POETRY ISN'T A SALVE I PUT ON MY BURNS

POETRY ISN’T A SALVE I PUT ON MY BURNS

Poetry isn’t a salve I put on my burns,

an ointment of the moon, though it can help

like a afterword, it’s the original shriek of pain itself.

The moment the talons tear into the rabbit,

the rose snarls and bares its thorns and bites

and the owl that seemed so wise in its nest of carrion

turns out to be, no more no less than what it always was,

a feather pillow plumped up around a scrawny raptor.

Sweet dreams. The night tossed in its sleep like a snakepit

trying to get on the same wavelength as the big names

on a starchart though everything ends in a colon

as if something were to follow like a fangmark

or a binary of black holes. If you’re going

to punctuate things, do it like a firing squad.

Born a tiger, born a puff adder, born

with the claws of the moon like an anthropod

clacking across the seas like top heavy castanets,

how did you ever manage to underwhelm yourself

and evolution, and learn to kill like a tapeworm?

Not a morning I’d enter in a new age beauty pageant.

Mercifully grey, but too exhausted to put up much

of a pretence. Mr. Bluebird’s opening a chic boutique

of organic food he’s gleaned from his many years of experience

hand picking seeds out of the teeth of vegetarians

like a sparrow dragonflies in the grilles of cars in parking lots

while the mandalic carpet of the forces of life

are swept from under his feet at his office desk

as neat as a moonrise on his fingernails

is aerated by earthworms the size of vacuum hoses.

Ex-hippie vulture capitalists with their third eyes open

like the fractals of a peacock collecting

emotional enlightenment experiences like the badges

of a cub practising knots he’ll later hang himself with

as soon as he masters a noose. Wonder what the Buddha would think.

I’m not moaning Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani from a cross

or a pigeon with the messiah complex of a dove

betrayed under the eaves of my apartment

and I wish I could forgive everyone for not knowing

what they do, but simply put, this morning, it just isn’t true.

Try a troll under a bridge by the fieldstone embankment

at the side of the Tay Canal trying to spiritualize his anti-matter

by putting a happy face on a total eclipse. Sometimes black

is the only colour my rainbow body can resort to

to reinvigorate my soul, though it’s reticent to admit it.

My mother’s ninety three. Afraid of what that means.

My brother just had his leg amputated for number two diabetes.

I haven’t seen either of my kids in thirty plus years

such that the distance between my tears and theirs

would have to be measured in parsecs and lightyears

and I’m so sick of not having any money

I’d tar and feather another night owl with it if I did.

It makes me queasy sometimes remembering

how wonderful life used to be before I entered

this isolation cell in the name of a solitude bigger than me

that would demand nothing less than everything of me

all the time, so that when I died from all the things

I’ve given up in life to write, I’d have to ask someone

if they noticed an appreciable difference in my line-breaks.

I’m imminently qualified and well published enough

to say that what I do, before another donkey begins to bray

about the anti-social function of my heretical wisdom

sticking the stars in their eyes like the spurs of a man

broken by a winged horse, is unpatently absurd

though I still don’t think there’s any other way to learn

to ride a word like a wavelength instead of a particle

and when I talk to God in the valley at the foot of the mountain

about what she’s doing to me, I’m still humble enough

to remember to always use the indefinite article in her presence.

Though I’ve had love affairs with other muses, poetry

has always been my most committed relationship to life.

Say it beautifully. Say it tragically. Exalt like a stranger

before the open gates of your metaphors. Don’t step

on a crack in the sidewalk that will break your mother’s back,

and when shining comes to zenith like a firefly in a lighthouse,

never respect a threshold that hasn’t got it fingers crossed

or darken a burning doorway with a firehose at nadir

until all the houses of the most influential zodiacs

go up in flames like the taste of a slum in a spoonful of ashes.

And if you get mistaken for a cult leader of one

in a small town of succubi, leave a garbage bag

full of used voodoo dolls one night outside the Salvation Army

and watch the passersby steal the burnt effigies of your childhood

without attempting to save anybody from anything

like the curse that cast aspersions on King Tut’s throne.

I didn’t come to poetry like an immigrant to a foreign country

but I’ve tried so hard over the years just to belong

except for a few benighted souls, no one visits me

unless their unremarkable absence wants something

it’s impossible to give them as long as their hands are full.

I try to balance their bright vacancy with my dark abundance

but how few on a spiritual path ever truly realize

that scales are the first step on your way to feathers

and if you’re not dragon enough to swallow your own eclipse

don’t try the full moon unless you’ve got dental insurance.

Your fangs would break like the first and last crescents

of soft, graphite pencils biting into stone like the fossils

of Anomalocaris in the collected works of the Burgess Shale.

And that’s ok, too. As I’ve often said my brother used to say.

Unrequited goodness is the sign of a successful sacrifice.

Do ut des. I give so that you give. Or, more savagely,

do ut abeas. I give so that you go away. With blessings

on your head and house of course, and a small shrine in my heart

where I keep the relics of all your best ideals

like the needles of baby teeth that fall like thorns

from the mouths of kittens that roar like crematoria

though I’m demonically amused that the flamethrowers

they mistake for real dragons never seem to bring the rain

in time to put their pyres out like new age fire brigades.

Just the same sumac in the fall is still more of an arsonist

than the naphtha of paper birch in the dead of winter.

Knowing what I know about how little much there is to know

about nothing, I won’t disrespect myself by becoming bitter.

Someone asks, I show up like a genie with a lamp

and we talk about matchbooks like the haiku of a dragon

or a crow on a branch in the void bound autumn rain.

I listen to the world dispassionately as if I were

absolutely certain there wasn’t a quantum self to the atoms

that wasn’t certifiably insane according to its own lights,

as I show them my arcane starmaps with albedos of chrome

and carbon, so they can see for themselves in the dark

how much deeper a black mirror is when the lights go out

than a white one that’s in your face all the time

as if it didn’t trust you to take your eyes off it once and awhile

like the broken link of a shepherd moon on a short chain

that wants to howl with the wolves, free of the flock,

still labouring under the delusion it’s got something to do

with where it’s going and where it’s been and tomorrow’s

already so far off the path, every prophecy you ever make

is just the future memory of your erratically inspired aftermath.

PATRICK WHITE