Sunday, September 30, 2012

BARLEY MOON, TONIGHT


BARLEY MOON, TONIGHT

Barley moon, tonight. Hurt deeply but don’t know why.
The threshers and the raccoons and soon the Canada geese
have already done their work, so there’s nothing to harvest
but a few cobs and kernels of cattle corn that look like
they have bad teeth. Pale yellow ochre ribbons of the moon
that flake like the acephalic pages of old holy books.
Something unknown is trying to be born of my emptiness.
My heart and my body strain to sustain sufficient gravity
to hold it in its orbit long enough to attain fruition
and hopefully, then, we can both let go of the labour
of trying not to let go of the climber that fell over the cliff
tied to our spinal cord like a burning box-kite
or the arrested development of a corpse past its prime.

For all the fury of their clarity in the cold air,
the stars seem more distant, aloof enough to be cruel,
almost savage like these fields returning to their own agendas,
purple loosestrife and mustard, and the hopeless green
of stunted plants trying to get their time in before the first snow.
I’ve walked these meandering dirt roads before,
but now everything’s gone inside, except for a few dogs,
and there are no lights on at the farm. I don’t care
where I’m going. I just walk. I just look. Exiled by the outside
of what’s sleeping in the hearts of the farmers
and raccoons alike, as the nights grow colder and longer
and the grave stars seem to shine brighter
the fewer there are eyes to see how radiant they are on their own.

Burridge up ahead, a gas pump, a grocery store,
a hippie who makes brooms. Think I’ll just keep on walking
until I run out of road, and after that, have to make
my own path through the woods to sit beside
a small unnamed lake with the wisdom of a sage
that’s got nothing to impart to me but what I came with.
And I can nurse the subliminal agony of a poet on the Milky Way,
bemused by the passage of all things around me
as if they too were walking the same Road of Ghosts I am.
I see the beauty. I see the bat flash across the moon.
I feel the mythically inflated sublimity
of my comparative inconsequence. I lament
the rubbish of the last flowers of the season,
the trashing of the wild irises as if they were all wrapping
with no gifts inside. I wonder what death is. What purpose,
if any, life serves, if it isn’t just here to serve itself.

PATRICK WHITE

YES, THE AWFUL THRESHOLDS


YES, THE AWFUL THRESHOLDS

Yes, the awful thresholds.
The taboos of lace and razorwire
that threshed our blood like kings of the waxing year,
queens that were crowned like the full moon in broken windows.
And you, dark one, hidden familiar, switchblade,
last crescent of my torment when all else had failed,
bloodsister of the same wound I’ve been dying of ever since
as if this life were the greatest affliction
that could have been visited upon either one of us
by the closed doors that drove us away
like scapegoats and pariahs, the untouchables
of an infernal caste of homeless innocents.
How could I ever forgive the boundary stones of their skulls
for what they did to you with their false prophecies
and promised lands, the hatred of your savagery
when you were mauled by the snakepits
incarnated in the hands and the glands of the toxic fathers
who brought their drunkenness like garbage barges
to the bed of a terrified girl to waste her
as they had themselves as if you’d been born to be trashed.

The deepest outrages and sorrows in life
have had their tongues cut out, and over the course
of many demented stars, the light evaporates from their eyes
like the last grey thread of smoke from a candle
dipped in flesh, and the soul, no longer a spinal cord
of serpent fire burning like a fuse toward
some apocalyptic illumination that would right
the errors of perception in the awareness of heaven
that washed you and I like motes and cinders,
the crumbs of dreams clinging to the end of an eyelash
out of its field of vision as if we were never meant to be seen.

O my lover, my salve, my muse and anti-self,
my heart still burns in the cold out here alone
in these broken starfields under these shattered chandeliers
lucid as ice-storms in the abandoned ballrooms
of the scarecrows that once used to dance here
until they broke into flames like strawdogs
at an outlawed ghost dance that promised to return
all those things to us that we had irrevocably lost.
Where have you gone? Is it warm, there?
Do they leave you alone to nurse your heart
back into feeling something remotely human again?
Even at this late date, your gesture of silence
still humbles my voice like a night bird
I haven’t heard before, as you ask for nothing
in the darkness, knowing as I know,
it would only make you more vulnerable to joy
and joy’s an arrow fletched with our own flight feathers.

And though, even now, wherever you are,
it would probably make you wince like a black rose
waiting for a pearl of blood to appear
where you pierced your eyelid on a thorn of the moon
in lieu of a tear you couldn’t show to anyone but me
without them breaking it like a mirror they didn’t want to see,
I have to say it, because you have to know,
though we’ve grown old apart, and I don’t even know
if we’re still the same astronomical catastrophe of fireflies
trying to keep each other warm in the immensity of the solitude
we once huddled in like a cold furnace of the heart,
waiting for a new world, anyone but this,
like a new universe to hatch out of a cosmic urn
though we both knew matchbooks don’t just
suddenly flare into fire-breathing dragons
out of the ashes of creatures like us
who could not forgive our childhoods
for abandoning us to the ferocity of their absence.

I have to say it, as if I were threshing arrows
like stalks of wheat in Virgo, what
an unlikely blessing of a sphinx you were
among so many obvious curses in utero.
And you must know, though I say it in broken glass
that never learned to cry, that I really did love you
even if I never said it at the time for fear you’d mistake me
for the others who did to excuse what they took from you
and never returned. Thousands of miles away
and more light years than the journey could keep up with,
in this open field, leftover for the birds and the worms
and the homeless weeds that are turning it into a refugee camp,
I stand like a hypocrite under a harvest moon in silence
and think of all the empty silos I’ve tried to be grateful for
as if I’d broken bread with them in order to learn
how to live on less than nothing but this vengeance
that still burns inside of me like the vow of a vacuum
that has yet to be fulfilled whether nature abhors it or not.

PATRICK WHITE