Monday, August 20, 2012

HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY


HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY

Heal softly, lover, burn gently,
the moon is full on your windowsill,
and the stars haven’t gone down
over the eyes of your bells
or made a fool of your tears
over a jest of ashes. You are
the night branch that reaches for me
and I’m the bird that returns
to your cherry chandeliers,
the ripe goblets of your fire-plums,
and the stars in the quince of your eyes.
And there are blackberries in your blood
thorns and vines, simmering eclipses
broken gates and lonely doorways
where I’ll always come to shine,
where I’ll wait like a ghost beyond death
for the eyelids and bridges
in the breath of your wine.
Eternity isn’t time enough
to hold the sea I bear you
nor a mountain robed in snow
nor a valley heeding voices in the depths,
more than a wound and a toy
to the love I feel for you.
Heal softly, lover, hear me, see
in this dreamtime of the flesh,
how the lanterns
of the lady slippers glow with honey
that fill the hives with light,
and the doe sleeps softly
in the silver grass that jewels the water,
and the fireflies outlive the brass
of graver monuments than these
that write our names on the moon in shadows.
I say it in bees and bruises and orchids
in apples and eglantine,
in roads and doors and thresholds,
in skulls and scars and sunspots
in grapes and scarlet runners,
in the slips of the cucumber seeds,
and the lips of the velvet borage
that kiss and overflow the stone,
you’re the harp in the throat of time
the spider weaves
to hear the morning play.
No widow of burnt guitars,
no journal of summer
pressed between the pages
of the nightshift shales,
no blood on a chain,
or raven lost in the rags and ribbons
of her own black sails, not
frost on a garden that fails,
or a lock that’s lost it keys,
or a rock that grieves for its plundered ores,
you are the candle and the seal
of all my mystic urgencies,
the gentle thief of my confessions
at the circuits and sessions
of a doomed man’s last appeal
to die in the bay of your arms,
a dolphin, a bottle, a snail
that craved its way to you.
Heal softly, lover, turn with the herbs
that follow the sun like clocks
and when your day is done
bathe in the dusk with the birds
that fly through the air like autumn,
and scented by the apricots
and peacock blues that pour out of my heart
like the eyes and inks of a prelude,
a painter, a pitcher of words,
rise from your ancient solitude renewed
and dressed by the wind
in your scarves and veils,
in your nets, your shawls and auroras,
in anklets, chokers, loops and chains
in your nebulae and orbits
and the nippled rain of your earrings,
wait for me as I will wait for you
where the nightjar sings
to celebrate his lover’s soft approach
with every quill and feather of his wings.
And no world will deceive us,
no flame expire, no radiance cease,
no fracture mar the jubilant fire
that recast its heart in the irons of hell
to love you long and well.

PATRICK WHITE

A VISION OF GRIEF IN THE WORLD


A VISION OF GRIEF IN THE WORLD

A vision of grief in the world, so vast and varied,
so intimately specific, so peculiar to each one of us,
we stratify it in our brains like the fossil shapes
of wavelengths and membranes layered
like the flying carpets of the Burgess Shale
or the sediment of a mindstream slowing down
to deposit itself in the book of experience.
Things we couldn’t understand at the time
and still don’t, turmoils of stardust
that fogged our clarity up like a windshield
and taught the heart that feeling
cannot only be a chandelier but a chainsaw
in an old growth forest as well
no matter how many nails for the best of reasons
you drive into the messiah you’re trying to save.

We’re always pouring mirages into
the white gold goblets of the moon
and confusing our lunancy
with the hilarity of being drunk enough
to delude us into thinking we’ve escaped our sorrow
by covering our eyes to outrun the light.

Sometimes I can look at a housefly missing one wing,
rowing in circles on its back on a windowsill,
and my heart overwhelms me with a flashflood of tears
rising from an unknown watershed deep inside,
a subliminal empathy for everything that is lost,
broken, and alone, seriously alone, when
they turn the lights out in the labyrinth for the night,
and the wounded lab rats settle down
in the corners of their cages with their backs
up against the wall, until tommorow when
the lights go on again like a Pavlovian dawn,
and the savage humans come with their tormentive deaths
to kill the way they kill each other
with expedience and enlightened self interest
that whisper like contractors in the shadows
of pleonastic alibis for perpetual war against the world.

No less susceptible than I have been all along
to what is emerging like a dark harmony from my confusion,
my well-informed bafflement, this road I’ve been walking
like a revolution on crutches ever since we lost,
as if there were no other way but love and understanding
even when you’re ready, six times a day
to concede defeat without giving your assent
to the way chaos turned out in retrospect. Time
sweetens the apple into an approximately habitable planet
even if it’s not Eden, and peace beguiles the soul
like someone left alone too long to the intimacy of their solitude
but the sadness of a seasoned overview mingles
in the sugars of life as well, and the heart, the heart
hangs heavily in space with no sight of a planet
under its feet anymore, except the abyss of it all
with nothing to fall toward or away from anymore.
A black sheep shepherd moon with nowhere to pasture
in the starfields on the back slopes of the world mountain,
with nothing to graze on but the symbols
that swarm its breakthrough into the available dimensions
of a future that can’t happen a while longer without it.

Human nature, an alloy of the highest and the lowest,
a three-edged sword, drawn like iron and blood out of the ore,
folded and hammered on the anvils of the stars
and tempered in the valleys of the fireflies
where cooler heads prevail, or the nib
of a silver plough farming the dark side of the moon
as if it were seeding sacred syllables in its wake
hoping they would spread like the hermetic lunacy
of tryng to make bread to share with those who hunger,
out of wildflowers. I was born with a bellyful of those
who try to make what people need seem as beautiful
as the gaping aviomantic fountainmouths they never feed.

Michelangelo at Sotheby’s, Shakespeare at the Bodleian,
how many families could culture sustain
if it actually got as real as grain in their bloodstreams,
instead of auctioning off the windows
as if Galileo painted something as obscene
upon the corrective lenses of his Dutch telescope
as pockmarks on the moon and sunspots on perfections
as one cardinal suggested he did
instead of looking as far as any of these three
into what is well beyond any of us to comprehend and forgive
insomuch if it’s done unto these,
it’s done unto the rest of us as well?
We should worry about a lot more than just cholesterol
placking the heart at its tinkling soirees
suggestively pointing out the gestures
of meaningful insignificance that beset our labours.
We should check out, to maintain our own well being,
whether our art has a green thumb or not,
or we’re just leaving
the crumbs of our dreams in the corners
of other people’s eyes to nibble their way

out of a dark wood into the threshed gardens
and empty silos that ring as hollow as a carillon of bells
summoning a sad, sad seance to leave ghost food out for the dead.

PATRICK WHITE