THE BEAUTIFUL ARTIFICE DESTROYED

THE BEAUTIFUL ARTIFICE DESTROYED

The beautiful artifice destroyed,

is the ugly one any less fictional?

O the glow of wisdom on a disappointed man’s face.

Auroral veils in the ashes of flypaper cobwebs.

You can know someone who’s lived well

by whether children are happy around them or not.

Bleak concrete and arterial air ducts

painted red so every grey day’s got its poppy,

more like a bunker than a peripatetic perch

of higher learning. A perch for nesting missiles.

Military-industrial. Everywhere the inert gases

of the overhead lights interrogate you

overenthusiastically. Que sais je? Nothing.

Incriminated by a metaphor that ratted her out,

I heard a writer say every time she came across

some unexpected jewel of language, she

plucked it out before the Taliban splashed acid

in its eyes. Flowers aren’t allowed at a funeral,

but the asters still crowd around the muskrat

like roadkill, death and the beautiful united

in belief. And to judge from the silky, sunken

eye-sockets, the minimalist ants extol squinting

over seeing the same way. A local habitation

and a name, ok, but GPS is not a starmap

and o little journey, a step across the threshold

is only so many miles to an inch. Desecration

is hitching thoroughbreds to the bullet proof hearse

plagiarized from the sun god’s chariot. Inspire

a matchbook, you might flare for a moment,

but nothing of any consequence is going to go down

in flames. Speak for yourself like the voice

of a species. Who cares how many mammoth bones

or shoes you’ve got in the closet of your psyche?

You can look at a field and at first all you can see

is a blur of golden hay the wind is polishing

to a sheen you can breathe on like the skin of a lover,

and then, stars emerging, the wildflowers begin to come out.

I like to listen to what they’re saying in their sleep.

I don’t feel a compulsion to run and uproot them

because some nitwit’s got a writing style

that doesn’t include them. All gate, and no garden.

Even the weeds will surprise you with what

they know about flowering if they’re left

to their own resources. I got up one morning

and was mystically mauled by the New England asters

in the apple orchard caught in a bolt of sunlight,

a black bear among the ungathered windfall,

as shocked as I was to stare into the eyes

of another mammal there, doing what I was.

Biting into the amazing sweetness of the same

sacred syllables, jewels glistening on our lips

like the firesticks of diamonds raining

on Saturn and Jupiter as for one brief moment

we understood each other like apple juice

and the strange elixirs of September that

make fools out of the wasps too comatose to fly.

PATRICK WHITE