Tuesday, January 15, 2013

SOMEONE TOOK THE GREY DAY LIKE A DIRTY RAG


SOMEONE TOOK THE GREY DAY LIKE A DIRTY RAG

Someone took the grey day like a dirty rag
and wrung all the sunshine out of it.
Ten thousand poems bloom like flowers,
beam a little light back to the stars
and go back to seed before I’ve put
a word to the page. Infinite worlds,
infinite possibilities and all of them
inter-reflectively true. All the cosmic eggs
hatch out like a choir in a nesting church.
Pick a nightbird and give it your voice.

See if you can sing the frequencies of the stars.
The mystery doesn’t exist until
you start exploring it. Not to prove
how wonderful you are. Take my word for it
we’re all uniquely magnificent each
in our unexploited way. Liars err
on the charming side of the truth.
If you ever had an emotion as big as that
you wouldn’t be able to lift it.

Just because you sit down at your desk
like a sacred clown with a bag of bruised balloons
doesn’t mean your feelings are
universally inflatable. Tell a big enough truth
often enough, and everyone will deny it.
Look. They’re laying salt and sand
down on the icy roads like a Kuiper belt
of asteroids. Whatever you can’t
relate to here you befriend in other worlds.
Long before Heisenberg, lovers discovered
the truth of uncertainty principles,
spooky action at a distance. Quantum entanglement.
Cookie-cutters of black matter
shaping templates of dough sprinkled
with galaxies for the abyss next door.

I’m plotting a starmap of my neurons
and everyone of the poems I write
is a myth of origin in someone’s eyes.
The wind doesn’t fuss over the seeds it sows.
I’ve seen wild columbine like a tender carillon
of fragile bells suggested by the rain
growing out of the skulls of Cambrian rocks.
Even the lifers at Millhaven have poetry in them.
Deepen the darkness of your own nightfall
if you want to see the same stars they do.

You want to radiate like the stargates of Orion,
shine with the brilliance of Sirius in solitude,
show up like a bad penny in an abyss
of the first magnitude and see if the moon
comes up heads or tails, bearing in mind
the donkey at the end is in the lead
when the electron reverses its spin
without an intervening medium or even
a reasonable alibi. -290 on the dark side
of Mercury that close to the sun, what’s
the point of deciphering the scars of crescent moons
on icy membranes laid out like rinks in hyperspace
when you could be out there with the rest of the quarks
figure-skating for yourself like the language of poets
who don’t know what they’re dying for,
but let the heart make a generous guess.

Here’s one. Elaborate as sophisticated a universe
as you want out of your own simplicity
and where it stops is your seabed for the night
and write of all the myriad forms of life
that thrive in your dreams, agonistically
dependent upon one another and exhilarated
by the rush of a creative avalanche see
if you can make the same indelible impression
with sacred syllables of your own upon life
as the Burgess Shale without your name on the cover.

PATRICK WHITE

PUTTING A LITTLE FINESSE IN MY SOLITUDE


PUTTING A LITTLE FINESSE IN MY SOLITUDE

Putting a little finesse in my solitude
I befriended a river as the intimate familiar
of my mindstream flowing under three bridges
of my vertebrae where I can stop where I’m going
once and awhile and look down, just look down,
look down a long time into the rippling
reflection of the sky’s third eye looking up at me
as if we shared the same tears in common.

The swallows nest in heritage stone along the canal.
And the moon, the willows, the lime-green water tower
trying to look colossally spaced out among the trees
plunge their images into consciousness like a telescope
without an inverting mirror to reorient them.
As above so below. Twenty stars at the most
due to light pollution, I walk past a Brink’s truck
emptying the vaults of the bank, looking
suspiciously unsuspicious as I step into a crossfire
of overenthusiastic hellos from the flaps unbottoned
on their guns trying to pass for one of the locals.

Back door out of town, upstream half a mile
where things aren’t quite as dangerously trivial
and the stars aren’t cosmetically occluded by make-up
and I can hear the river walking on its own waters
like moonlight writing wave functions in chalk on a blackboard.
Everything feels closer to eternity out here
in plain view of what there is to cherish, perishing
as I remember a woman I’ve remembered for so long
without ever stepping into the same recollection twice
like the eye of a jeweller swimming through star sapphires
as if the patina of time hadn’t found a way
to dull their shining yet, cling to their translucency
like a snakepit of oil, breathe on their clarity
like a milky cataract mistaking a window for a crystal skull.

Here, I can say she was beautiful and it doesn’t
echo across the waters like the night call
of a distant bird always saying farewell to the music
of some hidden tree the wind’s been playing
like a flute for the last twenty years. It’s crucial
to give your past a future to look forward to
so it can go on growing in your absence
like the painting of a garden you planted and abandoned
like a constellation of crocuses breaking through the snow
to get the rest of the way there according
to their own starmaps. Follow their own shining
wherever it leads, as mine keeps leading me here
where I can tend the beauty of the wound she left me
without listening to all kinds of scar tissue
offer me well-meaning worldly unasked-for advice
like scalpels of the moon that wanted to cut
my heart out of my chest like an ice-age arrowhead
congealed out of my blood like flint-knapped rose petals
long before the rock doves discovered
the invention of the bow like the shadow
of the wingspan of a ferruginous hawk.

Even if you were to uproot all your sorrows
like weeds from your solitude, what have you done
but exhume the lightning from your own grave,
defang the crescents of the moon from the serpent fire
at the base of your spine? Shame your passion
with a fire escape, burn out like the root-fire
of a candle into an echo of smoke that smudges
the bats from the house of the zodiac you were born under
like sage and smouldering cedar boughs that never
break into flame? No. She was beautiful
and as much as it hurts to remember that
clear-eyed as winter water worthy of the moon,
because she’s gone like the fork of a river
that’s moved on like the other half of a wishbone
from this our secret meeting place,
and the sadness and the beauty of the fireflies
that are missing among the paradigms of the stars
that once echoed their earth bound radiance
sometimes leave an abyss in my heart
a thousand deaths wide I’ll never be able to fill,

still, like the ghost of a phoenix unfeathered
like the staghorn sumac in the fall by the wind,
though space burn as hard and cold as glass,
I will spread my wings and rise like a fire
equal to the moment in passing that shines
through my tears like the arcing flightpath
of an arrow of light dipped in the waters of life.
I will celebrate my wounds as a measure
of how deeply I was seized
by what was irrevocable about her eyes.

PATRICK WHITE