Tuesday, February 12, 2013

DOUBLE FULL MOONS IN THE THERMAL PANES ACROSS THE STREET


DOUBLE FULL MOONS IN THE THERMAL PANES ACROSS THE STREET

Double full moons in the thermal panes across the street,
elaborate fractals of disproportionate replicates
in a seasick multiverse warped by the aging ripples of the glass.
I see Li Po drowning in all of them trying to embrace
the euphemistic screening myth of his suicide. I don’t think
a lotus bloomed where he died, but Jesus has a star
where he was born, so let’s put one there anyway
for a man who sang and drank and chanced his path
through life because no one offered him a job as a bureaucrat.
I love the double entendres of the unadorned.
How the waterlilies land like migrating swans
in the wetlands of the windows, and don’t expect to drown
like Narcissus in the mirrors of their own reflections.
But then I’m not in the habit of looking at things
like the emergency mentor of telescopes that suffer
nervous breakdowns looking for their third eye among the stars
as if it were interred in neuronic masses of black matter
and you could uproot it like a grail quest for ginseng
in the deep woods of Lanark County if you know where to look.

The night hot and humid and totally unmotivated,
all the windows open, and a big fan sword dancing above my head
waiting for the thorax of the rest of the helicopter to show up,
all revved up like a propeller without a flight path to anywhere,
I’m Zen-duelling in the acephalic shadows
of my hydra-headed anti-selves
for the lack of better company
until the muse of my solitude shows up
like a knock on the door of my coffin without
expecting a cogently analogous answer.
I write her long loveletters of cedar-scented smoke
I conjure from the ancestral inkwells
of my penumbral black holes to express
the excruciating loneliness of my singularity in eclipse.
In the intense heat of frog-rutting desire
black orchids bloom in the all-consuming fire
of an heretical apostate trying to burn
his God-particles into the wavelengths
of the photonic discharge of the rainbow bodies
of the highest Himalayan rinpoches as if
the sherpas of the Book of the Dead
were way over their heads like clouds
in the mountains of the moon without an atmosphere.

Easy in public to master the mot juste of a scalpel
you can use to nip and tuck the flabby psyches
of the less beautiful among your friends, but alone,
it’s different to divest a ventriloquist of your life-mask
and express yourself in a secret grammar as twisted
as the sensibilities of the evil jesters of the times are
in the fun-filled halls of the judicious mirrors
that can only recognize you by the accent of your tears.
To bring a gravitational eye to your unworthy affairs
and bend space into conformity with the magic rituals
of a black mass in an asylum of acquiescent pharmaceuticals.
Not to talk to yourself as if you were enamelling buttercups
with imaginative projections, or immolating blue hydrogen
like wild irises breaking out like insurgent firestorms
along the mindstream of your vagrant waywardness
as if off the path were the way of the path as far as you can go
without turning into the template of a preconceivable destination.
But to see how the full moon shines in a thousand lakes,
a thousand thermal-paned windows, a thousand and one eyes
and a mystical number of poets drowning like a multiverse
in every one of them, or conversely, the moon,
as must happen in the infinite waterclocks of time,
sinking like a pearl of nacreous wisdom
through myriad incarnations of Li Po letting go
like blossoms and poems scattering before the fruit
of their inexhaustible enterprise ripening into a windfall of eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

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