Thursday, July 12, 2012

OBLITERATIONS OF BEAUTY AND WE WEEP


OBLITERATIONS OF BEAUTY AND WE WEEP

Obliterations of beauty and we weep
for what cannot long abide in us
because we, not the rose, are the ones
who are passing so irrevocably away
into an abyss that doesn’t
take the measure of anything.

The lake knows the time
by the wingspan of its waterbirds.
I note the location of the stars
in the rotation of the Big Dipper.
And there are crickets
that will yield the time as well.
Time, too, like human solitude
is embodied in the things of this world.

Time perishes when we do,
is born with us, matures,
and embraces our ends as its own nature.
Time sets its pace to the passage of us.
We are the muse, the motivator, the demi-urge
of its passion for shedding
the leaves and flowers and moon like skin.
And we’re the ones who grow infinite
at the speed of light so that everything stops
immeasurably from there on everafter.

All things returning to the one, and the one,
returning to transcendence. Which is why
I come here this late at night when the stars
are as far from people as they can be
and yet they’re still as intimate to me
as my eyes are. A mutually creative continuum.
The star makes the eye I need to see it by.
I am the fragrance of the wildflowers
and the adamantine insights of the rocks.
The singing master of the nightbirds.
The oracle in the leprous skull of the raccoon.
And my heart is one long, continuous moonrise
when I think of how the dead still animate me.
How they cling to my heart like ants to a peony
to let me know when it’s time to bloom.

The dead trees house the mosquitoes and the herons.
The fallen pine cones, the seed koans of Zen masters
under their brittle eyelids waiting for the fire
to crack them deciduously open into evergreens.
I don’t lament the passivity of the dead in my life
because I put them to good use in their capacity
as enlightened mentors who urge me
to live splendidly whatever I encounter in the world
for all our sakes. I can be the blossom and the fruit
on the dead branch, as easily as a red-winged blackbird
sings from the green and leafless alike.
Not a bush wolf raises its voice up to the moon
that I don’t feel its distant longing in my own throat
like a sacred syllable half way to blossoming among the dead
who always hear it like an auspicious beginning
to the summons of their leave-taking in the fall,
to the deeper greeting in the meaning of farewell.

PATRICK WHITE

RESTLESS WITH THE DEAD TONIGHT


RESTLESS WITH THE DEAD TONIGHT

Restless with the dead tonight.
Old friends, the gates to abandoned farms,
the roof collapsed and the wind with access
to all their windows, overgrown roads
going nowhere I can walk with them now.
Blue-green the evening sky, still,
without direction, island clouds, but unmoving.
Sparse beginnings, and sorrow in the seed.

Relying on the stars to do for me
what I can’t do for myself. Pull me out
of this black hole I keep slipping in and out of
on the rim of my event horizon, stray photons,
butterflies ducking in and out of the dragon’s mouth,
a halo of X-rays looking brutally right through me.
Down to the musical instruments of my bones.
Flutes and drumsticks. But I’m void-bound,
trying to shed my skin like a chronic illusion,
liberate the chains I can feel but can’t see,
numbed by having to say no
when all I want to do is say yes
over and over again to the picture-music
to the themes, the hints, the clues, the nuances,
the radiance, sorrow and horror of the mystery
wherever it leads, whatever occurs,
be so fully here, I don’t exist, not even
as a witness, and be nothing but the listening.

I suffer crucial impasses of circumstance.
My heart is blocked, the way isn’t clear.
The emptiness is leaner than usual, longer
than a plague of Egypt living up to a penurious dream.
Third eye of the hurricane slowly closing.
My friends at the end of a tunnel of light.
Reptilian as a camera shutter. I howl
for stars and fireflies, the accoutrements of my bliss
and the pleasure I take in the hidden harmonies
of my drifting, my circuitous blossoming.
Someone is using my skull for a door stop.

