Saturday, October 20, 2012

HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN


HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

How strange to recall childhood as an aging man
as if nothing had changed for the last sixty years
you’re watching yourself as a young boy
from a point of awareness somewhere in the air
above him like someone he couldn’t have foreseen becoming,
looking back upon him with great tenderness
that I’m what I made of his future as he
tries to reverse the bike chain he caught
his pant cuff in, and I can do nothing to help him
at this remove, except love him as someone should have then
when these strange tears didn’t taste so much of time.

Who could have guessed it would take all these years
to fill the absence in his heart up by becoming
the intimate familiar of the solitude of a child
who could befriend anything that was as lost and wild
and wounded as he was and yet could dream
of doing great things up late in his room at night
to prove he was at least as loveable as any achievement.
He was off to fight a holy war of one with himself
like a single infidel against the whole of Christendom
that I’m the living ruin of because sometimes it’s wiser
to be defeated than it is to prevail supreme
against your own dream of being worthy of love.

Time ripples in the growth rings of a tree
echoing the song of a well-seasoned nightbird
in the heartwood of a shedding maple
that remembers all the lyrics of longing and lament
it sings to itself at times like an arrow, a burnt guitar
struck by lightning, or one of the strong rafters
that uphold the soul like the keel of a lifeboat overturned
on the great night sea of a death in life
it drowned in more than once like moonset
among the corals that tore the bottom of its hull.

And how many cold nights did it take
before the syrups began to run sweetly in spring
and the new leaves forget the history of their roots
as I tried to abandon the child that I was
by the side of a road that led him away from me
because I thought one of us had to go homeless
in order to survive the firestorms of his outraged innocence
and the unaccusing guilt of mine as I grew up
letting him down in ways that only he can imagine
as I spread from one burning building to the next
like a new religion that wasn’t looking for converts?
But if you were to ask me now, I’d say it’s funny
how he turned out to be the Buddha sitting at the base
of the Bodhi tree of my spine, and on a good day,
at my best, before the fall, I’m Lucifer leading
the sun up at dawn like a child guiding a blind prophet
by the hand long before the morning star appeared
like Venus to those who were seeking enlightenment
without me or themselves to witness what neither of us
had attained like the key to the mystery of a universe
that had no locks on it to begin with to shut anybody out
or keep anybody in. The man in me doesn’t blame the child
for existing the way I do now trying belatedly
to embrace his rejection as a way of life
I can make up for by sharing this wounded solitude with him
like an injured animal he can see himself in
as a potential friend he could identify with
as if what had happened to me had once happened to him
and we could both approach each other with compassion.

PATRICK WHITE

AND WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT, IS IT WHAT YOU DREAMED?


AND WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT, IS IT WHAT YOU DREAMED?

And when you get what you want, is it what you dreamed?
Did the mirage live up to its reputation, did it exceed
your expectations or is there another award beyond this one?
O endlessly hungry one, pleonaxic emptiness, were you born
like a black hole on a midway of blazing radiance,
a blinding light that serves as a guide to star-nosed moles?
Fulfilment or doom, depression, disappointment, as if
some clown had washed his face off like a painted tear
in a green room mirror, and discovered he was still crying?

You grasp it like the garment of a passing ghost,
sand, water, cloud, and it changes shape in your hands
like the nature of a bird when neither of you understands.
We all wake up to spend the wealth we hoarded in our dreams.
We even greet death with money under our tongue.
In Zen they’d say we’re all stealing the Buddha’s purse
to buy the Buddha’s horse one way or another
whether we can ride it or not, and if today you’re disappointed
you’ll be mesmerized by something else tomorrow,
a junk dealer going through a widow’s private treasures.
You’ll open your mouth again like an oyster farm
trying to breed pearls like the philosopher’s stone
labouring to turn all these new moons of pitted ore into gold.

Good luck. Hope you’re the wiser for it. As for me
and my house, I’ve never been disappointed
in my wonder at the world, and what I’m doing here
being aware of it all as the world tracks its starmud in
across my homeless threshold and all these ancient footprints
are dance steps back to a self that’s just a tic of the emptiness
I catch once and awhile out of the corner of my third eye
abrogating credit for a dream it had nothing to do with
because that’s a bird still flapping its wings in a shell
thinking it’s being upheld by the wind until someone
cracks it open like a brittle atmosphere and all that space
comes rushing in and you realize with a cosmic sigh of relief
like a sunflower bowing its heavy head, what a great debt
you owe to the nothing that you are that can’t possess anything.

You’re standing there in all your spiritual bling,
gold necklaces around your throat, chakras and chains
looped like nooses in knots at the end of your spinal cord.
What did you do? Bind yourself to the axis of the earth
to be mistaken for a saint or a martyr, the wobbly snake
of an inebriated caduceus, but where’s the fire, where’s
the heretic, the apostate, the dragon singing in its own flames,
where even one firefly of insight that consumes the universe?
Or are you just another photo op with mermaids
calling you to the soft rocks of a popular song?
A straw dog in the rain smouldering like methane
on a compost heap after another ritual performance?
You’re greedy for joy. You’re greedy for illumination
in the spotlight. But bliss is one of the spices of life,
not the main course. And to want more than this
is to declare you’re a glutton with lousy spiritual manners.

And O yes I know, you think this is like blooming
and having someone throw acid in your face
when you were anticipating rain on your plum blossoms.
You duck through a hole in the fence like a raccoon
caught pilfering corn in a garden, and you want
a Roman triumph with rosewater and slaves
for passing through the gateless gate to liberation
when all you’ve really done is barge through
the emergency exit to run from a shotgun loaded with stars
in the hands of a scarecrow trying to terrify the birds
by shooting straight up into the air until things
begin to take root of themselves, and the locust trees
are feathered with the leaves of nesting lapwings
that don’t have any further to fall though they feign
a dizzying descent of wounded maple keys
and all the shamans have to heal themselves
by ploughing the ground they were born on into bookshelves.

PATRICK WHITE