LIVING ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF THE LUNAR WASTE

LIVING ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF THE LUNAR WASTE

Living on the cutting edge of the lunar waste

I made of my last moonrise. A truce

with underwhelming circumstances for awhile,

no apparent pitfalls on a Saturday night in Perth,

too cold for snakes, and the leaves playing their cards

close to earth and the air a knife at your throat,

I can remember when I tried harder to exist,

and it’s still a holy war every day just to subsist

and not let it scar your spirit into being cauterized

like a bad tattoo of the moon you had effaced,

but tonight I seek the ease of a solitude older than humans

down in the wetlands of the Tay River just off

Sunset Boulevard before you cross the first bridge.

Waist high in the broken antennae of the brittle grass

yellow as the fossils in a graveyard

of green praying mantes, decultified romantics,

I pad the skull of rock I usually sit on like a prophetic throne

with the old manuscripts of fallen maple leaves,

recalling lines from poems like lyrical snippets of chromosomes

I’d written many years ago to adapt my heart

to the changes it had to go through to recast

the cannon it was into the life of a shapeshifting bell

with the pulse of a nightbird lamenting the dead

instead of a twenty-one gun salute like a firing squad

aimed at the stars. Death is the saddest loss of discipline

the spirit will ever be called upon to master in order to survive.

It was sitting here one night, staring into the eye socket

bored into the albino nugget of a crow’s skull,

the boney harps of its wings torn off their hinges

like gates that weren’t strong enough to keep something out,

as the black flight feathers of a long eclipse slowly passed

across my eyes, that I realized, dead or alive,

existence is an interactive creative medium that doesn’t care

whether you live it like a seance or an exorcism

and there are untold ages of the shining left

even in the oldest ashes of a star strewn on the path

of these long nocturnal firewalks through the mind

and that hello and farewell were the two wings

of the same waterbird, beating in unison

that empowered it to fly like a phoenix of imagination

out of an aviary of urns of its past lives

that might not sing for awhile but never lose their voice.

Cultivate the kind of spirit that can sing to you in the silence

when you’re down, about the beauty of just being here

to live it, though you don’t want to hear it,

you want to drown in your sorrow like a bell

but somehow the sound of life cuts through you

like a lunar blade with a growing edge

through wounded water and you can’t help but wonder

what your ghost would give just to be here again

if only one more time, to resonate with the pain

like a back up singer to the universe,

who knows all the loneliest lyrics by heart

like a waterbird out on the river late at night.

If only to hit one perfect note of sadness, one tine

of separation and suffering like a phantom waterlily

adding its shining to the light like the art

of knowing how to paint starmaps on your tears

indelibly on water for light years to come

to let people know you were once here,

you listened as they will by the side

of this river of life to the same songs, hurt and alone,

as they must if they want to step out of the chorus

and sing solo through their tears in their own voice

before they’re gone to a hundred billion stars

that are listening to the same echo

being whispered in their ears like the fires of life

carried away by the desire to live on

like the empty lifeboat of a song full of moonlight

drifting down river to an ocean of awareness

where the gateways of the crow are refeathered

like the exit and entrance of an eclipse of wings

still keeping time to the picture-music that shines

like a new moonrise in the voice of a mindstream that sings

its way through the woods at night alone like a wild grape vine

sustaining the tears of its spiritual high notes until they turn

into the euphoric lunacy of a poetic wine aged in an earthly urn.

PATRICK WHITE

OLD SORROW, I'VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

OLD SORROW, I’VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

Old sorrow, I’ve forgotten your name,

you’ve been with me so long, pouring

the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart

that’s climbed back up this sad tree of my spine

so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,

these sad planets collapsing in on themselves

under the decaying weight and water of their own tears

from the inside out, and gone to seed

like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,

trying to make it up out of these watersheds

to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard

whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin

climbing back up toward the stars again,

until one night I’ll raise my sail

like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way

and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires

I’ve danced around alone like the only child

of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold

of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.

Who did you bury that we weep for, what

did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,

what love of yours was so betrayed when it had

its eyes pecked out by the song birds

you never sing anymore when the bees

are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening

the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,

except there’s a wound in your voice the lyrics

are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,

the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells

with oceans of disappointment like the run-off

of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain

after we’d talked to God like bathyspheres

trying to get to the bottom of our tears

like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,

our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope

fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,

looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves

toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?

And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself

when you came back down from your tete a tete,

and returned your commandments like a library book

that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons

have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons

as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note

of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders

are writing music you’ll never play like the wind

in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River

when the black walnuts are floating by

like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud

of all these roads we’ve walked together to get

nowhere in particular but wherever we are now

in this graveyard of shadows

that talk to the stars who have none

about how to wash our names and faces off

like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness

like a candle at a black mass at high noon

with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won’t look at

for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,

you bend my boughs toward the earth

with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature

seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo

of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience

being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms

of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors

you could blow into bubbles of the mind

like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?

Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon

in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted

like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat

growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?

Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind

like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit

like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon

lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.

Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins

of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars

like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever

finding your way home again through your lion gate

or have you encamped like so many other nations

to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?

Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal

that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?

I shall call you, friend, given how long

we’ve known each other like shadows of the valley spirit

blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.

I shall open my heart like a fire to you

and we can share the silence together for hours at a time

on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside

and there’s no need to speak of things

that neither of us understand about why

the fountains with the deepest watersheds

are always sadder than the last of the flowers

in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.

Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,

red shifting into the longer wavelengths

of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,

and I’ll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream

that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,

though you probably know better, keep us both afloat

like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock

that’s been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

PATRICK WHITE