Sunday, July 22, 2012

I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN


I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN

I have not forgotten
the asters that bloomed in the wake of your smile,
the torn bridal veil
you were always shaking free of the spiders
that wanted to pin themselves like badges,
like mushroom crowns
to the polygonal thrones of your web;
or the way you would walk through doors,
swim through windows
as if my life were your own personal dream
and I was the only horse on the moon
that had ever survived your thorns,
nor the way your fingers could turn into
the horns of a garden snail
or the green tendrils of imperial strawberries
that slowly colonized my skin
with small mystical villages
on the slopes of volcanic dragons,
and how you were always quicker than pyramids
to extinguish the fire
with emergency kisses
that turned the ambulance into
a newspaper tossed on the doorstep
announcing the terms of the armistice,
the swaddled folds
of a nursing iris in bud,
or the cross you swore was a bridge
between a coffin and a cocoon.

Did you ever finish painting your wings,
or that likeness of death
you said was a portrait of me?
Drifting for years
in the stone lifeboat you left me
like an island of my own
where I was the king of shadows,
the disconsolate wizard
of my own ruined magic,
and my heart was a cauldron of skulls,
I often thought of you
to keep myself from believing in love again;
the blow, the money, the music,
the secret sauce
of the Malaysian black current cheesecake
sliced into portions of the moon
robed in the folds of a regal eclipse,
of how you made everyone feel
they were better for you than me,
crazed by the panties you threw everywhere
like the fragrance of a smouldering rose
to prove you were hot and a rockstar,
and then grab me like a mike stand
and give me head in a song no one else could hear,
as if I were a hit long before you were born
and evolution hired a publicist.

I always thought you were a dangerous child,
a bouquet of fireflies
you were trying to give
to the ghost of a death that hadn’t happened yet,
a bee of blood that drowned
in the angry chalice of a broken mirror
that lied to your face about flowers.

I had to throw my heart out
like a corpse at sea to love you,
and lean back and watch as if I didn’t care
as one by one the stars o.d.’d like candles
in the black hole
that was swallowing you
like a snake with its tail in its mouth,
the eternal recurrence
of your father with you in bed.

And now it’s twenty years later
and life is a crosswalk in a dream
where we pass each other like bells on parole
from the spires that plunge through the past
like daggers through the eyes and the skies
of our isolation cells,
and it’s law not love
to go for a drink
to compare the opulence of our solitudes
like trees shedding their leaves to the bone,
and you undo your hair
like ribbons of fire at the foot of my grave
because you remember while I lived
I liked it long,
and reach across the table like wine
and take my hand in yours,
the other half of a split wishbone
that didn’t come true,
the head of a dead swan,
the last bugle of a dying civilization,
and quote from memory
a poem I wrote for you
chained by lightning
to a sacrificial rock in an old abyss
catastrophes ago
to make sure
the moon always had eyelids
when it stared into the lights
that obliterated all my faces
in the dark blaze of planets on tour with the dawn.

And I was moved like blue grasslands
as I always used to be
to witness the eerie beauty of your tears as you spoke,
sweeping out of the open window
of your abandoned heart
like curtains of rain you stood behind
to see if the wind would bring you roses again.

PATRICK WHITE

I WANT TO WRITE


I WANT TO WRITE

I want to write something that will impress you,
a blue virgin with a silo of hand-picked stars
for a heart that we might begin with,
the soiled velvet of my collapsed parachute
that came down like the night over everything,
the miscreant sky of an ancient descent
that keeps snuffing the candle of blood
I keep using to draft poems on the mirror
that suggests an emergency of fire and ink.
I want to write something like a pulse
that doesn’t belong to anything in existence,
the mythic inflation and collapse
of a sail or a lung or a womb
that might engender something extraordinary
among the plaster cherubs
and efflorescent gargoyles of this abandoned theatre
that no longer stages the improvised encounters
of the demons or the angels,
whose silence is the salted earth of a city
that traded its wilderness in
for a cemetery of clowns and scarecrows
and traffic jam of golden crutches. I refer,
of course, to the plastic bag
someone put over the mouth of my longing
and the cyanotic agony of trying to breathe freely
under the asphyxiating skin of the sky
that adheres to my eyes and voice like dew.

I want to write something fine and wild and exalted,
and enlighten the hinges of a vastly open door
with the raw ore of my meticulous urgencies.
Supple and eloquent, a sapphire river
flowing effortlessly through the night,
a rose of fire ashing on its own roots,
tendering its green thorns
like the fangs of an innocent moon,
I want to wash off the mud of the road with stars
that only bloom for those with the eyes to be them,
and throwing off the yoke
of all these sad windows
I collect like dogtags and discount coupons
of spiritual junkmail,
plough the moon with my tongue
and in a whisper of opening eyelids
weep like a silver tree
for the beauty of the dark-side jewels
that water my roots.

You must be in bed by now;
you must be mourning your lost lover,
lamenting the blizzard of ghosts
that coats your heart in the burlap and chainmail
of another winter that must be borne on your knees.
May I hover, may I linger,
may I spectrally request an audience,
pour this star-flavoured darkness into your ear,
can I be free without intruding
and rattle this chandelier of dragon tears
like a spell across your last shadow?

