Sunday, July 8, 2012

LOOKING FOR SILENCE LIKE THE OTHER WING


LOOKING FOR SILENCE LIKE THE OTHER WING

Looking for silence like the other wing
of what I’ve got to say, landscaping with meteors,
or the planet having a face lift, some of the words
have echoes and some of them proper names,
and a few still homesick for their prison cells,
I keep painting on the white noise of the world.
I keep writing like a wolf in the fleece
of a shepherd moon with a secret life of water.
Scofflaw, a poet, driven into the wilderness
to listen to the voices of disembodied messiahs,
kings of the waxing year, flesh stripped from their bones
like desert shipwrecks waiting for
the providential tide of their tears to return.
God particles that got in their eyes like sand.
I hear them gnawing on their bones like calendars at night.

And I’ve said it in a flash of demonic indifference
trying to pretend they were listening immaculately
and I was compassionate, as soon as you give
your fulsome assent to a few simple things
you turn into a test of what you refuse to let go of,
as if you were always faith-wrestling with rattlesnakes
you establish a church of denial that will stone you to death.
You save your soul but you render your flesh expendable.
This for That. Betelgeuse for Aldebaran.
How to read a starmap like the Wall Street Journal.
The optical illusion of a bifurcated consciousness,
loss and gain, but the viper can swim across quicksand
as if it were all one wavelength, the Egyptian glyph
for intelligence that hasn’t been wounded by the heart
and spiritually materialized into a path to follow.

Do as the wind does with your mind and eyes. Let go.
Blow the stars off your windowsills, treat all holy books
as if they were trees and let go of their leaves in the fall.
There’s always a few jewels of insight in a gossip column
but most of it’s rut, rant, and judgement, dream gossip
and slaughter, history with an expiry date.
There’s always going to be some demi-god somewhere
asking you for your fingerprints like a paranoid magician.
Kick the skulls off your stairs like last Halloween’s pumpkins
and start acting like you’re in the world and of it.
Break the neck of the hourglass of heaven and hell
and let time pour out of your cells like exorcised mirages.

Illusions are like rats and seagulls and insects. They thrive.
No more than the night, is life a reward. Water
doesn’t live its whole life fearing the indelible
like a wavelength of its own immutable mindstream.
There’s no big sky blueprint behind why you’re alive.
No circus tent covers your foolishness.
And you’re not here to answer for everything else.

PATRICK WHITE

HALLOWED BE THE GENTLENESS OF A PACIFIED MIND


HALLOWED BE THE GENTLENESS OF A PACIFIED MIND

Hallowed be the gentleness of a pacified mind.
Uplifting, a gust of stars, dust doing wheelies
in a back alley like a vehicular Sufi in a Ford,
because, and this is significant, it doesn’t, I swear,
mean a damn thing and therein lies the joy of it.

Inspiration never aspires to meaning. It doesn’t
cling like a God particle to give the matter at hand, mass.
The morphology of the multiverse is bubbles.
Iridescent, rainbow-smeared grackle-headed bubbles.
And that includes the black-pearled oil slicks
shining like new moons after their first eclipse.

Meaning, that hovers like a ghost of grammar
over the things of the world that can find
their own place in it without consulting anyone.
Who turns around to ask their shadow where they’re going?
Grammar’s a dead shaman. Time for new orthodoxies,
to let the rain make some new creekbeds to flow in
when it’s lamenting the death of a Spanish guitar
like a gored matador scarred by a Babylonian bull.

I’m smothering in the parachutes of the morning glories
as if it just snowed outside by mistake. It’s not fake.
It’s playful, profoundly playful, unsayably so.
Putting things together like table legs
is the basis of perception. Put any two
disparate elements together that share the same metaphors
and guarantee you you’ll laugh at the shock
of photonic insight discharged like a power-surge
down the backroads of your nerves, out for a joy-ride.

But you’ve got to be free to do this. Unpack
all those preconceptions you’ve hoarded
like a coral reef you’ve got to navigate around
to keep from running aground without a life jacket on.
Travel light. Don’t even take yourself. On the road
let your thumb go on by itself like an over eager companion.
Hellfire’s just the smell of burning rubber
bored by life on the farm. No risks worth taking.

Life refuses to be denied its vastness, stunted
into a black dwarf that limps like the king of something.
Even the stumps of the clear cut slopes of literature
are being burnt out like old gurus in their pine-cone temples,
seeds opening their eyes in fire like a nirvanic experience
that nobody knows anything about. Who can’t hear,
anti-solar gegenshein above the horizon, the distant mutter
of another breech-loading revolution in the distance
moving like a weather front toward us with eviscerated intent?
You don’t have to live like a bird in an air-raid shelter,
a canary in the mine, you just have to gain some elevation
on the bombs. Let the sky do the flying for a change.
And then move on to stars where you can trade
your flight plans in for the source of your own radiance.
No more Nazca lines. No more fireflies organized into runways.

You just shine. Amazed at what you can do, as the light
always is, at what can be achieved without even trying.
Joy and inspiration, for example, love, wonder,
shape shifting in the mystery without having to be anyone.
Anywhere. Anytime. Anyplace. As if you had
a message to deliver that would upstage the course of history
and you sent it downriver like a paper boat
so the butterflies could marvel at how easy it is to float.

PATRICK WHITE