Saturday, October 13, 2012

WHAT I WOULD SAY


WHAT I WOULD SAY

What I would say to you if you were near,
if this definitive namelessness that walks me down to the river
to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock
and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water
enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire
to poems I never wanted to own,
every burning lily of paper floating away
like another crown I’ve set free
from this domain of air and shadows
to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,
weren’t the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both.
I would say to you in the pyres and the petals
of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash
of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes
of these poems that confess their love to the flames
with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke
gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here
in the form of a man, I would say,
it was always the hive of your silence
that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey
rarer than night, I’ve ever tasted.
And I’d try not to talk too much,
letting the fish jump for the two of us,
and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away
like things not said into the water
and I’d draw you in under the bough of my arm
that was never much of a yoke
as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,
and hold you a long time in the vastness
before I turned to kiss you for everything
and fall down back into the silver grass
to make love to you on the moon.
And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest
your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,
I would mingle blood and starlight
with the wine of your body and being
like a chalice lying empty by the river
that has brought us both to drink from one another
like the deer that will come out later from the grove
to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death
would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds
among the sceptres of the cattails,
and I’d want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky
for this night of being human long enough
to understand its brevity is its beauty
and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,
burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.
Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,
like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak
look as if they’re trying to swim, and one poem
more enduring than the rest,
floats downstream under a frozen elbow
raised to take the next stroke,
and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself
levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha
into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment
that grasps at nothing. Form
is emptiness; emptiness is form, and the poem
had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,
and though you’re not with me now,
we’ve never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird
lands on the water, and then another,
and I think of them as you and I
arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night
and the bright vacancy
between the sidereal knots
in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile
weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.
And I wonder what love is, knowing
love is I wonder what love is,
as the fireflies flash their assent,
and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,
and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here
as much for the island that spreads the stream
into the water legs of a woman
like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself
like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,
to launch my fleet of poems
like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.
I like being a child alone on the shores of things,
turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance
among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick.
And I’ve always asked questions no one could answer,
awed by the fact of being here at all
under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,
everything’s got a mouth of its own to answer,
and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.
And I’m never as old by these waters
as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon
you told me to watch as you would
is always so much more on this undulant black mirror
than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.
There’s a birch and three willows
and the third of the three is you
dipping your hair in the water
as if your roots weren’t enough for the glass.
And it’s no surprise to know you know how
to drink the whole river in a single gulp
and swallow a whole star with your eyes
in a single glimmer
the way a solitary drop of water
at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass
entirely fits the entire skin of the sky
because I already know how you can consume the whole of me
from the night song in the flight of the bird in my voice
and from a single hair of your head,
or the eyelash on your cheek
that is all that separates us now,
from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem.
I can be here with you as I have always been
on the other side of death
where everything in creation
above and below this river of night,
from the furthest galaxy
to the dragonfly on my right
is expanding like a lily of fire into us,
as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.
So it’s easy to know where it’s all going,
releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,
raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream
rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing,
it’s always, like birds and stars and fish in the flowing,
been going to us.

PATRICK WHITE 

LETTING THE STARS FROM LAST NIGHT


LETTING THE STARS FROM LAST NIGHT

Letting the stars from last night
settle in this morning’s puddles
so I can see more clearly once
this turmoil of starmud precipitates out
as mental sediment in a mirror
skybound to a vast blue abyss
and, as they say in Zen, the eternal sky
does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

I want to be a bird that dissipates
in the mauve distance like water in the air.
I want to be a fire whose flames
never stop aspiring to the stars,
though every time they’re almost within grasp
they disappear like petals on the wind,
the pages fall out of the book I’m burning
like a sacrificial rose of galactic hydrogen,
and I’m left with a handful of ash
I can stuff my pillow with like the down
of a phoenix in the urn of his worst nightmare.

And being strong seldom helps.
Or feathering your dragons
to convince yourself they’re bluebirds.
Strong means condemned to solitude.
Hanging on to the mountain with one arm
to keep it from falling to its death
in the valley it dug like its own grave
in the valley below. Biting the bullet
like a crystal skull until your back molars break
and you’re swallowing little flakes of glass
like the beginning of a snow squall
even as you’re smiling like a grimace
on a death mask trying to hold its tears back
like a glacier trying to discipline the mindstream.

Strong means you don’t use the fossils of other birds
as crutches for your lapwings. Your calender of scars
begins to smile more affectionately at you
as you get older like waxing crescent moons
and this avalanche of meteoric life
looks more like a windfall of ore and apples
with seeds like snake-eyed dice inside
or the seven come eleven of a coal mine
that finally clarified its darkness like diamonds.
When bad news comes you fall on it
like a hand grenade in a daycare center
as you strain to keep yourself together.
Strong means being taken for granted
like the solid cornerstone that can take the weight
of the world that towers above it like quicksand.

Strong means you don’t hesitate to eliminate
your distinctions when someone’s drowning,
whether they’re a fly in a toilet bowl,
Icarus falling out of the sky because his wings
were insincere, Narcissus plunging into his face,
or a siren caught up in the undertow of her song,
you show up like a lifeboat with a lighthouse
full of fireflies for a lantern, words for a rudder
and a star to set sail by and pull everyone in
to your emptiness, happy you’ve finally found a use for it.

A holy book says that no one’s asked to bear
more than they can carry, and it’s probably true
from one direction of prayer, but I swear, lately,
one camel isn’t enough to shoulder what
it’s going to take a caravan on the moon to walk
this cargo of heavy metals to a nuclear dump site
to the dark side where it’s always midnight at noon.

One moment there are funeral bells dissolved in the rain
like sugar-cubes of acid in a wishing well
and the next, a spear of insight penetrates my heart
and I can’ t tell if it’s a pin meant for a butterfly
or a voodoo doll, or as a dance floor for the angels
to learn how to waltz without bumping into each other
like Canada geese taking off from a trashed corn field
as if they needed an air traffic controller and a runway
to bear the souls of the dead west and south
as I begin to wonder if death really is too pricey a ticket
to unload all these camels of their burdens
like sacs of genetically modified bee pollen
I’ve gathered radioactively from the starfields
so it doesn’t derange the hive or taint its honey and flowers,
and travelling lighter than life, go with them.

Yet I know I won’t because my heart’s
mortared into my Mongol blood like a brick
in the Temple of Life at Samarkand
and I would think of it as genocide
to kill even so much as a single human
who’s ever stood nightwatch in a crow’s nest
for a fleet sailing into a divine wind.
Sooner or later I’ll be washed up
on the event horizon of another black hole
at the center of a galactic starfish
all my lucidities will stick to like myriad universes
nacreously gathering their pearls
like planets and new moons out of the nebulosity
of these lunar sandstorms whipping my eyes
with the radiance of a hundred billion burning stars
that get thrown in my wounds to cauterize
the scream of my fountainmouth hemorrhaging
in the dead silence I keep like a vow to myself
not to shriek out in pain at the arrows
that strike the hearts of the clear-eyed hawks in autumn.

PATRICK WHITE