Thursday, November 8, 2012

EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW CREATION


EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW CREATION

Every morning of the moment, a new creation,
the distillation of the dreams of the night before
when the moon was as fertile as the dew we were born from.
I start out each day with a new face. By nightfall
it’s just another phase of the same old ageless deathmask,
heavier than a bell that’s been talking through my mouth
for more light years than I’ve got tears to measure in mirrors.
That’s usually when I start thinking like a potato about stars.
Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening me like a vision
I’ll only ever get to see backstage like a forlorn clown
trying to hang on to his faith in laughter.

You can pursue happiness, but it will only
run from you like the light, or you can cover your eyes
and try to avoid it for fear of losing it like the last time,
but when you turn around, it’s right behind you,
flirting with your shadow. Better to let it come and go
of its own accord, like a waterbird in a moonrise
reflected on a lake. Then when you speak of things
you increasingly know less about the more
you’re intimate with them, your voice isn’t
a bird net trying to cage words on the fly
but an aviary as open as the sky when
Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the Lyre’s
a larynx for the asking. And you’re free
to sing your heart out as if no one were listening
but you and the trees and the stars you hit like high-notes.

Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the coydogs
if you run out of lucky feet and that’s what comes up
like snake eyes. Lap the experience out of the bone
until there’s nothing left to eat but your appetite itself
and among the myriad flavours of life you’ve exhausted
that will taste the sweetest of all to that emptiness
that harvests the world like a blue moon that’s never full.
Is the moon not the equal of its waxing and waning alike?
Is it trying to enlighten its dark side?
When the candle goes out, does the light have any trouble
handling it? Fear returns to what it knows the best.
It hugs the shore like a tidal pool beside the sea,
a dead starfish or two it can get its arms around
like a worm’s-eye view of the galaxy, and the shell
of a red sunset in the morning on the carapace
of a crab that left its hovel for a house in
a more upwardly mobile zodiac. Sometimes
it comes down to that. Quantum level gravity.
A gravitational eye with myopia that bends the light
like a stick in the water, a mirage of sand in an hourglass
that’s afraid of being swept out to sea
with nothing to hold onto but the lifeboat
of a shucked clam Venus just stepped out of onto land
to have sex in a new medium like an artist
who’s just switched from water colours to oils.

You’ve got to accept the down times as all part
of the same wavelength you’ve been riding
like a snake scaled in white caps of light
that break on shore in a turmoil of kelp.
The cosmos doesn’t need to be put in order
and chaos doesn’t need any help. Listen to your sorrows.
Summon them to a seance of yourself
and apologize to their ghosts for not having the voice
to let them speak through you about
learning to swim with the stars further out of your depths
than you’ve ever been before. First you drown
in the fathomless immensities of even the smallest detail,
and then you bubble back up to the surface
of a multiverse with an oceanic awareness
of what’s been hiding under every eyelid of a wave
like a overturned lifeboat that’s waking up
to the fact that everything floats like the moon
in the reflection of its own mindstream.
And whatever sail you spot coming up over
your event horizon, whatever constellation
or black hole you take for a sign of salvation
or salvage, it first had to sink
before it could rise to the rescue.

PATRICK WHITE

PUTTING IT DOWN TO SOME IMPACT ON MY HEART


PUTTING IT DOWN TO SOME IMPACT ON MY HEART

Putting it down to some impact on my heart
in my sleep, this sunny afternoon edged
with cold anger like a residual hangover
from some dream I don’t remember having.
Did you visit me again last night like an albino nightmare?
Was Venus in Virgo? Were we unaligned?
Was I talking through a window embedded
in heritage brick? Did I mutter things at the sky
that were indignantly unjust without meaning to?

I wonder if the stars after all these light years
they took to get to my heart, are completely happy
with an afterlife without flowers or hermit thrushes.
Who knows why anybody looks back on their past
and risks turning into a pillar of salt,
or returning to the dead by default
but did you let go of my hand again last night?
I’m sick of your absence always being the prelude
to my dismemberment. And those eyes
that always rebuke my poverty as if they’d
been bathing in jewels. Those spiked stars
you bait like red meat you leave out for polar bears.
The brittle sensibilities of a neglected ice age.
Did you break your windows again like a frozen lake
to get at the waters of life in your mindstream?

I hate it when the light goes unappreciated
but this soulless blue of a late autumn afternoon
is beginning to get on my nerves
like a Hallmark greeting card that’s chewed
all the real flavour of life out of its feelings like gum
masticating its words for public consumption.
I feel I’m letting some prophecy down somewhere
as if I were misreading the tea leaves at the bottom
of the moon cup of my prophetic skull.
The gash of first crescent early this morning.
A lunar hair on the shoulder of the dawn that swears
it wasn’t untrue to the sun the Luciferian morning star
is leading on as if a new fool were born every day.

No matter. By the time I was ready for sleep
I expected a lot less of you than anyone’s ever delivered.
And I’ll be ok in a while, and you’ll hate me for it
when your heart turns into a toxic arrowhead
that didn’t have any effect. Just this Clovis point
to say you’d been here once and been wiped out
with the larger mammals of North America
in the dust bowl of another sudden flash freeze.

PATRICK WHITE

HAVEN'T SEEN A STAR IN FOUR NIGHTS


HAVEN’T SEEN A STAR IN FOUR NIGHTS

Haven’t seen a star in four nights
and the windows are pining for more than lamplight.
It’s darker in than it is out, but suddenly
through the breaking clouds, hey, there’s one
and I’m momentarily thrilled by the delight of a child
spotting her first firefly rising like a chimney-spark
above this ashen town on a cold, autumn night.
Small pleasures in the aftermath of great intensities,
the immaculate focus that burned eyeholes
in the sockets of my crystal deathmask
that left me feeling like wounded glass
thawing into the long slow tears I carried back
from the wishing well like the empty buckets
of a waterclock that acts like a volunteer fire brigade
that never put anything out before it was too late.
Wouldn’t be the first house of the zodiac to burn down
and probably not the last, but, at least,
it’s not a plague door to the past facing east.
It’s not blood leaking out of the nostril of a bell,
but who knows? You can never really tell.

Anyone here ever go through a transformation,
emerged from a chrysalis of solitary despair
like a dragonfly with a retroactive message of hope
shining like Venus in the false dawn
of a real enlightenment experience? Do you see
how the light breathes on the darkness
and it’s morning everywhere at midnight?
I’m off to the woods to listen to the laughter
of the falling leaves abandoning their dissertations
on the nature of perishing as if the answer
had always been a breeze of effortless effort.

Truth is just the sound we make for something
we’re never going to stop looking for.
In the company of birches and the ghosts
of lake mist Druids it’s easier to sit still long enough
to recognize it. Let the starmud settle in the puddle
as if a vapour of metal were silvering a mirror
like dew in the night, a silk cloak of auroral insight,
without trading your eyes in for a Zen telescope.
To a dead man, is it folly to hope?
To a live one, is it wisdom to despair?

PATRICK WHITE