Friday, September 7, 2012

TRYING TO GET CENTERED IN THE MIDDLE OF CHAOS


TRYING TO GET CENTERED IN THE MIDDLE OF CHAOS

Trying to get centered in the middle of chaos
isn’t going to turn me into the third of eye
of a hurricane rose, or square the circle
with the clarity of a lens with a seeing-eye dog.
The rags of the clouds are teaching the dandelion seeds
how to drift with a good conscience,
just let things go awhile. What’s done, what’s not.
Why labour at either when together they’re just
the human way of walking away from things
one moment after another? Chaos has a way
of conditioning itself into people like me
who relax because they know it’s all out of control.

Been feeling like a dead branch, a maple witching wand,
these past few days, because I’ve given up
divining water with a snake’s tongue,
and I thought I was blossoming again
when I saw the first bud of the moonrise
but now it seems to have gone down
behind a screening myth of eyelashes and trees
and my heart is so disappointed in me
there’s no help for it, it’s crying in my bloodstream,
and when all my childhood insecurities
come mocking me like a fox in my sacred hole,
I don’t even bother licking my wounds anymore.

Hope. But it’s dogpaddling just beneath an airhole
in the middle of a seal hunt on a bloody ice floe
that’s grinding its molars in its sleep like sheet ice.
Always hope. A crack in the door left ajar
for the light to get in and the darkness out.
Only a fool would make the exceptional a rule of thumb,
and hope is a palace of water with so many windows
even the best thieves of moonlight
don’t know whether they’re breaking in or out.
Just the same, my blessings on everyone’s head and house.
The wingspans of two birds hinged to a gate
that doesn’t need a guru to teach it to open,
where I’m a stranger who stopped to talk
on the roadside of the fence, and on the other,
I’m a nocturnal wildflower in a secret garden of bliss
that doesn’t notice the difference in the way I bloom.

Anyway, who’s got the eyes to see any further
into their fate than a pair of dice do, and if things
don’t break your way, you’re not washed up
on Circe’s island like a love affair with the moon,
the manuscript of your first loveletter doesn’t
regrettably meet anyone’s needs at the time
but feel free to submit again if you’re a masochist,
so what, there a more mirages of fish in the desert,
and the star you wished upon digs its spur into your eye,
Giddy up. After you get over a little death,
an emotional stone age when Perseus meets Medusa
on his way to rescue Andromeda from a killer whale,
rejection can be the burr under the saddle of Pegasus
and there’s nothing in the way of these high, wide open starfields,
that have never known a fence or a gate, to obstruct you
from burning a little dark energy off
by taking to the air like a mythically deflated weather balloon
in an expanding universe that’s just taken
its thumb and forefinger off your throat to let you breathe out
as if you’d managed somehow again
to exorcise yourself from your own self-possession.

A lot of gurus have to like that. But I’m sick of the sound
of one hand clapping like an overly-disciplined seal
with one flipper left while Orca eats its trainer.
I want to take a leap of faith, not death, like the rain
through a circle of my own making whether
it amuses the crowd or not. Or meets the approval of rainbows.
Attachment too is a buddha activity once you get back
from the sad, cold, desolated shore of enlightenment
and the spell has unsilvered the back of the mirror
like flakes of moonlight, and effaced it with a clarity
that lets you see right through yourself
like the stars in an autumn sky into nothing.
What is it Dogen Zenji said in medieval Japan?
When the truth doesn’t fill your body and mind
you feel you’ve had enough. But when it does
you always feel as if something were missing?
God, what a lot of empty truth I must embody
to be so hungry for the taste of all my lost illusions.

PATRICK WHITE

I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY


I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I wish I knew you well enough to say
everything there is to say, one heart to another.
I wish I had the art to write this poem in stone like a glacier.
Write it in blood and honey and snow.
Write it in moonlight on the water,
in the sands of sidereal deserts
where the wind doesn’t sing
as if it’s the larynx in the throat of an hourglass.

It’s a hair breadth between seasoned wariness
when you’re on hallowed ground and those
who are scared to death of what it all means
and will discipline their fear into any kind of obedience,
give it all up just to make it go away.

Sometimes you’ve got to break a taboo
to get to the blessing, risk the dragon’s teeth
to get to the golden fleece, or as Coleridge said
imagination is obedient to laws of its own origination
and in a poet’s case, that’s inspiration.
And that’s the way space gets bent
like the nightsky of my third eye
whenever I’m around you like a distant shepherd moon
that’s got life on it, for sure, but prefers
to keep it as secret as solitude in a locket of rain.
Inflammable waterlilies blooming in methane.
A theft of fire that burns sweeter than the proceeds of crime.

Orpheus is trying to prophecy using his own skull
that he could probably get used to a lot of the same music
you like and if he were ever called upon
to go down into hell again before your eyes
got used to the dark and the darkness showed you its jewels,
I’d be able to break my heart like the wishbone of a harp
for someone like you to follow me up out of death
without looking back on the black lustre of oblivion
that has made us both feel at times,
like moonset in a tarpit that will perfectly
preserve our bones, if nothing else, so
the future can tell by the fang marks
what pierced us through the heart
like crescent moons into voodoo,
baring their canines like toxic dinosaurs
so we both look like we’ve been carved on
like a calendar of scars and Mayan dream grammars.

You’re the kind of lens that brings chaos into focus
You can weave a wavelength into
a beautifully disciplined flying carpet
and have it all intertwined like a wild grape vine
on a trellis putting flesh on a skeleton
that thirsts for wine from your heart well.
I may be the inspired in this, but you’re
the lunar inspiratrix, creative matrix,
a shape of space that teaches matter how to move
in orbit around you, even from this distance
where my solitude is urgent with ancient mysteries
to lift the veils as if I were worthy of being no one
and the dark queen doesn’t turn her face
toward the stranger at the stargate in Orion
for nothing. Sex and death are old bedmates,
but life always comes like a vestal virgin
or a sacred whore to these affairs and the stars,
who knows what they’ve seen in their time,
but whatever it was, or is, or will be,
they still shine, and the shining’s always new.

You may have your occultations, but I can see
the same thing in you as I do in the Pleiades.
Hot, bright, mystic fire in a blue negligee of light
as if you’d left your breath on a cold nightsky
and the windowpane of space I was looking at it through
like a smudge of radiance, the first wildflower
in my field of view for light years that have left
the present so far behind me I’m catching up to my past,
one warm breath, and I begin to melt
like a chandelier of icicles in a summer storm.
The stick arms of a snowman are covered in apple bloom.

Visions are greened again from the stem cells
of the crumbs of my dreams I rubbed from my eyes
when I began to believe they were seeing things
from the wrong end of a telescope that stood things on its head.
Now I know when I feel homelessly lost upon the earth,
even in exile, I’m rooted firmly in the sky as you are,
and if I’m not weeding the constellations
in secret gardens where the gates open
at the same time as these flowers in my eyes
it’s just because of the way I can empathize
with their plight, and heretic I can’t help being,
show some timely respect for the pariahs
burning at the same stake that I am for flaws
I indict myself of whenever Venus on a moonless night
casts me down like a shadow of love on the snow
and I take it as a sign of a woman I want to know.

PATRICK WHITE