Thursday, October 4, 2012

TACKING INTO THE EMPTINESS


TACKING INTO THE EMPTINESS

Tacking into the emptiness
like a sail, like a lonely bird
grown bored with carrying love-letters
from tree to tree, star to star,
none of them with my name on them
or a return address
that wasn’t light-years out of date,
to amuse the wounded river of my flowing
I try to get outside myself,
exceed the gates of the black constellations
that govern me from within,
squeeze out through a hole in the fence,
through my pores, eyes
of blood, amber, pitch
weeping out of the pine,
trying to read through the page
with tears of fire,
leaking out of the tree, the pillar,
the plaster Christ that exalts the peasants,
an emotional blackberry
ripened by many nights,
seeping through a makeshift womb of jam,
trying to decide whether
I’m a miscarriage or a delivery.

I feel sorry for myself.
No one will miss me much
when the shadow of the last dragon
passes like a lifelong eclipse of the heart.
The infinite folds
of the hair’s breadth edge of my clarities
demanded blood, not pressed flowers,
and there is a special solitude reserved
for the Promethean thieves,
for those who dare
to spread their arms like a propeller
at the axis of the wheeling world.

I never stared at the playbill
of a cancelled sky for long
without trading my scales in for wings.
I cared dangerously for people
who took from the orchard like wasps
drinking from the bruise of my fall.
Their hearts were punctured
by sidereal omissions,
needled like a doll
into occult distortions of pain.
I will spend the rest of my life
learning not to care for them.
Their pulse tolled like the echo of a soggy bell,
souls and minds,
palettes and telescopes
who wanted it both ways
without really taking a look
to see how they broke
the harps of the longing between them
like the wishbones of impoverished peacocks.
I will master the heresy
of consoling their lovelessness with indifference.
I will apply poultice after poultice
of sensitive lies
to their gangrenous sunsets,
knowing the infection will never come out.

I will be the spirit of a bird
carved in rock,
and I will let the ores of my insight
lie idle in the earth
like the dream of a sleepless god
tired of hearing the universe go off
like an alarm clock that can’t be reset.

I am aging, I age, I grow remote,
I thaw like a bird in the sky,
an eye boiled like a grape
in the wine of its own tears,
and no one lies well enough
to surprise me anymore
with a face more original
than the masks it trades in,
and I’m sick of the knots and nooses of vinegar
that sour the shapely waters of life
by insisting the moon
is only a dead sea in a returnable bottle.

And there is a sadness in everything
like the memory of someone loved
walking away like a leaf down a rainy street
through the gleam of oleaceous carlights
and everything I have ever cherished
is a cameo of the void in a locket,
a portrait of an abyss
everyone is chained to
like a dog in a junkyard of delusions,
howling at the moon
smeared on a bumper of dew
that never put a dent in anything.

PATRICK WHITE

SMALL, WARM BIRDS


SMALL, WARM BIRDS

Small, warm birds of feeling,
a profound tenderness,
something to cherish
in the loneliness of being human
in these vast, cold spaces,
as I read your words
like poppies in my blood again.

What stars could I call upon,
what roses could I ask for their skin,
what darkness charge with radiance,
what ploy of dancing buddhas
could I summon
to let you know
you are all my sky within,
and the assent of my soul in the morning
and the bough of my homing at night,
that there is within me a blind fire,
an invisible flame
that consumes me in the ferocious beauty
of its unseen flowering
even in a flurry of faces
and the business tugging the donkey of the day
braying like a knot in a stream of wood,
and all the objects and forms of the world
are burning mirrors I look into to see
the black pearl of your mystic presence within me,
the iridescent lustre of your shining,
how you are a message in a bottle from ultimacy,
and a dark shrine of desire
that can wake the valley dragons
with the fragrance of your eyes on the wind.

I want to kiss your kneecaps;
I want to crush cool mushrooms against your lips
and feel my kisses break like bread,
I want to feel my mouth
blossoming on the nape of your neck
and my breath blowing across the shy wheatfields
of the softest gestures of hair on your skin,
I want to taste the silk
of the inside of your thighs
as if it were the flavour of an intimate paradise,
and approach your breasts like crowns,
and under a full moon
tenderly turn the sacred soil of your sex with my tongue
like a stranger in the doorway
of an infinite longing to make you shudder
like the void into light
with sexual eclipses on the back of your eyelids
that will fill you like a palace of water with stars.

I am the luminosity and shadow
of your green lamp that glows like the sea,
and my voice wants to bleed like black cherries
over the alluvial plain of your stomach
and touch you like a prophet
running his fingertips slowly over the pages of a holy book,
savouring the revelations
that throb like a pulse in space;
and there are storms that want to exhaust themselves
over the blue thresholds of your hills
and root their lightning in your body
like a tree of light, a new map of rivers
for your blood to follow back to me
like the echo of thunder in a well.
And all through the day
with its curbs and functions
I imagine the lilt of your fingers
on the rim of a coffee cup,
the cougar in the glance of your eyes,
the way you put a knife down on the table
like a smile without a script
and what it would be like
to circumnavigate the equator of your waist
with a rosary of kisses
to raise you like a sunken continent
out of your depths
and explore all your tides and passages
with the fervor of a dolphin in a bay of wine.

I want to be tangled like a kite
in the turmoil of your hair,
the night watchman of your dreams,
the one who notices
what no one else looks for,
the stone of the small grave
you sweep with your eyelashes
when the leaves of autumn
lie down with the shadows of spring
and the virgin windows of your tears
that no one has ever looked through
weep like glass over the secret root
of a flower only a child could see.

Beyond reason, gates, words,
where the bridges take off their shoes
to admire their feet in the water
and the waterlilies kiss the thorn
of the star that tore them like skin
and whisper ancient pollens to the night
softer than flour and saffron,
and everything I say to you
isn’t a wound in the light,
a mouthful of shadows,
a bell of water with a fish for a tongue,
fleets of butterflies
learning how to sail the oceans of the rose
like the keels and wings
of love-letters you can read in the dark,
I want to fold you in my arms like the moon
and pan the nocturnal urgencies of your eyes
for a gold rush of fireflies
in the all night boom towns
of a heart that struck it rich
digging a hole to bury its dead.

PATRICK WHITE