Wednesday, November 28, 2012

PATINAS OF DISTINCTION


PATINAS OF DISTINCTION

Patinas of distinction trying to green the terminated poets.
Death drools its cruel elixirs. Perfume
from ambergris, whale vomit for those
who have the stomach for it, dung
under the snow, then come the squabbling sparrows
to tend upon God in her rehabilitated ruins.

Literary forensics putting flesh back on the skull.
Red threads of blood in the nests
they build for themselves like pyres of cosmic eggs
in the tree where the poet hung
like a poached bird, a plumb bob of the depths,
a pendulum in a still life with choreographed knives.

The cooing pigeons who write with flight feathers
plucked from fledgling suicides. Water has a voice
of its own, the blood, the wind, three octaves
of fire. Here come the uninspired
with insulation, rebar and cement.
And even road kill’s got an undertaker.

A telescope’s more of a work of art
with a poetic vision of the stars
all waiting to greet you like long lost relatives
and friends, at the end of a dark tunnel
than the barrow tombs of all these
blind, star-nosed moles grubbing
among their damp root fires
to add their smouldering voices
in Braille like singularities
to a dying tradition of black holes.

Equinoctial careerists of their fair-minded lies,
they damn the solstice for taking
more of a stand in summer and winter
like a Stonehenge of the light
and lament the evanescence
of spring and fall that sheds them
like roseate petals of snake skin
that strike the heart like toxic sins of omission.

The sheep are hunting the tigers to death
and there are maggots in the moonlight
like toxicara worms eating the hearts and eyes
out of Mozart and Liszt to see what they saw,
to see what they did, but maggots
never turn into butterflies, and in time,
their lives are fined for fouling the footpath
like commas of excrement in the aftermath
of all the winged heels that stepped in it
like Sylvia Plath in a hive of killer bees
making a grand entrance of her exit
like the black queen of the uninhabited planets
in the corona of the starcluster in Cancer.

PATRICK WHITE  

SNOW ON THE STREETS


SNOW ON THE STREETS

Snow on the streets grooved by tires
into a bar-code. A band burning its first c.d.
Garbage bags humped against the parking meters
like terraformed drunks in an albino mindscape.
I want to sleep. But savage clouds are fuming
with moonlight. Oblivion’s sweet, my little death,
gentle as a snowflake but the prelude to it
is pierced by cauterizing anxieties
like a needle park for voodoo dolls.

I’d rather be a butterfly, a pinwheel
spinning on an axis through my thorax
but you can’t have it all. I tilt away from the sun
at perigee and try to stretch the night out
like a budget of meds for the month.
The dark’s a cool poultice that draws
the infection out of my dreams. It
sublimates my sorrows like dry ice
that skipped the tears. I don’t want to get wet
in an ice-age. Crucified by icicles
that drip like syringes in a limestone cave.

I smear my face in red ochre, blood
with desiccated binders, oil pastels,
and lay my prophetic bones under the firepit.
I place a great stone on my chest
like the weight of the world
to make sure I never get up again
but pain is a homeless ghost
and I don’t think, even with my knees
popped under my chin like an embryo
every part of me is going to fit
my place at the table like a grave.
I throw a few cornflowers in
and wander off with my spirit
like a thought wave that’s tagging along.

I chip away at my heart
like an obsidian lunette
with a bone that’s edging it
into a phalanged Clovis point
for a throwing spear to penetrate
the mammoth of the wooly moon.
I think I’m going extinct.
I’ve culled too many stars.
The herds are thinning over my head.
The green of the traffic lights
that turned yellow in the fall
drops its single, blood-stained berry in the snow.
As the birds and the bards say
of the chokecherries, ripeness is all.

Snow-blinded by this white page,
and blazing is a kind of blindness,
I want to leave something behind
for people to follow like the tracks
of a wounded caribou writing
in the cuneiform Braille of my starmud
you can read with your fingertips
like a hungry clan that hasn’t eaten for a week.

I don’t want to be sought or thawed out by anyone
who isn’t burning my fat in their lamps
or sewing my hide with a splinter
of my femur, threading my sinews
through the eye of a needle
stitching me up in an emergency room
like the mouth of a wound
that’s had its say, and holds its tongue
like the exhausted flavour of silence
masticating a wad of pitch and pine gum
like the sacred syllable of the spear point
I was trying to make an era ago
before I got stuck in this one like a tarpit,
an exile returning on a migratory journey
to the prodigal museum of my homecoming exit.

PATRICK WHITE