POETRY USED TO LIVE IN A FORBIDDEN STATE OF COURAGEOUS GRACE

POETRY USED TO LIVE IN A FORBIDDEN STATE OF COURAGEOUS GRACE

Poetry used to live in a forbidden state of courageous grace

but now it’s palpably culpable of cowardice.

Paper-mache lifemasks with all the characteristics

of a gaping sin of omission. As F.R. Scott said of E.J. Pratt

in his poem about the building of the CPR

where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?

The ten thousand that died lining and tamping track.

Now the real subject matter of most works of art

is not what was put in, but what was left out,

where’s the heart, the soul, the imagination,

where’s the grief and the longing that slowly matured

into the black flames of the charred roses

that immolated themselves in their own fires

for the love of someone they couldn’t live without

like the other wing of the song of a bird

maimed by the oversight like a tree in chains.

The applause of trained seals isn’t praise

and celebrity isn’t fame. Everyone’s good

at divining the well, but who takes the time

to dig one any deeper than their own shallow grave?

Maybe there’s a sleeper out there who’s fighting

for his life in a dream, enduring excruciating transformations

as experience shapeshifts his voice into poems

we’ll get to overhear one day after he’s dead

like the sound of distant water in a mindstream

or the ashes of an unknown soldier

that couldn’t be contained by a broken urn

or buried under a monument to anonymous violence.

A hero or a heroine who didn’t play to the crowd

like an acrobat of words faking it as a wizard

in a literary scene of very unsacred clowns.

Tiger-striped arsonists that couldn’t burn

their way through a matchbook. Where are

the thieves of fire, the Promethean criminals,

the fore-ordained demons of nihilistic doom,

the mad who used to sacrifice their shadows

on the altars of the mountains of the moon

and came down into the valleys in tears

with a message like an avalanche of the underwhelmed?

Are there no more Druids? Is the bloom off the mistletoe

of myriad moons that have lost their atmosphere

to the bright vacancy of the vacuum on the reflected side of things

and forgotten the dark abundance of the occult originality

of the true face that’s turned away like a perennial eclipse

of the black sheep of a severely depleted family

that doesn’t want to talk about such things in public?

No more shamans risking death in the cradles of the treetops

at the hands of the visions that cut them to the bone

to see if they’ve marrowed suffering into lunar gold

they scatter on the waters like feathers and bread?

Even the deer miss their hunting magic more than they realized.

Now the flies stalk lions in zoos that know better

than to fight back. And poetry reads like a tourist trap

for expired prophets glad-handing their coveted awards.

Bleed a bit, damn it. Weep like a mountain. Write a poem

like an amputee in a straitjacket with the pen in your mouth.

Pour the ocean into a seabed, not a teacup

that tastes vaguely of life, and down a deep draft

of your own blood in a single gulp from the vessel of your skull,

then wipe it from your lips like the petals of a rose

that knows how the heart feels when it’s sealed

like a blood bank and the hungry ghosts of ideas and ideals

have been summoned to it like a seance of vampires in lieu

of the living metaphors that animate the lives of real things.

I’m not saying that the morning is without singers,

or that one should only listen to the night birds

or that the old stumps aren’t sprouting tender green branches

out of their Medusa-headed roots. There’s fire

in every generation if you get close enough to it

sufficient to singe your eyebrows on or at least

walk toward on a cold night in a cruel landscape

to spread a few stories around to scare the children

into listening to their imagination unbound

from the usual lullabies that keep their parents lyrically young

in a state of arrested development. Where are

the dangerously dissociated ones who yell Merd!

at the choirs of cant and stab an established

pigeon of a poet through the hand like an osprey

then walk off the stage into oblivion as if

a mediocre morality play were beneath his felonious dignity?

Where are the black-robed, outlaw, poet priests,

the sybils, oracles, witches and warlocks,

the vatic rebels hiding out in caves to amplify their voice

like the anarchic mountain they’re trying to bring down

on everybody’s heads like a meteoric shower

of portentous space junk in a degenerating orbit

that cremated their body parts separately as if each

had nothing in common with its fellow asteroids

except they couldn’t keep their cornerstones together long enough

to establish a small planet they could live on in anarchic accord.

