Wednesday, October 31, 2012

THE AMERICAN FLAG JUST BELOW MY STUDIO WINDOW


THE AMERICAN FLAG JUST BELOW MY STUDIO WINDOW

The American flag just below my studio window
one floor down, a real estate office carrying the colours
on the left and on the right, the Maple Leaf,
stubbornly clinging to its flagpole like the bough
of a tree that won’t let go of it even in a storm,
are both snapping in the air like two mad dogs
at the end of their chains, as if they smelled bush wolfs
moving through the dark without any respect for property.

Poor dogs. Poor wolves on a night like this.
Store lights smeared on the black asphalt streets,
a Fauvist palette, or the trail of a snail of lipstick
on a mirror in full eclipse. Everything tonight,
a jaywalker, a refugee, an exile, or a pariah,
with a mind shattered like pottery into any one
of a hundred ostrakons. No country for him,
his identity ends at the limits of town
as the willows rave in the asylum of Stewart Park.
The windows are rattling and the doors are banging
their pots and pans to keep the ghosts at bay
as the hard eyes of the rain sadistically whip my face
while the waters of the Tay froth like a troll throwing a tantrum
over the rocks under the Rainbow Bridge
that’s standing its ground like a harp in a rage.

Nocturnal greys with a tinge of infra-red in the clouds.
For anyone who likes to look up, it’s a night
to keep your eyes on the ground as I make my way
to Devil’s Rock, to watch the white mustangs
of the river run wild the way they used to drive
sheep through town a hundred years ago
before the coyotes and coydogs took their toll
and the vagrant hearts of the shepherds
found it a lot easier to go with the flow
by leading from behind with a couple of dogs
turning their flanks than I do tonight,
with a hemorrhaging heart in the eye of a hurricane rose
stirring the cauldrons of things up like the golden ratio
of galaxies and sunflowers thrown into the mix
like memories of better days at an exorcism.

Things torn away like children and lovers
caught in the turmoil and undertow of cosmic venting
that breaks the koan like a one-fingered wishbone
and achieves liberation followed by
the interminable solitude of going it alone
on a starless night out into the open fields
trashed by autumn after the harvest,
complicit with the storm, the pathetic fallacy
of the objective correlative that plunders my soul of adjectives
until all that’s left are these verbs gnawing at my bones
like a neolithic grammar of scarred calendars
and discarded manuscripts not worth another draft
with beautifully illustrated cave paintings
spit on the walls of my inaccessible skull
like shamanistic magic under a Hunter’s Moon
I can feel, even if I can’t see it, under this snarling
wolf-hide of clouds, from the inside out,
howling back in agony over the roadkill I’ve become.

PATRICK WHITE  

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER THINGS FOR AWHILE


IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER THINGS FOR AWHILE

If only I could remember things for awhile
as they were before they changed. Savour them.
Let the flavour of the jewel
that’s been ripening in my voice
wash through my mouth
like the mystic blaze of a star sapphire
and every word I say be a firefly of insight
that can shed some light on dark matter.

Would that my tears fell fruitfully enough
to feed the world, that one drop of my blood
after years of preparing the potion, were enough
to immunize a whole planet from affliction.
And what marvels would my eyes not delight
in showing anyone, if they could astonish the blind
like an orbiting telescope that’s just had
its cataracts removed
like the reflection of the moon peeled
like an albino eclipse off the black mirror of the lake
only to discover that all this time they groped through the dark
like star-nosed moles, it was their own face that got in the way
of what was shining. If only my hands
knew how to build like the birds
and my bones were strong crossbeams and rafters,
what palaces of light and water and air
would my heart not offer to the homeless
like the growth rings of a maple tree
that threw them the keys like winged samara
and said, move in, its yours. It’s built on bedrock
not the quicksand cornerstone of a slum lord.

For the lonely sitting with their cats and their elbows
in half-opened windows, observing
the pigeons and the stars for memorable events,
I would break this long fast of my solitude
like black Slavic peasant bread with strangers
who sat above the salt at the table
as my honoured guests, and ask them, eye to eye,
heart to heart, all ears, as if I were a radio telescope
listening like Seti, if they’ve heard any news back yet
from Bellatrix or Rigel, and which
of Jupiter’s shepherd moons is hiding
a secret affair with life that everyone’s dying to know.

It’s heart-breaking that we can’t all bring our tears to bear
into one cloud weeping over a drought like a dry creekbed
where we’re all hibernating in our own starmud
like toads and frogs waiting for flashfloods of the next rain
to underwhelm us like gravestones in a makeshift cemetery.
What would the world be like if we could
walk up a long country road at night far from ourselves
and not have to ask the roadkill for directions in life?
As if we were sure enough where we were going
to risk being followed by the lost like a starcluster of fireflies
within the compass of everyone’s bearings, not
out there somewhere like the ghost of a spaced-out lighthouse
but like the porchlight of nearby farm on a summer night
that draws living things out of the dark like the full moon to it,
even if it just be gnats in the air, bats, or Luna moths,
what a seance of life we could be to each other
as if we left the screen door unlatched
for any lunatic of the light on the road this late at night
who might wander in like the seeds of new themes on the wind
to enrich the bright vacancy of our dark abundance
with a starmap to where our buried treasure lies hidden
like diamonds in the ore of the hearthstones of our hearts.

If I could take the whole of my darkness
and enchant its snakepits into the wavelengths
of the light I would have emanate out of me
like the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche
entrusted with the wisdom of the Himalayas
to seek a low place among the stars like a sea
that all things flow down into like the shining images
we retain of ourselves like the reverberations
of experienced luminaries echoing
like seasoned birds to each other
in the valleys and black holes of tears and death below.

Sacred syllables of immortal butterflies
in the orchards of morning and moonrise.
I would shine down upon the abyss of the lovers
like a water star from the bottom up
of all the burning bridges they have yet to cross
like Aldebaran at zenith, or Cygnus at nadir,
to get them to the other side
of what binds them to each other
like water and air, light, earth and fire,
and each moment of my life, every step
I risked anew, I would become the way
that’s never taken itself before this deep into the mystery
of what it means to be alive and everywhere
be endangered by the beauty of our own awareness.

Instead of breathing for the dead as long as I can
underwater on the moon, I would invite them
to make a new birthmark in new medium
that calls them back from the night like light
from the scattered ashes of the empty urn of a star
coming together again in a gravitational womb
of their own remains, where everyone achieves
the all consuming illumination of their endless afterlives
by opening the koan of a single flower
in the light of their darkest hour of perennial insight.

PATRICK WHITE