Friday, September 21, 2012

LONG AGO


LONG AGO

Long ago I learned to forgive
yesterday’s shadows
like the daggers of a dead assassin
I melted down into bells
without occasion to sing.
I was tenderly adamant
about the need for compassion
and hung them from the loftiest towers
like iron fruit or rain frozen in its descent.
Only the conceptualists
indulge in perfect virtues
and mine, at best,
are improvised approximations
of the dark whispers
of the blind fish
that swim in the watersheds of my heart.
And there was no other way
of pouring the infection out of the wound
except by inviting the maggots to the feast.
I reproached them all
with the wisdom of a mirror
for relishing the worst of me.
It’s hard to remember sometimes
that even flies have a dignity of their own,
if no honey,
and even the city rose
turns into an old, well-thumbed book eventually,
an index of celebrity desecrations.
I kept my eclipses and dragons
up my bounteous sleeves
and took the trembling stagefright of the stars
cowering behind their cardboard hills seriously.
Whatever the mind realm,
whatever facet of the jewel turning in the growlight,
whatever feather of the spirit
soaring overhead with a twig of fire
or groping below like a star-nosed mole,
my heart turned into a lifeboat, a well, a telescope,
and I hauled everyone up and in and out of themselves
until the moon began to look like a pulley
and there was an echo in the siloes
of my exhortative sufficiency.
Sometimes the galaxies were easier to save than the candles,
but I applied my whips and swans lovingly
I was a good oar on a seaworthy vessel
and eventually my heart turned into a rudder.
I launched every pulse in the name of the unknown
and soon found myself a stranger
in the eyes of the people who had climbed to safety
up the nets and rope-ladders
I learned to fashion from my spinal cord.
I wasn’t a rudder on a lifeboat anymore;
I was a dead shark, dorsal down,
lethal, a meat-plough.
Nobody knew me as I was.
I struggled deeply within myself
to assume the throne of my isolation,
my heart freaked by the hazard of random lightning strikes,
challenged by demons
I could not win against,
crescent moons that broke off in my throat and voice like teeth.
I became the nightwatchman
of pleading shadows laid out
like corpses in a morgue,
a lamp in the arms of its own journey,
while their bodies walked around delinquently.
And the shining was black, the light,
an eerie pollen of the night,
an indelible soot lasered like destiny
on the sheets and sails of a soul I could never wash out,
a luminosity that just didn’t open
the moths and flowers like letters
but rewrote them, a transformative mirror,
an eclipse of the sun
that rises within at midnight,
an illumination that didn’t just reflect
but imagined the things of the world into being
and went on changing them,
mutating them,
seer and seen alike
on the same side of the mirror
that suggested them into existence inconceivably,
though there was no existence
or non-existence
to exit or enter by.
My seeing grew cold and impersonal,
space, a straitjacket of glass,
my heart, an ancient ice-berg on the moon,
and with a shriek of mouthless perception
my blood was blanched into flowing diamond.
I dared to look upon suffering,
my own and the pantomime of others,
as the flaring of a brutal creative fire
that wracked the world in an unwitnessed dream
lonelier than the wind without a star or a candle.
And I knew it was saying me
behind the mask
of every hopeless word I uttered.
And I saw at the dark gate
that reason was only another peer of the realm,
and there was an infinitude of skys and windows beyond
that my eyes hadn’t grown into yet,
flying like a bird into the vision
until only the vision remained,
and there were intimate metals in every rock
that had been confided into being like a secret.
Reason was merely a prim shadow
in the cosmic fire-womb
of the original madness
to make the hidden known,
whispering the world
into its own ear like a blasting cap.
Everything exists to know the hidden
as a robe of its own blood,
the taste of stars in the sap of the sugar maples in spring,
whether the cool mushrooms of her lips
that she offers up in the night
under the evergreens
are dangerously hallucinogenic,
or tenderly toxic, white angel or fly agaric..
I found it important to learn
what doesn’t make me happy,
and then to learn
that there isn’t anything that would
as I long as I persisted
in looking for the meaning of my joy,
the replicable reason
that would let me breed it
like a butterfly or a silkworm in captivity.
Now bliss comes when it does
naked and adorned,
impoverished and squandering,
and my heart is more of an empty, open hand
than a fist clenched around
something it feared to lose.
Haven’t you noticed the sad drinkers
in the all night taverns
who age faster than the wine in their glasses
as soon as they start
to con the god into staying,
make a cage of the tree
to snare the elusive nightbird
that enhances their darkness
with a voice hinged to a doorway of light?
And the theorists trying to sweep
the ashes of stars
immolated in their own light like moths
off their thresholds with tweezers?
And those who live like pharaohs
under pyramids of quicksand
they’ve made of their hearts
anticipating afterlives
that look a lot like this one
when the bandages will come off
like the brittle eyelids
of a shedding rose
and the bull harps will seed the moon again
and the echo at the end of the dream
won’t be just the voice of another used beginning?

