Tuesday, August 28, 2012

NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR


NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

Not sitting here trying to flint knap the splinters of a mirror
into Clovis points for pygmies to go hunting mammoths with.
Maybe if I can make them small enough to go on Twitter
or Facebook, two minutes with a hook in the imagination
and I might be able to make of a little stardust, a big constellation
of gaping fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake.
I might make a big splash, like Basho’s frog,
for the lifespan of a haiku in prime time for nitwits.
I want to lay my vision out like a surrealistic starmap,
I don’t want some lazy idiot laying its egg on my forehead
like a carnelian, or worse, a contact lens on my third eye
to cure my astigmatism by eating little peep holes in my vision.

I don’t want a news feed for an intravenous muse
spoon feeding me whatever she wants me to hear
like a distant rumour of inspiration running like an opioid
at the end of a morphine drip with fangs.
Beauty’s not an ephemerid, nor the truth
a media fashionista on a catwalk, or an anchor’s desk,
that doesn’t so much as illuminate and deepen
the darkness and the light, but distract the heart with agiprop
and show off its lipstick as if Van Gogh just ate his paint again.
God bless the insane glorious souls dying alone in vain
as the old order changeth and giveth way to the new
and the language of the spirit that expressed itself
in a grammar of wildflowers breaking into a purple passage
of New England asters, is all thorns but no roses
on a bouquet of razorwire that was born without leaves
but still fits the brow of some silly poetling like Apollonic laurel
for having enough money to buy a good book review
if you don’t have the breasts or the chest or the talent
to get it for free.

Why make a mockery of the lie poetry used to be
when yours is so trivial and petty your pretty snowflake
is going to piss in its pants if it ever encounters
an emotional blizzard or a spiritual avalanche?
And that little night light of yours you keep on
like a dream journal beside the bed, isn’t going
to seed the darkness with stars when all you’ve got to sow
is artificial sugar and organic sea salt. And even then,
you’re not Carthage, though you share the same impotence.
What does the candle know of the calling
of a lighthouse on the moon, waiting for light years
or why the foghorns are always in mourning
for the ghost ships it exorcises with a warning
not to come near, or its all downhill from here to the bottom
of a housewell with the literary ambitions of a black hole
the fireflies won’t come to sip from without going out
because they won’t drink from any fountain mouth the stars don’t
and you haven’t even gotten drunk on the blood
of your own skull yet, singing by a river to a moonrise.

Let the strong rope unravel as it will into a million weak threads
clinging like a mountain to a spider web, or a spinal cord
that’s never been frayed like the delta of a river or a mindstream
that can smell the great nightsea of awareness up ahead,
or even a shoelace passing like a needle through an eyelet.
The planet’s on fire, this is Dresden, this is Hamburg,
this is Gaza in a squall of white phosphorus, this is the inferno
that sweeps you off your feet like a whirlwind of igneous Sufis
and evaporates your eyes like dew off the grass in a flash
of inflammable insight that not even your guru or your shrink
are fireproof enough to live through this astronomical catastrophe.
And you, you want to write and tell me, in poems
that make me want to ask them to come over and do my hair as well
how domestically troubled you are by the pebble in your shoe.
You blindfold yourself with a no smoking sign
in front of a firing squad that thinks it might be a good career move
to make a literary martyr out of you like James Joyce
going blind in Trieste while Ezra Pound
sends him cabbages and shoes to survive on.

Bathetic, trivial, irrelevant and effete, you think
it’s radical not to explore the roots of things
like an underground fire in a valley of cedars,
or immolate yourself like the sumac in the fall
hoping to ignite an Arab spring in the middle of your perishing.
Two parachutes on your back, and one in the trunk of the car,
and still you won’t jump, even when the stars
are underneath you expecting you to join in the firewalk
and Icarus hands you a fire-extinguisher
and says, here, put them out if things get too hot.

PATRICK WHITE

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING


NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

No lightning from my cloud of unknowing,
now that this season of storms has passed.
Occasionally tears, but a harvest of stars
shining like Spica in the hand of Virgo
and all these dazzling insights into nothing
I hang like wild grapes and chandeliers
above the dance floor where I press the wine.

Not meditative, but darkly absorbed, who knows,
maybe even void bound, drowned or lost,
I’m not trying to seek a way out of the abyss.
Whatever it is, I accept it as it is. Most of the time.
And when I don’t and I’m stuck like a wishbone
in the throat of a nightbird, even my dissonance
is included in the background cosmic hiss.
So I say you don’t have to be attuned to it
to be in harmony with it, and if you’ve gone astray
or been misdirected, maybe that’s a course correction
you didn’t have to make, because all rivers
are flowing the right way to the sea, and as
for the picture-music you hear like a hidden mindstream
talking in a dream in a dark wood, you don’t
always have to hit the right note to be a great singer.
Or name me a bird that sings its heart out off key.

I can feel the stillness moving under my feet
like a road, a mountain path, a rogue orbit,
or Curiosity like a wandering scholar on Mars,
a vagantes, a Druidic refugee intervening in the War of the Worlds
and a machine this time looking for the Garden of Eden
like an alien mirage in the desert, fossils of Dilmun,
the middens of Shangra La, microbes in the begging bowls
of a new myth of origin, where Nasa is God,
and a robot is the first of a whole new race of Martian nomads.

The silence speaks to me in thousands of estranged voices
like leaves on the silver Russian olives moved
by the spirit of the wind tampering with their sterling currency
to lament their passage at the approach of autumn,
though there are only a few flames beginning
to immolate the trees like heretics that had to
bring their own stakes to their auto da fe.
O how easy it would be when I’m down here alone
to slip into this river like an unobtrusive sacred syllable
into a long-running conversation, even if
it’s nothing but spiritual slang, and yet be satisfied
I’ve had my say, I’ve added my voice
like a bird in a birch grove, whether
anything alive tonight answers it or not.

As a holy book said once on a bus, sitting beside me,
when one jewel is marked they’re all marked
indelibly as stars and eyes and planets,
and there’s a Conservation of Data Principle
in this universe, even in the heart of a black hole,
that says once here, here forever
in this great spiritual lost and found
that can read the whole history of life
in the mustard seeds that yellow the fields around here,
or the stars that do much the same
in a commotion of atmospherically aberrated colours,
burning with the urgency of mystic details
being whispered into everyone’s ear
as if each were a hidden secret of God
that wished to be known and expressed itself flawlessly
like a master of mantric wavelengths
or a mute with an overbite pointing out constellations
and the last of the wildflowers, a signage of light
reciting the fathomless poetry that lives in a name,
ignoring all the fancy lanterns in the windows
of the houses of the zodiac, to follow the flame
of whatever light you’ve been given to go by,
wherever it leads, through the star fields or the cul de sac
of a satoric eclipse with no light at the end of the tunnel
as the only way of ever prodigally coming back.

PATRICK WHITE