Friday, December 7, 2012

THE PALE MONTHS


THE PALE MONTHS

The pale months discharge their attributes of green
in the gripe of small, bitter apples
and the white blossoms
have got their laundry done like nursing caps
and the bonds of friendship with the young
have grown sticky and black, almost obscene,
as they lash the willow like bad actors and beauty queens
with long, drawn-out rehearsals of sappy plays
and the busy wavelengths
of petty mind worms inching toward the virgin cocoons
that might lark their threnodies with real wings
and flammable paper if the little mummies
ever make it to their afterlives. As it is, when they weep
their tears fall like the cold lenses
of leftover concentration camps
they may or may not have read about,
and the split seeds of their careful, furtive eyes,
the tender shoots of agile semi-quavers
run to the black and white keyboards of vinegar
thinking the moon’s just an old whole note,
and the silence that lies in state
like wine in the dark cellars of the sublime
is just another waste of time. They can’t imagine
how many stars and planets and lives it takes
to sugar the black holes of their photographic depressions,
how much light must give itself up to the night
to get one drop of translucent honey
flowing through the narrow veins
of their slim contingencies
and into the green flutes of their bones
like marrow and music. Okay, they’re not
the red wizards of autumn yet
forging swords out of the ores and eras
of the igneous sunsets that have purified their fury in the fire.
They’re too busy looking for their place
and white surplice
in a travelling choir with portable pews
and souvenir crosses of wood. They’re young
and imagine because they say the word good a lot,
they’re good. Let them stand for their hymns and anthems
as they will, it’s natural, it’s right
and there’s even a beauty
in their platitudes and repertoires, their reforms
of ancient hydrogen
that looks like the birth of stars,
the seven spoon-fed sisters of the Pleiades perhaps,
or the reluctant debutantes torn on the horns of Taurus,
white dwarfs and Cepheid variables,
young pulsars turning their diamonds in the light
to see if they’ve been cut right, if all the facets
are correctly interfaced
to download easy solar systems from the night.
They’re goldfish in a shark bowl,
flamingo fan tails and neon tetras
in a cannibal aquarium
of tiger-barbs and brutal dime-angels,
they’re an army of baby turtles
holding on to their helmets
as they run for the beaches of Normandy,
strafed by the Stuka seagulls,
black panzers in heavier armour on the cliffs,
black wolves swinging their muzzles into the wind.
It’s a hell of a way to begin
the rites of spring,
but the best steel goes through the fire
and there’s a chastening beyond virginity
that’s got nothing to do with victory
or the peevish tempers of first violins.
And I look at the old women, the derelicts, the crones,
and the roadkill along the highways of life
unstrung by the turkey vultures like dead guitars
and the sad veterans of spring in the swan park
staring themselves to death like foodbanks for birds,
all the lamentable carbons of human existence
down to the last embers of their spent hearts,
the spare change of cogs and bobbins
taken apart like watches, and I see
another kind of beauty, the deeper innocence
of worn bannisters spiralling up like smoke
in the stairwells of old hotels panned by junkies,
sybarites of wood aged and polished
by the sweat and oils of ten thousand different hands
that steadied their ascents and fallings
through years of snakes and ladders
on the chromosomes and rungs
of these who’ve bleached their peptides
in the caustic salts of the sea. Born
a beachcomber among wasted, cast-off things,
the second-hand bins of the stranded performers
and dismantled wild-west shows of the wave,
a seahorse, a Pacific cowboy from the lunatic fringe,
I look efficiently into the secret urgencies within
the Pre-cambrian tidal pools of their fossils and shells,
tears the ocean left behind in the undertow of a thousand farewells,
and a I see a darker kind of flowering
and the mysterious purple fruits
of a second innocence sweeter than the first
long after the apples are out of their diapers
and their blossoms are fouled by rust,
swinging from a dead branch of boney vertebrae
like bells, and moons, and chandeliers
clustered in an eclipse of black cherries,
and windfalls of seasoned planets
waiting to be pushed through the doors
of the hungry dead
in a jubilee year of pious offerings.
See yourself reflected in the face of an old man
if you truly want to understand what grace is,
or the well-used wood of a faithful chair
with a view of forever
beyond plans, if you’ve got the juice
to make something of yourself in the light and the rain
that can embrace the whole of the night,
can hold it like a syllable under the tongue,
a coin of insight, and not go insane. That’s what
courage is, not the charades of the young
besieging the sweetmeats
of moonlight in a nut,
raising their arrogant hammers
like stone gavels on the anvils of the heart,
mistaking their juvenile bias
for the robes of an older law
that presides without judgment
over everything that lives, not the breezy sail
of a quick voyage into the depths,
a love-boat cruise among enchanted islands,
but staring into the eyes of the Medusa
in the snake-pit of an oceanic abyss,
and greeting every grinning serpent
with an antidote and a kiss.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT I WOULD SAY


