Monday, September 17, 2012

JOURNEY


JOURNEY

I’m on some kind of journey
but I don’t know where it’s going;
I’m growing wings and shedding them,
and I’m true to every thought in my head.
I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,
a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,
a meteorically battered planet
that wobbles between a kiss and a fist
in the way it keeps running itself around.
I spend too much time alone.

There are no obstructions in any direction;
and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,
talking to myself like a candle,
weaving my way among the shadows
like a fish through the supple harps
of the silver river reeds. I see
that I’m taking a bath in my own grave
to wash the soiled skies of the painted world
off my eyes, to behold
the brief career of the leaf of life
and how the light gusts out from the windows
like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short,
and the new temple never gets further built
than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest
left to the business of the earth,
all that beauty and magnificence,
unraveled among the mud weavers.

I was inoculated against death
by a splinter of the moon;
by how little time there is for love,
for the root to get drunk
on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,
by how little I will ever know
of the road to the doorway I stepped through
to stand in awe before the moon spill
on the raven blue waters,
and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman
who has just conceded an island in her passage,
and the fragrance of unheard music
that I am a pillar of wonder
before the unsayable
as she lets drop her shadows and feathers of light,
and the blood-god assumes
his flowering crown of fire
to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.
What I have lost in the river
I will find in the river
and what I have taken from the sky
I will give back to the sky,
and there shall come a day
when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,
and the darkness that overtakes me now
will be a gate of stars to a water palace
where the dragonflies and waterlilies
are the scepters and crowns of a human divinity
that will endure like a whisper of radiance,
a more haunting taste of light,
the rumour of a black rose
that outshines the angels
that coax the lanterns out of the night.

I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies
on the windy shore of a trembling lake,
like the blue hat plume of smoke
from a gallant winter chimney
into the vastness of my own mind
like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.
And these words will come and go
like the tides of the ocean I was,
like the providential leaves
of unfurling fortune-cookies,
like an avalanche of gold
washed down from the mountain upstream.

I write them in flowing diamond,
I write them in auroras of blood,
in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,
in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night
in the fleeting, indelible dream
of doors and hands and moons,
in warm breath on a cold window,
in a halo of comets
smeared into light by the sun,
in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,
I have said what it was mine to say
on a page of the wind
that whistled through me like life
greening the sands of the hourglass
with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart
to fall like wisdom from its tower
toward a fallible paradise
that won’t leave me as I am for long.
And I will jump again
into this cauldron of joys and sorrows
to string my spinal cord
over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,
walking upright
to plead with my own answers
to thaw like a mirror
estranged from the world it reflects
in the self-effacing flames
of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.
The awakening seed
echoes these flowers of fire
in the valley of a voice in the furnace
that lies down in the cool grass
by a stream of idle stars
and arrays its vagrant heart
like a breeze of blood in the dust
to the refugees in the shadows.

They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness
to the slash of a razor of light
to the threshing of the full harvest
in the siloes of the nightwind
enthroned like a breath of life
in the midst of its own dispersal.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THERE IS ONE VOICE


AND THERE IS ONE VOICE

And there is one voice among many,
one I remember as mine
among so many drops of rain, so many stars,
so many leaves, flames, feathers, flowers,
and the teen-age girl in so many corners of the darkness
skeining her pencil webs across the page
to catch something, a butterfly hunting spiders
that won’t understand her,
and the lovers that have sifted downstream
from the radiant watersheds of their mountain plateaus
like silt over the laryngeal deltas of my saying,
black pollen of extinguished stars
I carry around in the medicine bag of my afterlife
like mystic winds to keep the sails up
like the eyelids of a blind rose.
So many skies have enthroned themselves within me over the years,
so many waves and planets and legends of darkness
and the shipwrecks and shores of the weather,
and the storms and the birds, and the shriek of the lightning,
so many dawns and sunsets
and the strutting peacocks in the twilight,
and the sumptuous nights with their illicit luminosities,
so many banners of burning straw
as I look for the one needle of light
that was the gate and the eye and the mouth and the voice
of what most closely resembled me for awhile,
before I learned how to slough my skin
and the hauntings of the black poppies who long to be clear began,
and what was one threshold for a poet in solitude
turned into a palatial labyrinth of doors
that swung on their hinges in space like birds and tongues and bells
all the homeless whose last address will be a gravestone,
all the hapless, broken wretches
who keep trying again like losing bottle-caps,
and the women who came to the mike
to sing like an ambulance,
and the atrocities, the murders, the obscenity, the weeping,
that grabbed at my throat like severed hands
to scream of the horrors and sorrows
in the bloody braille and crippled signage of slaughtered flowers.
There was a boy. He was sixteen. And a prelude
that grained him out of a black cloud
that swirled around his feet like a snakepit
and pearled him into an eclipse
that time held up to the moon like a crow,
like a telescope silvered by the eyes of the night,
a black mirror that parted the veils of the obvious
like a woman’s legs
and went looking like a silo of infinite space
that echoed like a famine
into what he was the name of.

And he discovered he was nothing but the shadow of the world,
deaf mailmen, reluctant debutantes, car thieves
with the souls of hunted deer,
hookers whose blood glowed like neon
to fill the pleading mouths of a nest of empty wallets,
and the arrogant, the boring, the vicious,
the scholastic tidal pools who conjectured
about the existence of the great sea of being
that overwhelmed them day and night,
and the arsonists who walked in the rain of their distant exile
playing with their hearts like matches,
and the bruised violets who hide their eyes
under the sodden leaf of an autumn journal
that reads like the last ocean on the moon,
and the treacherous, the bitter, the liars
whose quivers of feathered asps
broke like arrows against the stone lions of the truth,
and the assassins who waited
like the thorn of a sundial to blood their shadows
in the eyeless witnesses of the crimes of noon
and the reformers who wanted to cover the earth in leather,
put shoes on the world
and wore out like flying carpets,
and those who were born to salt the field
and those who were born to sow,
and the rootless wildflowers
that gathered on the corners of concrete cities
like fire on the wind
only to be threshed by the blades of the moon,
cut down by the scarlet scythes of harvest squad cars.

And he has lingered among the opals and sapphires
and on the stairwells of water
that coiled like rivers and women
through the hovels of fire and ash
that consumed him like the memories of a phoenix
that had gone out like a pilot light,
and drunk the stars and eaten the radioactive meat
out of his own skull
like an enlightened begging bowl,
and come undone like a bell of wine in space
like a drunk shapeshifter, a staggering compass
on the high wire of his spinal cord
when his locks were moved by one of the keys of the mystery
that attuned him to the voice of his freedom
in a vast, starless abyss
that wiped the universe off the mirror
like the last breath of the light
to prove he was irrevocably dead.

And through all of this he has been a podium, a stage,
the gaping ellipse of the clear light of the void
auditioning another dream for the talent show,
an advance scout in the night
following rumours of stardom
across the appellant deserts of the moon
like thought chains of migrating geese
trying to remember their lines
like the secret names of God
on the rosaries of their long farewells,
and the only way to be anything
when he turned the light inward
was to agree that everyone had the answer but him,
that even the darkness that dyed
the clarity of his waters with night
to detonate the fireflies like blasting caps
wasn’t a robe of his own
but the nocturnal paint rag of the sky
that has been making him sit for his portrait like space
for the last forty-seven years
of writing shadows on the road like poems.

And I haven’t stopped crying for him since.

PATRICK WHITE