrudging admiration a civilization away
from what’s been bred out of them like freedom
under a full moon in heat. As for me
and my homeless approach to the ghost towns
of future zodiacs, I never want to know where I’m going
until I get there inconceivably as the only path
I could have taken in the first place,
because that’s always the way it is
even when you delight in the wiles of going astray.
Signs of your emptiness in the midst of the great unknowing.
Time and space mindscaping the exploration
you keep thrusting into the dark like the light and the lamp
of an estranged nightwatchman, hoping
you haven’t been here before, and anything
worth keeping an eye on has already been given away for free.

PATRICK WHITE

FULL MOON AND THE MOURNFUL THUNDER OF A TRAIN


FULL MOON AND THE MOURNFUL THUNDER OF A TRAIN

Full moon and the mournful thunder of a train
passing through town. Venus, Jupiter, Mercury
long gone down for the rest of the night.
Orion a pale imitation of itself in the west.
Mars near Regulus, the little king with the heart of the lion,
and Saturn off to the east. Like water returned
to the river it came from, everything immersed
in the fluidity of silence
swimming through the trees
as if virgins were older than fish at the spring equinox.

A habit of wandering when no one else is around
walks me out of town like some unknown journey
stringing my feet along with a line
and two minutes with a lunar hook dangling
in the effluvial plains of the moon’s volcanic seas
as if I needed to be played into it by the sacred syllables
of ancient starmaps talking in tongues like oceans of awareness
into the ears of the seashells who can repeat
every word they say to themselves in secret.

All I’ve done most of my life is write and paint
spring, summer, winter, fall, four seasons,
and a writer not only adds another dimension
to the state of affairs, but constitutes
a fifth season of his own as well, a sphere
of thin-skinned spirit that covers the earth
like an invisible aurora of imagination,
the third eye of a wobbling satellite
lost in space with spiritual vertigo
like the black sheep of a shepherd moon. Five
seasons in all, but the fifth includes the other four
like a mood ring on a chameleon in front of a mirror.

And the rest of my life in between
exotic flame-outs and catastrophic inspirations
has been about running back home to my life
like an ambulance, a squad car, or a fire truck,
and, yes, even the occasional water bomber
to put a root fire out before it broke into blossom
and spread like daylilies to the rest of the neighbourhood.

Just as I can’t help looking extemporally at
the extraordinarily ordinary dandelions sometimes
and thinking they must have been born middle-aged
because they all look like yellow G-7 type bachelor suns
that have rubber-stamped themselves all over the place.
Dandelion wine, but I wonder if anyone of them
ever longed to be born a red head, looked
at the gypsy poppies like blood at the side of the road,
wearing too much black mascara , and wished somehow
they could be just as uniquely scarlet and carefree.

And in the night, out in the woods on my own
without a light or a fire for a companion
you’re never alone with, I think, o yes,
a poppy or a dandelion would be good right about now
and I make them a mental substitute through
intense creative visualization and though
I’ll sit out here spiritually naked all night
somehow by the morning I’ve melted a block of ice
like a Tibetan monk in the Himalayas
who was trying to focus on stars.
So when I take these long starwalks
through the desolation of stark and delicate things,
and their ferociously bold slow-hand insistence
on returning the way they came like fruits
ye shall know them by, back to the wild apple trees,
I’m not just walking among solid things
that overemphasize their reality at the expense
of realizing their full potential as an event of metaphors
that can shapeshift musically into anything they want to be
from dandelions with short haircuts
to poppies with the manes of solar flares.