PATRICK WHITE

GONE SOON ENOUGH


GONE SOON ENOUGH

Gone soon enough. To who knows where,
though I suspect the question answers itself
if there’s a there to get to at all. Deal with this now
and maybe that, given opposites engender
one another out of their procreative union,
will be tended to as well in every mystic detail.
Mark one jewel and they’re all marked.
Do unto one of these and you do unto me.
And maybe this is the belief of every leaf in the fall,
but with me when I’m trying on ghosts
to go with my death mask, it’s merely one
of a myriad passing thoughts and scenarios
impassioned by the inspired absurdity
of trying to conceptualize the inconceivable.

Not void bound, though I’m free, I still hope,
more love and loyalty than clinging to mirages,
to take all the stars with me, and the moon and the sun,
the wind, the stone, the flower and all the sorrows
I’ve venerated over the years as shrines
to unknown lovers who suffered as anonymously as I did
to accord their solitude the dignity of a sword
and their silence the clarity of a window into the soul
transfigured like space by the nature of its contents
into the bodymind of a human who’s given up
looking for signs of greater things to come
since he followed the breadcrumbs out of a dark wood
into a clearing where he realized, looking up at the stars
for paradigms of light he might be able to recognize
to get his bearings, the whole of his awareness
from the beginningless beginning was revelation
out of nothing, rootless blossoms on the wind,
emptiness with a thousand stamps on it
like a loveletter he wanted to be sure got there.

No message. No medium. However you parse
the expression into a million punctuation marks
like traffic lights of the silence, and the stillness
irremediable, and the stars not the measure of their light.
The many return to the one and the one returns to transcendence,
as the doge of Zen once said, out of everyone’s mouth at once
as he did in twelfth century Tokugawa Japan.
When the Japanese plum tree blossoms,
it’s not speaking for itself, it’s an expression
with as many voices as the universe has atoms to say it,
solo or in chorus, acapella or accompanied by the wind
lamenting the ashes of the blue guitar of the moon,
neither an urn, nor a womb, or the rain improvising
Scarlatti on a harpsichord of plectral thorns attuned
to our tears and spinal cords. If the painting, the poem,
the life doesn’t lead you to the unattainable within yourself,
if you try to contain the feeling, the image, the insight
in the Mason jar of the brain like the spooky green lights
of the fireflies riding their own eyebeams like Einstein
the clock on the town hall tower, until time stops
and space becomes infinite, and nothing outweighs
the feather or the flower, you won’t be struck down
by your own light. Things are retaliatory and petty like that.
But it will be awhile before the Canada geese leaving now
bearing the souls of the dead south and west,
return for you bereft in this realm of arrival and departure.

Death, too, has its muses, its nightbirds,
and none of them are widows at the window or the well.
None of them part the curtains or the veils like a death shroud.
They’re not the screening myths for what
we dare not say out loud lest the silence is listening
in a deathcart parked across the street. You are
the corpse telling you your own life story
and you’re the green fire of the living bough
that lights the funeral pyres of its own ancestral stumps
to burn them out with the intensity of your life
paying homage to your own transformations.
Though everything I’ve just said is smoke on the wind
to the living, that isn’t a sign of its evanescence,
because to the dead, it’s an imperishable lyric
sung by a ghost of picture-music so free and unconstrained
they can hear their hearts still beating like the echo
of distant thunder or wild moonlit horses
running through the high fields like Pegasus
flying with eagles and swans among the stars,
albino periods shining at the beginning of endless things
the middle extremes of every moment of the mindstream
rising like a waterbird with unborn life
and imperishable death for wings, and in its voice
all the silence, sacred syllables, and wavelengths
of everything that sings a child to sleep in its dreams
like a new violin safe in the arms of the mystery
that seasons it like the heartwood of a broad-leafed maple,
spruce, or the willow with lyrical eyes down by the river
trying to write a song for the waters of life
in the shadows of birds in passage across the moon
as if she’d just taken the words right out of my mouth.

PATRICK WHITE