THE UNREFORMED LIFE OF A POET THICK WITH SCAR TISSUE

THE UNREFORMED LIFE OF A POET THICK WITH SCAR TISSUE

The unreformed life of a poet thick with scar tissue.

What did I write forty years ago? O ya, la, la,

the live ones sing, la, la. Always knew it meant more

than I could discern at the time but it’s lasted

as I have a lot longer than either of us thought we would.

If you persist in your ruination sincerely enough

light years from here, creation gets quantumly entangled

in your root fires and things begin to bloom like a moonrise

you never suspected was a flower down on its luck.

I don’t care where you’re hiding, everybody’s

got something to fear, but I know you can hear me

though I’m not asking you to show yourself,

stay where you are. I’m not the answer to

all those secrets you keep up your sleeve

like an aviary of parrots you’re trying to teach to talk,

but have you ever given any thought to being here

at the indulgence of a dark mystery you embody

in flesh and blood, starmud sullying the light

on the waters of life with hermetically unstable intelligence?

I gave my word to the X on my spotted heart

I’d fall on it like a sword in the name

of the most dangerously compassionate art

that demanded nothing less than everything of me

all the time like a renewable Promethean sacrifice

chained to the altar of a rock by a long, dynastic bloodline

of hot-fingered thieves of fire. My votive candle

of self-immolation. Though I’m compelled to say

ashes are ointment on my eyes now that my tears

have boiled away into the more vaporous emotions

of less revealing gnostics lost on a sea of awareness

without so much as a moon or a lifeboat to stand on.

It seems it’s got to be this way somehow for reasons

that happily elude me in my pursuit of the perfect illusion

to offset my sense of being an enlightened eclipse

among fireflies trying to throw a blinding light

on the best of my intentions. If that accounts for anything.

Wolf, when I’m noble, bush dog when I’m not,

I can change totem poles like a shapeshifting dolmen

when the moon is new and I’m scavenging my way

into an ongoing exploration of the life of a human

with an unwieldy mind that keeps toppling on its axis

like Neptune bobbing bottoms up like a duck,

or a waterbird, to put it more gracefully, into its own reflection.

Is this narcissism, or the slippery slope to solipsistic idealism

in the first person singularly alone in a peculiar universe?

It’s never been a purpose of mine to make a precedent

out of my absurdity like a law of life that doesn’t

inspire people to disobey it freely so they can come into their own.

Nobody else can do your flowering for you and expect you

to grow to fruition. The green, bitter apple in the chilly dawn

of its fair beginnings is sweetened in time by the loss

of its blossoms, and the erotic pulse of the windfalls of autumn.

Pain. Was there ever a poet worth reading that wasn’t

a worthy candidate for what they hated the most

until they were house-broke into being the accommodating host

of it, instead of the nervous guest? Work with it

like a cat kneading a pillow into a loaf of bread

or a white-tailed buck trampling the grass into a deerbed

for the night. Take a hands on approach, and grab it

by the throat like a hydra-headed python

with nowhere to anchor its coils like an oracular genome

that gives the secret of its extinction up

like the open-mouthed blossoms of the hollyhocks

swaying to the bird-bone flutes of the wind.

It’s ok to be a snake charmer with a silver tongue

as long as you don’t milk your own fangs

to anoint yourself in snake oil instead of serpent fire

or die of smoke inhalation in a vain attempt to put it out.

Burn, baby, burn. You can’t be beatified until

we see if there are any ashes in the urn

worth scattering among the stars like flames

that played you like the patron saint of dragons

that remained true to the heretical alchemy of their nature

like the angels that eventually evolved their flightfeathers

out of the repitilian sky burials of their hereditary scales.

Angels bear the souls of the dead south and west

like geese and undertakers in folksy vests

with a timepiece like a goldwatch that stopped ticking

cremations ago when the ground got too hard

to mine it like a grave and death had to take to the air

like a transmigration well before the invention of back-hoes

that permitted people to be buried late in the year closer to home.

PATRICK WHITE