Friday, September 14, 2012

PURE INTENSITY


PURE INTENSITY

Pure intensity. The point of a star. Blue acetylene
to burn out the slag of the soul and burnish the gold
that pours from the ore like the full moon out of the new
without any fear of ever growing old.

Give up it all up like nothing less
than everything all the time
until there’s nothing left for death
to get its hands on. Nothing to curse. Nothing to bless.
But you can’t always tell which is which
as the witchdoctor minimalist
at the back of the wax museum
steps out of the shadows of his spider-web
and says less is more and more is less, more or less
as the crow flys. But there’s deceit in his eyes
and you haven’t got time to consider all that
when your hair is on fire like a tie-dyed comet
and everyone’s mistaking you as a sign
of their second coming, when all you want to do
is plunge your coma in the sun that shines at midnight
in every third eye of dew on the enlightened stargrass.

Everything passes, it’s true. But if you pass
fast enough, time stops, and that grave in the closet
you’ve been hauling around with you for light years
becomes as huge as a sky burial
at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, or the pyre
of your own skeleton stoking the fire
that’s boiling the marrow out your bones.
Stay inflammable like orchids and carnations,
waterlilies imported from your
igneous passion for the moon.

Don’t ever let the gods chain you to a rock
in the Caucasus for a theft of fire
they didn’t even bother to prove
before they put your liver on the daily menu
and sent vultures to peck your eyes out
like hors d’oeuvres. It’s ok to be a wildflower
and bloom in fire once every seven thousand years
like the return of a Buddha in an urn of ashes.
But never lend your third eye out to an arsonist
who says he’s having trouble focusing
and uses it as a lens to burn a black hole
in the middle of a poem that’s been taken
out of context like a table of contents.
We’ve got the stars for that, and who needs
another epilogue to keep the fire going
long enough to be the third man on the match
for a bullet you didn’t see coming like a space craft
because you were blinded by your own blazing?

Climbing the stairs to Joan of Arc’s place,
she was conditioning her hair with a fire extinguisher
and getting ready to pull up stakes
and move back to the country where you can see
six thousand stars with the naked eye
or you can jump through the fire
like a witch without being burned
by the Burgundians for reigniting France
without a permit in a month of unbearable heat.
Even though hagiographers prefer
the fragrance of their saints in urns.

PATRICK WHITE  

MOSTLY SAD


MOSTLY SAD

Mostly sad. Long dolorous drops of molten bells
tired of calling the faithful to prayer
and the cannon getting all of the attention.
No particular beef with life and only a few in it.
I’m reading poetry on my sixty-fourth birthday Saturday night
for my supper and the Canada Council.
A sticker for my license plate so I don’t get taken
off the road by a cop at a traffic stop,
and maybe, though it’s doubtful,
a free day or two to write without,
at this old stump of a desk like a snow hare,
the ferocious exigencies of an underwhelming reality
they haven’t found on the grid of their corporate greed yet.
Always try to put my heart into it
but right now I’m using my three and a half pounds
of cranial starmud as a doorstop to all my stargates
and I don’t really care whether or not
communication is blocked between me
and the fire hydrants sitting along the street
like squat little walk-in gurus with nothing else to do
when the Sky Dragon Restaurant isn’t setting itself on fire
but meditate full lotus while the heritage lamp posts
pray with their heads bowed like narcissi and daffodils.

And if you were to ask me how I was feeling
I’d probably say, today, all my emotions
are smoke without fire. Candle wax in daylight
with a little black wick in the middle
disgruntled it isn’t a fuse that’s lighting anything up.
Wonder if anyone else ever feels sometimes
their life’s a consolation prize that doesn’t console?
A rare singularity at the bottom of a black hole?
One of four prizes at the bottom of a crackerjack box?

Today stale bread has more character than I do
but, hey, it isn’t time to start feeding the pigeons
in Stewart Park yet, or filling a bucket of wild oats
I’ll still be sowing in the grave, to feed
Ian Miller’s big brass statue of Big Ben
leaping through the spotlight of a prime time moon.
Got one friend I can openly talk to in this town.
He’s a carpenter-cook and brings me dinner
when I’m down. He’s a man of the people
and I’m a somewhat embittered not so sacred warrior clown
surrealistically committed to writing things down
like a waterclock from one window to the next
as if my seeing were shapeshifting time
and I could take Arcturus going down
over the tarpaper rooftops of Perth
and burn it into my hard drive like an asterisk
on the computer screen of my third eye.

