Friday, August 10, 2012

FIREFLY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?


FIREFLY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

Firefly, what are you looking for
in every corner of the third eye of the world?
Are you looking for the missing children
of another realm who fell into this one
through the trapdoor of a lullaby
enigmatically enciphered in totemistic code?
Are you the star someone was following
like a spark plug that leaked out of their dreams,
a swan in an oilspill? Were you unhappy
with the constellation you fell from
like one of the crown jewels from Corona Borealis,
or are you just a vagrant like me, one
of those aligned to wandering as the next place
to shine a little light on, your life like a lantern in hand,
wondering what’s been written under the leaves,
or under a bridge, that it takes a madman to understand
or it takes a whole tree to play the mystery of its cards
so far from its chest, when they’ll all be scattered to the wind
like ancient starmaps and waterlilies soon.

Insight, synteretic spark, semaphoric lighthouse,
blackout and ignition, which phase of you
shines more intensely, the light or the dark?
Do you just have the one good eye, or two?
It would take someone just as lost at sea in their awareness
to get their bearings from you, as it would
to consult the compass of a flower like a waterclock
because time, when it’s free, like light,
expands in all directions at once like tree rings
dilating the apples of their eyes in the rain,
surrounding the lore of their heartwood with growing pains.

Metaphor, glow worm, do you find what you seek,
are you a chandelier burning in the palace
of a mason jar after the last waltz has packed away its cellos,
a tear of the sun that shines at midnight
like a canary in an underground diamond mine
or do we share the same mind, one neuron in the net
reflecting the other, an effect of the optics of thought?
Intimate familiar, little prophet, rogue planet,
singularity at the bottom of a black hole,
are you looking at me, as I am you
like a thought on the outside, an underwater welder
trying to heal the damage done to the hull of the moon
crossing the Great Barrier Reef of the brain?

Wavelengths of water and light sway the river reeds,
silver the fallen limbs of the statuesque birch
that leaned out too far over the edge of the lake
to pluck the moon from the sky like an apricot.
I watch the cults and spiritual congregations of the fireflies
gather, shape and dissolve, each with its own flight path,
and I wonder if there’s a shape-shifting constellation
that would cover us all under the roof of the same sign
like a zodiac of homeless exiles we all had the keys to
but didn’t know where the locks were hidden
until we took off our starmaps like blindfolds.

No extinctions in the gentle meteor showers
of the fireflies, nor any discernible radiant,
for them or me or the universe, given
everyone embodies the whole of the Big Bang
in and of themselves, just as the New England asters do,
everyone shining for all their worth
through the translucency of their own space,
even when they’re trying to hide from their own eyes,
like daylilies at night, or the gold of full moons
under eyelids of ore, under the overturned lifeboats
of their beached hope chests that have nothing
to look forward to anymore that isn’t any further away
than the telescope they use on top of a cold mountain
to measure the wingspan of their dreams.
The light will out as if it couldn’t keep itself a secret
from the darkness it illuminates with its own flowering.

PATRICK WHITE

WATER HAS ITS FOLLOWERS


WATER HAS ITS FOLLOWERS

Water has its followers
but the wind is free of an audience.
It doesn’t encourage cults of wild irises and daylilies
along the flowing of its banks.
It sows the orchards with the pollen of stars
it kicks up like dust at its heels.
But my voice isn’t the larnyx
of windmills and waterwheels
and when I speak
I’m always one among the crowd
that’s listening at the same time
to a conversation with themselves
that took the words right out of my mouth.

My voice is a seance.
The dead use it like a bus stop.
The swallows and the pigeons
drink from it as if it were a public fountain
efflorescing like an Easter lily in Florence.
It’s a guitar. But I am not
the medium, the message, or the master.
Sometimes my voice comes in the mail
like a self-addressed suicide note
I wanted to take a cheap form
of copyright out on. Be dead
by the time it got here
like the light of a star that’s gone on ahead
so I won’t need to open it to the public.

No echo. I know it’s a black hole
with nothing to say to anyone
who isn’t as singularly empty as it is
cowboying aeons of dark matter into galaxies
that won’t stray from the herd like starfish.
Still life with clown, sometimes
it finds me meditating among the pears
or half-lotus in the nunneries of the waterlilies
praying for something important to come down
like Jesus or a ufo and take me away
just take me away for good from this alien place.

When it talks as if it’s been insulted
I’m the one who loses face when it decides
it would be more honourable for me to die
facing in the direction of my chi,
gutting myself on a compass needle
that’s been in the family ancestrally,
than waste my death as I have my life on poetry.
And when it’s in a less ceremonious mood
it holds a broken beer bottle up to my throat
and threatens to cut my heart out
like a bird stuck in a chimney
putting wings on its jugular like a one-stringed harp.

PATRICK WHITE

MY FINGER ON THE TRIGGER


MY FINGER ON THE TRIGGER

My finger on the trigger of the crescent moon
I hold like a gun to my head,
or should I offer my throat to its blade,
unbind the flag of my blood from its pulley,
pull down the poppy
that exalts in the wind and the light
from this sad station of passing shadows
that mourns the death of the night like birds
in a burnt-out forest of blossoms and ashes?
I have the emotional life of a bell
rooted in rock like the columbines
that have mastered a silence I aspire to,
lamenting the metal in my blood
that rusts like the afterlife of iron,
defeated pollen no bee will gather, hive, or honey.
I am passionate dust,
not the powdered auburn
that stains the stamens on the stargazer lilies,
I bleed like a metal,
and I am leafless year round,
my seeing does not follow the sun like a heliotrope;
I am a bowl full of stars, a radio dish
listening for signs of life,
one word to startle the ancient hiss of creation
that keeps returning me to this moment
to cross swords with the clock,
even knowing how time will pierce my heart.
What folly to expect a horn to flower,
what madness to weed the stars
and expect a harvest
to fill the waiting silo of the railroad granary
that funnels nothing but air and echoes
into an abyss that lingers like a famine.
There are no more fortune-cookies in my kisses,
the constellations that once slid across my eyes
like an escalator approaching zenith
all look like punctuation marks without a text,
kells without an inaugural scripture
that isn’t a sigh of miscarried beginnings,
the desiccated afterbirth
of a pen with wings
that wasn’t strong enough
to crack its way out of the cosmic egg and sing, just sing
for the celestial fuck of it.
Caw. Chirp. Caw. Chirp. Caw.
Blank. Loaded. Blank. Loaded. Blank.
The hammer I was using
to build a palace of light and water,
to be able to nail my coffin shut with the truth,
coming down
on the anvil of the heart like the pulse
of a stagestruck bullet.

PATRICK WHITE