Wednesday, September 19, 2012

THERE ARE NEON VACANCIES


THERE ARE NEON VACANCIES

There are neon vacancies in our squalid eyes
and letters missing from our garish names
that eloped like snakes in the night
with a bridal catalog of juvenile trains.
For once in our left-handed lives
let’s concentrate on the salted cities
of the nightshift snails in the wounded factories
that scald the bolts on the cannibal cornucopias.
Let’s chalk our bodies to a sidewalk somewhere
and pretend we’re Renaissance artists
trying to put our pillars in perspective.
Let’s stop flogging the moonlight with razorwire
for rhetorical misdemeanors of mud
and see what the drowned man wouldn’t let go of
when they fished him out of the mirror:

O my love, you are nightwater and torn mushrooms,
and there are chandeliers of ruined cherries
that stain the light that sleeps in the seed
on the shores of your abandoned kisses, and your intrepid flesh
is urgent with the chlorine lanterns of the fireflies
you saved from the urns of your secret laments,
and in a fury of tangled starfish
that array their constellations
on the bottom of shipwrecked seabeds,
we have bestowed upon one another again and again
like thieves on the nightwatch among our captors
the passionate wealth of the long, delinquent voyages
that dreamed among the islands of never making it home.

PATRICK WHITE

THE WIND WILD


THE WIND WILD

The wind wild with jubilation at its escape from the asylum where it’s just killed all the windows, but not a flower moves, not a leaf is shed. Come this far, you should know what hour it is, what stars time sifts through its fingers like sand and gold. And though you’ve stepped away from your face in the mirror, you’re still inconceivably reflected in everything, oilslick and orchid alike. And how strange it must seem to touch your own skin and everywhere caress the sky, all wonderful, all a dark radiance without obstruction, a secret night of silver feathering the moon with the cool fires of a forbidden wilderness. And yet this isn’t free enough, this isn’t yet pouring out the sea to breathe in the light, this isn’t eating the dark with your water-mouth and spitting out worlds like seeds. Do you see everywhere around you, now, the worlds? Who but you could they have ever been? And, yes, you have selected a destiny, in assent to this one spontaneity, this one act, a letter in the mail, set all the axes of the planets spinning like a dealer at a roulette wheel. In one drop of water, the Nile; in one death of potential, birth into a universe that didn’t exist before you adopted this exile from yourself into a rage of becoming, whether ashes or gypsies on the moon bathing in their own shadows. Wherever you walk is the way; whatever you say, a school.

Leprous the white fire of the lotus, a pale fire, until it’s touched by the wand of the dragonfly, until you drink from the black mirror, the night-well that has never shown anyone their face looking back. Drink deeper than you’ve ever drowned before, and take the stone embryo of the delusion in your womb to an abortion clinic run by ghosts. At this point all percipients go insane, trying to save the seer and the seen. And the demons that had made a shrine out of every muscle of your body, reflexively catechizing every thought and emotion until you were bound by a theology of yourself, interred in the garbage of your own sanctity, spontaneously understand the invincibility of the sword in your spine, and release hell into effortless obedience to the void, falling, out of joy, to the sky. World disappears, seer disappears and all that’s left is a pervasive, unbounded, eyeless seeing, the moon flowing in a dry creekbed. This is the unending return to the source, the unborn cosmos that is the mother and afterlife of itself, all childhoods and every coffin, flowers and fish. Emptiness and form make one hourglass; overturned are they two? What arms to receive the worlds like sand if not this vacancy, this generosity of space being nothing at all? Now, tell me, what hour is it when a clown strikes a bell of water and the sun at midnight shines alone on you?

PATRICK WHITE

THE SILENCE OVERTAKES ME


THE SILENCE OVERTAKES ME

The silence overtakes me, I had almost forgotten,
and I am disembodied again, awareness
with no fixed abode, and it’s sweet and sad
this passage of the mindstream through the darkness.
Memories of childhood, collecting bruised potatoes
fallen off the conveyor belt of the vegetable factory,
thousands of muddy spuds like asteroids in orbit,
being rinsed off by fans of sharp-edged water
spread out like the wings of translucent birds,
smell of wet burlap bags and how proud
I was as a kid of seven to be a good hunter for my mother
and haul a bag of potatoes home as if
I’d killed and skinned the carcass myself.
When you’re seven you’re still a wolf-pup
and the game isn’t quite as dangerous as it will be.

The faces of past lovers bloom on a midnight lake
and then the wind scatters their petals. Or they glow
by the light of a fire lotus burning in the window
of a Napoleon airtight on a snowed-in winter night,
musing and caressing the cats dozing under it soporifically
as the flames dance in their dark eyes like the corona of the sun
at full eclipse, and you realize how lyrically vivid
images you glimpsed out of the corner of your eye
at the time, written indelibly upon your heart,
but barely noticed, are when they move front and center
like a star into the iris of eternity. Lachrymose and beautiful
as if a deeper union than the one we thought for awhile
was ultimate, had come of its own accord spontaneously
as if separation and solitude had become the cornerstone
of a palace of water that had gone on flowing on its own
and had made the sea, and once and awhile,
a heart made big by sorrow and the silence that holds it out
like some strange kind of lantern, is there to witness it,
not outside the moment, looking in, but from within
where it lives forever unfolding like ripples in a jewel.

There’s a soft elfin frequency in the air, and an unforced smile
on the spirits of wounded things resigned as scars
to the phases of the moon that first tasted their blood.
I don’t know who they are, but I throw another log on the fire
like a threshold or a burning bridge if they want to
step out of their shadows and cross one for the homeless alone
and say with my eyes let’s all live around this for awhile
as if it were the last house of the zodiac with its lights on,
or that rusty oildrum where we used to roast the potatoes
on the branches of young maple saplings bubbling in the heat.
A riverine intermingling of vagrant hearts
addressing my mind like a star chart of fireflies
buffeted about like the Brownian motion of a playful breeze
gusting the constellations like dust before the witchbrooms
of the black walnut trees exorcising their leaves
to get on with the next chapter of their manuscripts,
ghost writing their own immolations, heretics
trued by the fires they burned in like sumac
on the pyres of their boughs, sky burials in lyrics of smoke.

Time, the sacred clown, reliving the ashes
of its own tragic-comedy as if the encore
were more profoundly sad and absurdly beautiful
than the first aspirations of opening night.
Everything in commotion then that now
moves me more deeply with the stillness of its passage
as if all the eras of my life presaged this one moment
with no birth or death in it, this farewell that never ages.

PATRICK WHITE