WHAT I WOULD SAY

What I would say to you if you were near,
if this definitive namelessless that walks me down to the river
to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock
and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water
enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire
to poems I never wanted to own,
every burning lily of paper floating away
like another crown I’ve set free
from this domain of air and shadows
to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,
weren’t the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both.

I would say to you in the pyres and the petals
of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash
of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes
of these poems that confess their love to the flames
with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke
gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here
in the form of a man, I would say,
it was always the hive of your silence
that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey
rarer than night, I’ve ever tasted.

And I’d try not to talk too much,
letting the fish jump for the two of us,
and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away
like things not said into the water
and I’d draw you in under the bough of my arm
that was never much of a yoke
as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,
and hold you a long time in the vastness
before I turned to kiss you for everything
and fall down back into the silver grass
to make love to you on the moon.

And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest
your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,
I would mingle blood and starlight
with the wine of your body and being
like a chalice lying empty by the river
that has brought us both to drink from each other
like the deer that will come out later from the grove
to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death
would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds
among the scepters of the cattails,
and I’d want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky
for this night of being human long enough
to understand its brevity is its beauty
and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,
burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,
like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak
look as if they’re trying to swim, and one poem
more enduring than the rest,
floats downstream under a frozen elbow
raised to take the next stroke,
and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself
levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha
into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment
that grasps at nothing. Form
is emptiness; emptiness, form, and the poem
had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,
and though you’re not with me now,
we’ve never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird
lands on the water, and then another,
and I think of them as you and I
arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night
and the bright vacancy
between the sidereal knots
in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile
weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing
love is I wonder what love is,
as the fireflies flash their assent,
and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,
and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here
as much for the island that spreads the stream
into the waterlegs of a woman
like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself
like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,
to launch my fleet of poems
like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.

I like being a child alone on the shores of things,
turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance
among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick.
And I’ve always asked questions no one could answer,
awed by the fact of being here at all
under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,
everything’s got a mouth of its own to answer,
and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I’m never as old by these waters
as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon
you told me to watch as you would
is always so much more on this undulant black mirror
than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.
There’s a birch and three willows
and the third of the three is you
dipping your hair in the water
as if your roots weren’t enough for the glass.

And it’s no surprise to know you know how
to drink the whole river in a single gulp
and swallow a whole star with your eyes
in a single glimmer
the way a solitary drop of water
at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass
entirely fits the entire skin of the sky
because I already know how you can consume the whole of me
from the nightsong in the flight of the bird in my voice
and from a single hair of your head,
or the eyelash on your cheek
that is all that separates us now,
from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem,
I can be here with you as I have always been
on the other side of death
where everything in creation
above and below this river of night,
from the furthest galaxy
to the dragonfly on my right
is expanding like a lily of fire into us,
as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.

So it’s easy to know where it’s all going;
releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,
raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream
rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing.
It’s always, like birds and stars and fish in the flowing,
been coming and going like us.

PATRICK WHITE