Friday, October 5, 2012

I'M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES


I’M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’m learning to dance with eclipses
and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows
weeping rivers of acid rain that hang
like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains
or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life
is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,
and the wolf that came once a week
to teach me to sing underwater grew old
and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.
I don’t know what I want from the walls
I’ve designated heritage battlefields
with an array of awards and degrees
and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,
but everything I ask for seems to make
terrorists of the lamps
and the single moth
knocking himself out trying to crash into flames
against the vanilla fez of the shade
is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter
my eyes have congealed into a still-life
with antique ax-handles, a menagerie
of scarred paint, the landscape of the moon
humped and bubbled in contaminated crimson,
I haven’t seen anything for disposable eras
I wanted to drink from a skull. While the shadows and ashes
discuss what they have in common, hoping
for a marriage of convenience,
the blue night sifts my constellations through a spider-web
looking for the penumbral tear of the last life I shed
longing to avoid this one
like black shoe-polish on the pillowcase of a swan.
Even the absurdities have looped into platitudes
and petty thieves have stolen
the mask of the mouth in the imperial mirror
that keeps telling me
I’m the slumlord of my own ambition,
the blighted rind of the moon withering in the garbage,
the sloughed skin of a serpentine condom full of stars.
And how am I to understand my loneliness
and the fools I deploy to deface it
except as one more yearning octopus
with arms like hollyhocks
trying to cross the highway without a line of credit?
I should be bolder, smarter, more mineral
than light, my bones recast in gunsmith plastic,
and my heart a leaking hand grenade, white phosphorus,
unpinned and ready to hurl like a violent dove
through the slutty dreamcatchers in the windows
of strategic brothels, I should stand up
to the apostrophes of Armageddon
and handcuff my voice to a pair of quotation marks
and send all my friends bouquets of radical placards
until my voice is released from isolation, my blood
from intensive care, my mind from death row,
and I’m paid all the back wages I’m owed for the use of my innocence.
When the wind decides to defeat the leaves with poison
and the charcoal women burn their tongues
like meat on the grill of their dinner-bell smiles,
their charms all smoke and cocktail tears,
I should have the metal to drop
depth-charges on the willow cruising the shadows for convoys,
and depose the cult of scorpions marching south
that tried to brainwash me into believing
I’ve aged like wounded shoes.

PATRICK WHITE

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS


I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I concede my fretful beginnings to no one
because I was with the stars
before they began to shine, before
the first Adam of the primordial atom
stepped out of his shadowless glade,
and the worlds fanned out like birds from water
and the surreal sea dreamed of krill and corals
or the ghastly fumaroles of the expurgated heart
of the labouring earth
taught its thermophiles to live without light
like a memory displaced so deep in the mind
only the convulsions and catastrophes
of sunless winters severed from their vivid chains
like stillborns and candid moons
can waken it again to recall the swell
of the wave that gave it breasts
and its life on land in the mansions
of orphaned oxygen that taught it to breathe
and let its breath be vital to cherries and bees. I affirm
and celebrate my connection to everything
and my foot is not less than my hand
nor my blood merely the flag of my imperious brain;
and often at night when I’m alone
with my own poor, longing self
I can feel my eyes webbing the harp of my bones
with the soft night songs of my ancient minerals
and the sad, dark airs of my gypsy metals
slaying the iron roses in their teeth out of love.
I owe it all to everything, and everything to it,
and I am complete, even in my emptiness;
even in the desolation of galaxies and leaves,
even in the spoiling of my most cherished nativities,
the shedding of eyelids and black pollen
on the naves of the daisy wheels,
I am always full of the world, at home
with everything from the emerald wardrobes
of the friendless algae
to the carbon solitudes of hapless man,
I am the host and the guest
in the black mirror of my shining, the equinoctial eye
of my own arrayed being.
And the things that I say in the dark like planets
to amuse the night with motion and appease
my secret need for migrant harmonies,
are the foundation stones, the organs and skin
and kidnapped statuary of my summer palaces among the stars
and I am content with my solitary progress
through the wind-taxed realms of poppies and wheat;
I am the composite serenity of the night sky
that does not inhibit the flight of its cloudy owls
or its magnetic transfusions of bats.
If something troubles me, if there are distant seabirds
shrieking their warnings out over a turbulent sea,
or ants in the grass divining the lightning to come,
or the swan of the moon torn like a white peony
by something rising up with a beak and a shell from below
like the hungry turtle of the snapping world,
I take shelter in the roots of things,
in the watersheds of the relentless rivers
that press on with their dreams of eloquent deltas
in mystic union with the sea.
I summon the shields and shales of my radical nature
to renew their loyalty to the heights of land I stand on
battered but unbeaten like a northern pine.
And I shall live as long as there are rocks to cry on,
and fireflies to keep their homely constellations close to earth.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN


IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

If I could cry again, as once I cried for you, if
I could saturate this dark fist of a heart that closed up
and hardened from that flower so long ago, trying
to hang on to the jewel, the pearl, the star, the eye of the issue;
if I could turn this stone rose freaked with harsh minerals,
back into that night you drew the blade of the moon
across the wrist of the bridge you were standing on, waiting
it seemed your whole lifetime, trembling
like a drop of shadow-flavoured water
from the tip of a spear of stargrass
for the wind to shake you loose from your agony,
a lost earring, I could put out this root-fire
that runs underground from cedar to cedar, person to person,
consuming its way without flame
through the long valley of the sorrows and years
where I buried you like a storm that had swallowed the hot sword
of its own lightning; I could affirm the black ash
of that night that has gone on dying in me ever since,
I could green it with daylilies and vetch
and the frog splash of lachrymose junipers beginning to rain.
I could stop meaning what I say when I say
crueller solitudes are born of the pain that’s endured
like a grave with no eyelid staring into the sun
waiting for eclipses to fall out of the light
like coins from a one-armed bandit
that gashed the vein of its motherlode
to die in a windfall of poppies, a junkie of luck,
than the strange loneliness of the losers
who cash their winnings in, and bleed to death.
I could mean something else other than heroin,
I could mean a new religion, a successful skin graft
of happier metaphors and cooler tattoos,
brighter constellations than the needle tracks
that loaded the deck of your dark zodiacs
with star-crossed lovers in public washrooms
tying you off with the spinal cord
you carried around in your kit. I could stop the bleeding,
I could put the fire out, I could look at your death
square in the eyes
and haul in a god to answer it
like you did me that last night
when I asked for signs of life
and you quoted maxims to live by from the razor-blade
revealed to you alone on your holy mountain
before you dumped on paradise
like a shovel full of dirt, a spoonful of ashes,
an avalanche of hurt. I could open my hand
and fill your absence in
with things that begin. I could scrawl
a reason to live on your mirror in lipstick
and marry you in our honeymoon coffin
behind closed doors
in a downpour of wedding rings
I stole from the dead.
O, baby, my lost one, my fire in the wood,
you could be my candle-holder
and angel-food for good
if only I could cry again,
as once you knew I could.

PATRICK WHITE