I can remember when poems were written in blood,

not bleach and fabric softeners. Not anti-bacterial detergents

that shoot at their own troops over the heads of the enemy.

And how the poetic toads that hibernated for seven years

in the dry creek beds suddenly woke up one day to a flash flood

and started singing sexually naked in the downpouring rain,

not these isolated ripples and trickles of acidic dewdrops

that burn the tongues of the flowers with trademarks and name brands.

Where the savage mystic who wanders in out of the desert

reeking of stars and the wisdom of a snakepit

that could make a whole village stop work, and listen

to the unexpurgated desert wind that spoke through him?

Where are those who ennobled the miseries of life

by living their way through them like diamonds in a black lung?

Now it’s the association of the sensibilities into elitist cliques

of enculturated memes with homogeneous life themes

that never leave home to save their children, as Rilke rightly observes,

from having to do it for them. Domesticated lapdogs

never very far from the begging bowls that feed them

like the awards and grants of an institutionalized paternalism

that lets them know when the silver-tongued should be heard

at the table, each in their proper place, and when

Skinnerian censorship, like repressive tolerance, is golden.

Poetry’s as old and as dead an art as prostitution.

It’s been dying since the first shaman

imitated the song of a bird with its feathers on fire

or the first stripper teased her nakedness with boas.

Or the first wounded wolf let out a warcry

that chilled the moon with its unwaning sincerity.

And the ultimate angle? To be the thing itself

until it breathes you in and out like a way of life

the petty won’t risk aspiring to for fear of falling

and being found out like a candling parachute

tangled in its own life lines like a labyrinth of axons

that have lost their nerve for heights. Twenty-five million

children dying of starvation every year on the planet

and you’re lying in the lap of the luxury of literature

writing about the rustic quaintness of making home-made jam,

the same way they turned totem-poles into telephone booths

and minor domestic tragedies into recyclable myths of origin.

Let the stars burn deeper into you. Befriend the darkness

like the largest room in your house. Salt your tears

with oceans where your sorrows can learn

to swim like fish without ever swimming out of your eyes.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is it, this onceness,

of the dirge and the lyric you’re never going to hear

the same way twice, this mystic specificity

that encompasses us wholly in the mystery

of what we’re doing here, what we’re saying

and thinking and feeling and shrieking and seeing here

in the presence of each other bearing witness everywhere

as if even the void we flash out of like the morning dew

and return to with the dust of the sunset all over us

were also in some inconceivable way, though

we can’t put our lips to its eyelids, sentient

and playfully absurd, but never frivolously recognized.

Don’t live like the dress rehearsal of a play you didn’t write.

In the pursuit of an earthly excellence that expresses

our human consternation of who we are and are not,

neither this, nor that, say deeply what you mean

so that we can all draw water from it like the sun.

So there’s lightning in the clouds of your depression

and the fireflies take over where the starmaps leave off.

Be a great high priestess of the sacred syllable

and when you enter your venerated groves

like the night wind among the crowns of the trees

be at least as engaging and beautiful as they are

and as at home among warriors as you are homeless among saints.

Awake and alert in the unsayable silence. Wait.

And the metaphors will come like bridges that burn

and go up in flames like an orchid and bridges

that collapse under their own weight into the river

they were trying to cross to the colder, lonelier shore

where purity’s just a long, slow annihilation

of everything you still insist upon cherishing.

Let go. Fall. Revive. Return. Go up the mountain.

Find the mother lode. Bring it back down into the valley

like a strong river brings its knowledge of gold within.

Behind every explorer is a child who likes to discover

and share things. So what’s worth finding that you can’t?

You just have to look into one eye to see the history

of everything that can be seen. And when you open your mouth

prompted by a rush of stars, you sing

for thousands of dead poets who used to occupy

these green boughs and leafless branches, you sing

as if you were the last surviving member of the choir,

and the silence, the enraptured silence, were listening.

PATRICK WHITE