Too grounded by the shadows of the impending,
Even here by the river, the sound of distant trucks,
the occasional train bemoaning its way through the dark.
Snakes out hunting the frogs, slide and splash
back into the lake at my approach, estranged enemy,
walking in my place, face covered with ashes
of a man-shaped urn that’s avoided me for a while.
The way I like to live. Overlooked by the world.
Unregarded. Obliviously free to disappear
without worrying about what I’m coming back to
or who’ll be waiting for me when I do
to tell me while the idiocy of this languor
has got its hands on my throat, I should learn
to get a grip on myself, eat the pain, swallow the bilge,
live like a bear nibbling on the edges of a garbage dump,
give up this discipline of doing nothing
as if mere being were a form of worship
though to what is anyone’s guess and why
is just the nature of the mind reveling in itself
the way the stars make me guess their names
peering through the crowns of the trees,
dissociated from the features of their mythologem.

Time with their lifemasks off to be uncontained.
To go mad and not be held to account for it
because it doesn’t excite the attention of the crowd
when you’re unattainably available to live
as if your eyes were the way the stars touched you in tears
to see how the light labours for its flowering in you.
Thought-moments and light years bringing news
of friends from the past, bats and owls
flashing through the inadvertent moonlight,
the whole of existence in every locket of my cells,
freedom born, creatively, with a starmap for a genome.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS


IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

If I ever get to look back on all this
even if it’s just to show me how wrong I was
about so much, how much I risked for so little,
I don’t want to have been mean and petty here,
I don’t want to have lived short-minded
as if my brain never grew to its proper height
and I had to live close to the ground
with burrowing wasps and centipedes
trading toxins in the grass like slumlords.
Tried to live like a magnanimous man
with an open hand whenever my luck kept pace
with my generosity. Didn’t want to die
knowing nothing about the stars, that shining
that grew in time even brighter in the dark within.
Wanted to know the fury and compassion, genius,
the affable kindness, madness and love of humankind.

Used to say we were born to see and be happy,
and if you couldn’t find a meaning that suited you,
make one up of your own. Don’t waste
the great creative potential of the absurd
and try to fit yourself like a little polyp of sentience
into the fossilized coral reefs of the past.
Go for the galaxies. What’s to lose?
If you’re going to fall, fall from a height.
Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre flight.
You’d be surprised at what the timing of one comet
falling out of the black halo around the sun
can mean to millions watching down below for signs.

Sensible shoes, or starmud on your winged heels,
Icarus or Neil Armstrong using his foot
to take a big step for humankind, walk your mile
standing up as if you were scanning for leopards,
your simian continuum at a fork in the road.
Danger is a capricious muse, but it can still
rivet you with inspiration. The hunters get eyes.
You grow an exoskeleton, then rib
the walls and rafters of the house and soon
the sun decides where the windows are going to go.
The Hox genes talk, and you’re the topic of conversation.

You start listening as if
you were listening in on yourself,
all those voices and things
for words you don’t understand,
bliss, butterflies, sorrows and assassins,
the victimized heroes of egoistic tragedies,
and the poetry in the pity of unexpurgated passion.
Lovers in the last throes of unmitigated catastrophe.
The rush and turmoil of the picture-music
going on all the time, shapeshifting
from one musical scene into another
and even you with your hands over your ears
sick of listening to the cosmic hiss,
climactic cymbals in the great performance
just waiting to come together like a hadron collider
deep underground where black holes in space
are born of the impact. If you’re not already
too calculating, or mesmerized like a stone bird
by the snake-eyes of the dice, put some money
down on yourself as if you had one to lose,
and if for nothing more than the exercise,
kiss your prophetic skulls for luck and let them roll.

And when you love, don’t approach a seabed on the moon
with a spoonful of water you can both sip from.
Return like an ocean with a convincing atmosphere.
If fools rush in where angels fear to tread
the angels will follow soon enough, with blessings
on the horns of your head. Learn
every gesture of her eyes like pictographic signage,
of her heart, a grammar for two, of her mind
be the no one to lift its veils, of her body,
apprentice yourself to the genius of her starmud.

Everything that lives is a gesture of the absurd
the imagination delights in elaborating
like people with the personalities of apple-trees
or the encyclopedic prolixity of the Burgess Shale.
I am is not the cornerstone of anything.
I imagine. And the wind is the threshold of the tent
that sheds the desolation of a self like a flower
that blooms in fire. Why water a mirage? Live large.
Squander stars on your vision of this, swallow the abyss
to keep your emptiness well fed, let your wisdom
be the private life of space, your time on earth
be passage and transformation, and your heart
cherish the bliss of all, animate and inanimate alike,
who suffer the same dream of being awake that you do.

PATRICK WHITE