Tuesday, September 18, 2012

ARE YOU BORN YET


ARE YOU BORN YET

Are you born yet, you who will understand this
when I have receded like a wave into the foam
of oncoming stars, no more than a cachet
of this remote flowering in the darkness,
one man’s indeterminate attempt
to carry the cherished fire
of his own indefensible humanity
like lightning in a battery
with umbilical cables and fangs
to jumpstart yours in a dark, cold time
that hasn’t happened yet? Are you there sometime
up ahead beyond this boundless falling
ignorantly pure and ferocious as I was
springing out of the nebular hypothesis of your own breath
like a tiger of light on the jugular of the judas-goat
life chains to a wounded cross of southern stars to catch you,
the crux australis of the issue? How many times
have I pictured you in the albums of futurity
tracking these words of mine back to me
in the lair of this particular day
trying to anesthetize its own wounds
with the cleansing pyre of an antiseptic tongue?
This very moment that’s already gone
I imagine you glaring out of an overgrowth
of brindled shadows, arrogant and uncompromising,
the brutal judge of your own earthly excellence,
hunting alone, or trying to unmarrow
the message in the bones I’ve left
like gold in a bottle of ore, fireflies in a grave,
or a constellation in a folder of night skies
stamped for the black crescents of your eyes only,
these prophecies of chaos that only you can true
to the book of changes I leave you.
If you are young when you come to these skulls
like rain to the headstones around the ashes of old fires,
respect what must be you in time as well
as if it were your own reflection erased like a phoenix
from the gaping mirrors of witless carbon
that are all that remains of anyone’s renown,
the black dwarfs of a critical collapse of light.
But if you are old and marooned
on a glassblown island in a barefoot desert
when you stumble across these shoes in the dark
I’ve sent on ahead like the footprints
of who and where I might have been, don’t hesitate
to put them on like an urgent journey
to the circlet of the western fish
and dance your way back upstream
into the star shed of the oasis eyes
that spawned you from a dream,
your gray flesh restored, as it is today,
to the salmon rose of dawn, to the secret spring
of the key I buried like an equinox in Pisces
as an antidote to my own September crisis.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING AT THE SKY


LOOKING AT THE SKY

Looking at the sky from the bottom of a well,
midnight at noon, a firefly
or a musical note deep in a flute
waiting to be played, ore in the mine,
I can see like a painter
holding up a mirror
to check for flaws in a portrait,
I’ve got all my stars on backwards,
I’m wearing my eyes inside out,
the punchline happens before the joke,
and there’s a corpse at the bus-stop
waiting for a coffin
draped in a patchwork flag of advertising.
The mind is the world,
my passions nest in trees,
my insights shatter
on the hard eyelids of the water,
and my heart is a succession
of boundary stones
that groove like sullen planets,
heritage jewels in antique gold.
The pathetic fallacy is not a fallacy
so when I cry
it’s not just my roots
that are drunk with emotion,
or the dykes of a deepening darkness
that hemorrhage on the moon.
There’s something sad about being a human,
an old sorrow,
as if the heart were a rock
recast by breakers of blood
into a bell that can no longer tell the difference
between a wedding and a funeral
one pulse to the next. Marginal seabirds,
humans live off the coast of everything,
continents, God, reality, ourselves.
Generation after generation,
we drag our dreams to the grave
like chains and withered lilies,
and there is so much longing in a hole,
an ocean in the vulva
of a dawn-coloured shell
turned like galaxies and sunflower seeds,
one golden ratio for all,
grief comes in like a tide
with a pod of misdirected killer whales
who will die nobly
under their own weight
like a religion, or a brotherhood
of tonsured priests, Jesuits
banished from the ear of the king.
Some days I’m a logger with a chainsaw
snarling through the trunk
of the tree of knowledge
despite the spikes of the protestors; others
I’m handcuffed in the upper branches
like a shaman in a cradle
nursed by flying serpents. But there’s no point
in clear-cutting the slope
of the mountainous library,
intercalating the growth rings of the heartwood
or raging through paper like fire,
an environmentally approved arsonist,
lightning flicked from the flint of a zippo.
I’ve read all the poets,
I had a mother and I know
there are swallows under the eaves,
wild poppies along the highway,
and a beautiful face
singing in the sunshine
that poses for everyone
like the moon on a lake,
that love and friendship sway the world
like powerlines and suspension bridges,
and goodness exists like oxygen,
the silent partner of the flame.
You needn’t try to convince me of the wonder,
I’m a savage mystic
who’s been washed up with more dead starfish
on the shipwrecked shores
of the eerie islands of night
than there are the names of lost lovers
in the dead letters of a sacred alphabet.
It’s just that the pain
of averaging out the crises
and astronomical catastrophes
into the sea-worn roundness
of a planet I can live on
sometimes overwhelms me
with a morning, a thought, a spear
that pierces my heart
like the axis of a wheel
that keeps coming home,
a seasoned traveler,
to the beginning
of a journey, a road, a voyage
that always ends in the going,
the flowing away,
right where it stands
in the shadowless afterlife
of a sundial in the moment,
this passage of waters
from abyss to abyss, mouth to mouth
neap and ebb,
and the paper boats that fail them
like drowned sailors
poured out of the urn, the amphora,
cinders from the eye of the sea
like the ashes and wine
of abandoned poems
that always lead back to me.

PATRICK WHITE