I want to astound you with the risks I take,
walking on my hands down this guitar string
keyed to the gaping annuity of the abyss;
I want to shed my skin
and stretch it like a playbill
over last year’s cancelled play;
and write you certified cheques
on the petals of luxuriant flowers
for exotic causes
only the homeless clouds could believe in.

And I don’t want to be loved for who I am,
I want to be loved for what I do;
as the wind is loved in its passing
for clarifying the sky like a rag of air,
for winnowing the grain from the chaff
after the threshing of the harvests of the dead
into feathers, waves and leaves,
for the muffled thunder of cannons and apples
going off in the distance
like a holy war of one
trying to overcome its own stratagems.

I don’t want to swing the planet like a wrecking ball
against the condemned tenements
that sweat from the pores of a selfish mirror,
and bury the poor in doorways
that exhale the nocturnal vapours of the hopeless
who rummage through hand-me-down poppies
for an affordable dream that might fit.

I only want to wear you once
in a mansion of water and moonlight
like a nakedness of space and cherries
I can’t take off,
and from the orchard of these black blossoms
that scatter like heretical doves from a fire,
this migration of the white phoenix
to a burning branch in a combustible solitude
that roots its holiest ladders
in the ashes of its own blazing divestment,
offer you the fruit of the crazy wisdom
of the fool who drinks from my eyes
as if the grail of this all night feeling
were a bar that never closed.

PATRICK WHITE

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD


MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.
The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.
The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.
Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.
Even the glowing concrete seems benign. The gates
with their rusting guns triggered like locks, the fences
holding the occupying gardens with their placard poppies
back like riot cops. Time without haste. Consumed
by a moment as perennial as summer on earth.
Nothing urgent in the fulfilment of small destinies
in the grass, no antecedents necessary to know
how to live this, no event trivial or especially significant,
I’m as open-minded as the wind on a shoreless afternoon
that tastes of the stars gusting in the dust at my feet.

Wild parsnip, Queen Ann’s Lace, mullein, goldenrod,
purple loosetrife and cattails in the ditches along the roads,
Lichens of the moon on the staves of the cedar rails
where the red-winged blackbirds sit
to paint their picture-music on the unprimed air
like the musical notes of a cadmium red and yellow song
with overriding tones of nocturnes to come.

Sweetness of life when it takes its mind off of everything
and requires nothing of the living but attendance.
Just to be here like a vagrant wavelength of awareness
among things as they are without trying
to gouge your eyes out like bluejays at the sunflowers
to get at the roots of the flowering mind deep in the heart
of the hidden harmonies basking on the surface
they’re joy riding like the elegant riffs
of the dolphins and flying fish that leap out of the shadows
into the enraptured atmosphere of their own auras
like blue damselflies and green tree frogs and old guitars
working their necks like weavers, or fleet-footed spiders
walking on water like heavy metal on a Ouija board,
like thorns in the eye of a bubble, hoping it doesn’t
wash them out like tears in the eyes of a voodoo doll
looking through the keyhole of a needle it couldn’t find
like paradise on the other side of its blind blessing.

Not for long or far, I’m still walking a habitable planet
full of wonders. Though the road keeps getting shorter
like a fuse behind me the further I travel down it,
and the asteroids keep making newsbreaking fly-bys,
and there are rosaries of bubbling methane rising
from under the shrinking skull caps of the poles,
and people are still trying to keep each other’s attention
by stabbing one another in the eye, but for a moment
that isn’t concerned about whether anything lasts or not,
there are no omens stuck in the throats of the rocks,
or blood of children splashed on the hollyhocks. A re-run
of provisional innocence in a few hundred acres of woodland
swept under the rugs of abandoned farms as not worth the trouble.
Lapwing gates hanging by a hinge to distract
the wild grapevines away from her empty nest
as if it still cherished its emptiness out of a force of habit.

I look upon the Tay River at sunset, the reflection
of the darkening hill quivering in the cooling breeze
like the more mercurial downside of itself,
and the sky opening the blue-green eyes of the peacocks
like stars with too much make-up on, and a handful
of charred crows flying through the roots of the trees,
trying to make sense of themselves like a burnt manuscript.
And what can you say to the stars that are beginning
to look for themselves in the approaching night
except this too is the world where even the lost,
in attempting to return to themselves through
the unattainability of the past, shed light all along the way?

Nightfall and the silence intensifies the conversation
with bioluminous insights of the radiance
blazing out of the darkness of a white coma
as if it depended upon the contrast oxymoronically
just to be noticed like waterlilies in the shallows
of the conscious mind anchored by a spinal cord
to the reptilian epodes of its own illustrious starmud
as every thought moment is, like kelp and kites
and river reeds swaying like synchronized swimmers
to the currents and wavelengths, the turns
and counterturns, of thematic waters with a musical motif
that plays to its own depths from the bridge
of a burning violin dancing like fire on the water
with no fear of ever being drowned out by the moon.

PATRICK WHITE