My life is being conducted by a symphony of fiddleheads
at a seance of violins. I look at the desiccated milkweed pods
and I don’t see a coffin or a brittle fortune-cookie of a womb
that’s gone to seed, but the eyelids of visionaries
who gave up everything to the seeing they had to give
like millions of little ghostly white parachutes of moonlight
landing like prophetic time-capsules from the flowers
who refused to go blind, even after jumping from paradise,
and emptier than a widow’s mailbox
still stare blankly up at the stars
with their mouths open in utter amazement
trying to remember all their children’s names and myths of origins
shawled over their shoulders like the Milky Way
as if that were some kind of cold comfort
for a lifetime of absurdly trying to rinse
the shadows out of the light with their tears.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT INTERESTED IN THE BRAND NAME OF YOUR AUDIENCE


NOT INTERESTED IN THE BRAND NAME OF YOUR AUDIENCE

Not interested in the brand name of your audience.
Poetry makes its own up on the go, resonates
with the stars and the fireflies, mysteriously
marauds its own sacred shrines for the relics
of holy metaphors that can be melted down
into new sensibilities. And you, when you lose
your faith in your herbs ability to heal,
is it you that lets the medicine down,
the exhausted wavelength of an imploding star,
or is your magic just not strong enough anymore
to know when to keep its mouth shut, its grammar
like the secret name of a god, not a public convention.

It’s irrelevant to me if you blood your abstractions,
mythic deflation stabbing them through the heart
to keep it from pumping the colour out of the rose
and hanging them upside down over a bathtub.
Or that your insecticidal severances have been
so cleanly disposed of like the wings of butterflies
in the mandibles of seriatim ants. The reek
of formic acid. And it’s hard not to notice
that your gypsy nettles don’t dance to music.
You’ve got your head stuck up the eye of the needle again.
Must cost you a fortune in locksmiths.
And why, when you make a confession
of all your sins of omission, does it always sound
like you’re ratting someone out? Or you’ve got
a deathmask on you’re always threatening to take off
like a crab carapace in a tidal pool with a detached claw
trying to intimate the great sea of awareness beyond
that’s never heard of you, into making waves
even a shore-hugger buried in a puddle could handle?

You can make a cult of your doubt and cynicism,
snakes on the ladders and stairwells of your pretensions,
but I’m not going to be initiated into it. Just because
I was born in a sewer doesn’t mean I bathed in it
every time it rained. A metaphor is a metaphor
that’s looking for something to compare itself to
and picture-music isn’t a drum roll at the unveiling
of a new logo for the hysterically futile fans
of your dysfunctional aspirations to make a big splash.
As if the pond were never big enough for the frog.

Your words don’t touch my heart, change my life,
make a serious attempt on my life, derange me,
do anything to me, just lie there
so disconnected from my spinal cord
they’re clear cut yarrow sticks that have never heard
of the Book of Changes. Lean-tos and collapsed tents
in the shadows of Stone Henge. No moon. No Taj Mahal.
You’re an architect of flowers, but you don’t come
with any instructions for assembly. Or even a bag of tools
to flint knap your costume jewellery into arrowheads,
you could always hurl at a turtle on the run, since
it’s obvious there’s nothing wildly alive in the woods
that has anything to fear from a poet who can’t handle a bow
anymore than he can a lyre strung from his own gut.

No urgency in your work. No necessity, risk, danger.
Nothing lethal in the windowsill jungles you explore.
Nothing driving you like the inconsolable dead
into the unmarked grave of a black hole
that never bottoms out like a death in life experience
giving birth to a whole new universe of not two
every morning you wake up in it grateful for the chance
to teach your club-footed absurdity to dance with the bones
of distinguished skeletons who are experts
at knowing how to necro-romanticize the abyss.

When words talk to words about words
it’s not because imagination has run out of poets
who aren’t unsayable or self-destructive enough
to sacrifice their voices bleeding for the unattainable
so that every poem is history written by the losers,
it’s because there’s no visionary flash back
when you drown in your own reflection
in a narcissistic labyrinth of mirrors. No crash and burn
in your elegaic encounters with what you’re missing.
Your absence doesn’t leave a mark on the world
as you seek corporate applause for your trained individualism
tweaking your neuronic synapses with the reflexes
of early amphibians, one foot on shore, one in the boat
just to play it safe, a wishbone bridging both mediums
like a witching wand twitching over a watershed
with a dislocated pelvis that makes you dance with a limp
like Giovanni’s frog jumping between electrodes,
or as I remember, growing up, little girls playing hopscotch
on a sidewalk chalked with the outlines of corpses
with photo ops of the brand names on their toe tags.

PATRICK WHITE