Tuesday, December 18, 2012

WATER IMAGINING MIRAGES NO LESS REAL THAN IT IS


WATER IMAGINING MIRAGES NO LESS REAL THAN IT IS

Water imagining mirages no less real than it is.
Delusion, too, one of the many flowers
on the bitter herbs of enlightenment
that bloom in fire under the eyelids
of the pine cones dreaming on the roots
of broken evergreens towering like pagodas
in the starfields of elemental meditations.

The imagination makes an impression on the world
like the charred fossil of a leaf on a cement sidewalk,
reminiscent of a fallen starling with outstretched wings
in the autumn, aviaries of constellations singing
like canaries in a mine with hoods over their heads,
and the shape-shifting medium of this space
we inhabit, each a planet unto ourselves,
undemonstrably accommodates the suggestion
into the experience of actuality we call ourselves.

We live in the worlds we propose for ourselves
but these houses of life we occupy aren’t based
on the foundation stones of our ideals,
or the lack thereof when they turn to quicksand,
but the aesthetic approach we can’t help making
toward our own stars and atoms, as if we
were the inspiration behind their creation,
the singularity of the eyes in the black holes
of the life and death masks we keep shedding
like the eyelids of a rose in an ongoing dream
that keeps changing fragrances we can sense
but can’t explain like the numinosity
of unnamed wildflowers in an atmospheric mind.

Individuals creatively collaborate
with the collective presence of everyone
to make a persona of themselves
they only wear in private when the mirrors
turn their backs on the stars like nightwindows
lit on the inside by the fires of more intimate candles
light years closer to home. Doves of white light
or crows of black matter the same.
What do the great seas of awareness
have to fear from their own weather
in a deluge of forty days and forty nights
without landfall? Every top of the mountain
was first a seabottom, every ark,
the shipwreck of the lifeboat that saved us
from drowning on the inundated flood plains
of our own depths. And it isn’t relevant
whether the heavy bells on the nightwatch
envy the buoyancy of the moon or not,
they’re all adagios of the same picture-music
emerging like waterbirds from the same well spring
as if everything broke like the sacred syllable
of one prolonged note of a hidden voice
resonating like an empty grave beside an open coffin
in a guitar-shaped universe singing to itself
like the ocean in its own seashell, or a bee
in a big yellow rose with just a touch of sunset.

PATRICK WHITE

I HAVE BEFRIENDED MY SOLITUDE


I HAVE BEFRIENDED MY SOLITUDE

I have befriended my solitude
and even the luster of the empty stone
I wing side-arm skipping out over the lake
like a waterbird trying to take off
is enough of a moon for me, though it sink.

Dead, wet leaves, flat as maps, almost
the scales of a fish or a snake,
or the slicked backed fur of an otter
plastered like a poultice of leeches
matting the pages of a damp book
over a glacial crack in a granite skull.

Sedimented histories of dead rivers
raised from the bottom by disjointed cliff sides.
Love lyrics of lichen and mildew.
Scalps of moss torn from the rock
by a thousand tiny root nerves
that sound like velcro being ripped apart.

Decay. Rot. Duff. Detritus. Amputated limbs
pulped into soft rungs of arboreal gangrene,
there are no burning ladders to heaven
around here, but the stars, so purely unattainable,
Orion in the leafless alders, the red spider
constellation of the Sioux, brave mother,
blazes down through its abysmal patinas of time,
like alchemists at the putrefaction and suppuration
of this earthly matrix of mortal disaster,
the air saturate with the lingering pungency
of something tragic that once happened here.

Ages of gold degenerating into base matter.
I am growing old. My thoughts walk
among notable eternities discussing my succession.
I will be driven out like a deposed wolf.
Already I wander these woods alone.
Everything says what it pretends it does not know.

Yet something whole and of its own accord
like sweetness come to the apple
still blooms within me like a moonrise
partially obscured like a pearl glowing
in a bed of clouds. Suffusions
of a pale lunar glare tempered by compassion
for the foolishness of having lived immensely
without taking down sail running before the stars
for the sheer infernal joy in the thrill
of daring the nightwatchmen
not to let me get away with it.

I stole fire, blood, love and light.
I stole my freedom back as my own birthright.
Always a star ahead of myself
I weathered the firestorms out
and lived vividly under siege in the doldrums.
I flint knapped the new moon
of my heart like obsidian
and phalanged my anger like a Clovis point
into an art of arrowheads shaped to fit the prey.

With the effortless effort of a mastered discipline,
I hit the mark like a hawk of the feathers
I was fletched in like the war bonnet of a comet
in a raid off the reservation for wild game
worthy of a warrior with the courage of a lost cause.

PATRICK WHITE