Live behind windows most of the time
like a deus ex machina with my three goldfish
in an aquarium because I don’t want
to be estranged by the conciliatory looks
on the faces of the workaday people’s souls
as I explain how hard I work like a madman
for half a century now, at not making a living.
And they all say, don’t worry, because they’ve
seen the movie of the agony and the ecstasy,
you’ll be rich after your dead, and it feels
like a community slap on the back of a corpse.

I don’t try to pour the ocean into a teacup anymore
and intuitively take the measure of everybody’s skull
like a phrenologist looking for the brim of the brow
to determine what’s full for them, and to each,
like a vapour of mist rising off a morning lake,
or a sunami of stars like the Milky Way, I pour
Zen tea out like a Japanese Chanoyu ceremony
and talk about how you can turn anything you do in life
from making a chair, to raising a baby, or driving a back hoe
into the do of an enlightenment path. Nor is a calling
a job or a career you could marry to your daughter
and be happy about, though way too many poets
seem to have forgotten that in the pursuit of their hobby.

If you’re not dying or living for it like a junkie, you’re a liar.
Insincere. Sine cera. A bust of Caesar made of wax
because there wasn’t time before the triumph
to finish it in marble. And if you get caught,
it would be wise to make him laugh at your duplicity
or your effigy could be next. Just a thought.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING FOR A LITTLE BLACK WATER AFTER THE FURY OF THE WHITE


LOOKING FOR A LITTLE BLACK WATER AFTER THE FURY OF THE WHITE

Looking for a little blackwater after the fury of the white.
Dark energy after the light as peace
settles down gently upon me,
the sediment of the eras and rivers of my life.
And this cool night in early autumn,
a woman in a dark cloak and hood
I could almost caress if I could just breathe
a little more deeply than the abyss
I’ve been dogpaddling in because
there’s nowhere else among all these stars
I can swim from the shallow end of myself
into the watersheds of my last drowning.

And there’s an unprescribed silence,
a herb of the moon that’s salving the wound
of the lunar thorn I just pulled out of my heart
delicately with my teeth. I’m trying
to tune my spinal cord to the guitar string
of the Tay River, so I can resonate in harmony
with the flow of things. Starfire walking
on the water of the mindstream without
the crutch of a miracle to help bear me up.

It’s not so much a matter of power or self-discipline
as it is well within the spontaneous capacity
of everyone’s emptiness to do so because,
labour exhaustively as we do just to find the path
let alone stay on it, all we’ve had to do
right from the start, is to let life
give us a narrative of our own we can be true to
as it makes you up going along with it
like a lonely survivor singing to himself in a lifeboat
at the last watch of the night. Arcturus
at the tip of our eyelashes, enmeshed
as it sinks in a western treeline of beached shipwrecks.

Reach out, but don’t grasp. Accept and let go.
Scatter your blossoms, even when you’re
down on your luck, like ripped up lottery tickets
whether they end up in the gutter
or on an impressionist table cloth somewhere
playing checkers with a patient still life.
I’ve seen whole Japanese plum trees in blossom
be brushed aside like perfect haikus
by a street sweeper at three in the morning
when no one else was watching but me and Basho.

My blood is saturated by an overdose of stars
and I can feel a light from deep within
rooting in my limbs like nightfall
as my awareness is enhanced
by how much unknown compassion
there is the silence, love in a dark time.
Blue moons on the wild grape vines,
approaching the autumn equinox in Virgo
as if they could read my mind like a purple passage
intoxicated on the wine that can be pressed out of its own decay.

The waterlilies are gone with the fireflies,
and the reupholstered cattails are beginning
to show signs of wear already. And soon
the Canada geese will be flying high overhead
bearing the souls of the dead to new latitudes of seeing
where the starmaps fall from their hands
like the feathers and leaves of being
flowing along with the mindstream
like the wiverns, wavelengths, and water sylphs
playing on the shores of the Milky Way
with as many burning bridges,
as there are flames on the phoenix
in the immolated sumac, as there are eyes
to see across these circuitous waters
to the other side of where we’ve always been going
alone together with everyone who’s ever come aboard.

PATRICK WHITE