Wednesday, October 3, 2012

WHEN THE GERIATRIC DRUNK NEXT DOOR


WHEN THE GERIATRIC DRUNK NEXT DOOR

When the geriatric drunk next door who was
raising chihuahuas to make a living,
but couldn’t part with one them when it came time to sell
came over one day in my childhood,
shaking like an aspen leaf in the fall,
going through withdrawal, to ask if he could borrow
a few bucks, I watched my mother give him five
of the last ten she had to raise four kids
for half of the rest of the month before
the next welfare check arrived, and say,
Here. Don’t hurt yourself. Something to ease the pain.
Though she didn’t drink and he’d been drinking too long
to turn the herd that had trampled him around.

She didn’t judge. She didn’t try to give advice.
She didn’t belittle the man in the way she gave.
She didn’t count how much the giving took off her plate.
She wasn’t indulging her progressive, liberal, altruism.
She wasn’t breaking loaves and fishes on a hillside
or trying to win a popular election.
She just gave like the sea, the earth, the sky,
like fire gives heat and light, all in one easy action
of a heart that has suffered enough on its own to know
we’re all in the same lifeboat on the moon
white-water rafting through the rapids of a waterclock.
And that has been my religion ever since.

Though I’ve never said anything to her about it.
How much I loved her in that moment
of compassionate tenderness, how she pulled
one thread out of the straitjacket of despair in his eyes,
and rewove it not on a loom like the moon but a harp
into a flying carpet of joy so another human
in as much of a mess in her own way as he was
could gain some altitude for a little while above the misery,
and hang on to at least one single wavelength of threadbare radiance
that could still fall on the shit everybody was living in
and turn it into a flower. Indelible,
the understanding in their eyes when he
looked at her incredulously for a moment
and she knew exactly what he meant
as she laughed at herself with a soft, wry smile
as if she’d just seen the sacred fool behind her best sentiment.

That was the whole of enlightenment to me.
The beginning of a spontaneous discipline
and still is, though it’s sometimes bitter to practise,
when your giving is mistaken for having been taken
and you lament how many people can’t tell the difference
between a theft and a gift anymore. How they deprive themselves
of so many jewels of inestimable value,
and that human touch that can pour the heart like gold
from the darkest of ores, the deepest of mines,
or bring meteors to shed hot tears like diamonds upon impact.
Or oxygen and the bases of protein.
Though it be a nuclear winter outside.
Though the bride was left standing at the altar
and there was no one there to lift the veils of Isis
to see the stars in the eyes of the Queen of Heaven even at nadir
like a chance someone wasn’t willing to take.
Though common sense dictate a rational sacrifice,
and Ayn Rand and the Union of Spiritual Snakeoil Salesmen
preach that you’ve got to learn to love yourself first
as if you had a self to nurture that wasn’t rooted
like a mirage in a desert in an hourglass that poured
through your fingers like water when you tried to grasp
the delusion of the flower. Though all the mystics
try to annihilate what doesn’t exist to see God as she really is
as they come before her like busy, busy bees
with money in their pockets and honey in their hives
and all their martyrdom proves to be just another mode of suicide.

You can give a piece of garbage you’ve picked
out of a dumpster like the bruised fruits of the earth,
and when you give it to someone you can eat
from the Tree of Life with impunity without having to choose
between the serpent and the apple, the evil and the good,
or the knowledge you must suffer to be understood
as a human, who can gain altitude by erring on the side
of someone else’s plight without even wearing wings,
to the wonderment of the angels and demons alike,
and occasionally, like me, your angry, eldest son,
who didn’t know until that one moment whether
he should approach the world like a fist
with teethmarks on the knuckles, or
an open palm with lifelines thrown out to another
like billions of umbilical cords woven like a strong rope
into a mother who didn’t need to build an ark to be a lifeboat.
Who could see lucidly through a glass darkly
the veils of her own nebulosity breaking out of the fog
like the search lanterns of the stars
out of the most ancient mystery of love
hidden in her heart without the aid of a teacher or telescope.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD


THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

The night dances with itself like an only child
to the sounds of its own silence
when it thinks no one is watching.
Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,
poised, a word, a bird, a butterfly on a branch,
a sacred syllable from an alphabet that can dance,
caught in the updraft of a momentary insight
of falling to paradise like a flightfeather of light,
and landing the move just right, just so, with perfect timing.

The maples by day, easels for hot palette paintings,
red shift through red, orange, yellow, green
from the outside in toward the trunk, same
as a rainbow, same as the dynastic colours of a sunset.
Same as the fires of life returning to the root.
Same as the starmaps of the visionaries
flying like shamans from the nests they were fledged in.
Same as the ripening of the fruits of the earth,
or roses with green stars under their eyelids.
Different instruments, different voices,
the wind, the rasping of the leaves, the beaver
slapping the startled flesh of the water at my approach,
a twig snapping its drumstick on a rim shot
and the crow, and the squeaking bats, and the lapping
of the waves like the plectra of an aquamarine harpsichord
at the whole notes of the rocks, but a confluence
of picture-music washing the roots of the dead violins
of the wild irises and the timpani of cattails along the mindstream.

Merrily, merrily, row your boat, life is but a dream.
But to judge from the windfalls of green planets
shaken from the black walnut trees, it’s a dream
that’s urgent with the myriad realities of a multiverse
waking up in a place like here, and a time like now
with a lavish appetite for inhabiting itself
as if appearance weren’t just the rind
that had to be peeled away like the skin and the shell
of the meat of the real, the shapes of the known worlds
the rat snakes shed like intimate illusions
that have naturally outgrown themselves,
the new moon in the arms of the old, like a nightsky
leaving the Milky Way, a mythically deflated windsock
tangled in the tree line like a runway that tried to fly by itself.

Now the Great Shedding as the earth turns
like the old abandoned mill wheel upstream
like a circular waterclock making linear time
take its tail in its mouth like an eternal recurrence
that’s always pouring itself out of itself like life
into the emptiness between the equinox of one thought
and the solstice of the next like the silence between heartbeats,
the night between the stars, like the inseparable gap
between the distant moon and the intimacy of the moon’s reflection
on the newly surfaced dark skin of the water sequencing
its pentatonic scales to the seasonal themes of the mindstream
you can’t step into twice, as Heraclitus said in Ephesus long ago,
though it seems that way if all you’re doing is dogpaddling
like a delinquent green apple on a snow covered bough, instead
of going along with the perennial renewal of the flow
by letting go of your water skin with its lunar tattoo
like the bright vacancy of an old silo of the light
for the dark abundance of the new insight
into the nature of life when it full in October.

The fall. This hour of my becoming
when everything is burning like the sumac
with the fires of life but nothing is consumed.
Because fire doesn’t burn fire and death is unperishing.
And autumn is no less of a transformation than spring
as this new day dances as readily with the old woman
watching from her kitchen window as it does the young girl,
than the rain is to the tides of a lunar ocean
swaying in its shadows as if it were dancing
with its river reeds like a lonely child
in the embrace of her imagination,
like a poet in the grip of his crazy wisdom
flirting like a firefly with the dragons of his madness
without listening to the search parties of the lighthouses
bellowing like the foghorns of mournful trains back on shore
being swept away into the distance like nightwatchmen
and unconvincing ghosts. Things are unmooring
like lifeboats full of seeds and the souls of the dead
taking to their wings like the oars of waterbirds,
and the lowest of earthbound snakes
are dreaming of feathering their scales
into the vans of a dragon firewalking with stars
around the wobbling axis of the earth
on a potter’s wheel, turning it like sentient starmud
that’s fired up in autumn like an urn that burns like a kiln.

PATRICK WHITE