Thursday, January 17, 2013

THE DUST ON THE WINDOW NO LESS PART


THE DUST ON THE WINDOW NO LESS PART

The dust on the window no less part of the magnificence
of our awareness than the stars that will come
later tonight. Look past the obvious radiance
even if it means you go into eclipse for awhile
and two full moons weigh heavily on your eyes,
and the clouds press down oppressively like a pillow
over your face. When you wake up you’ll be amazed
by how extraordinary and strange the ordinary is
in everything. Wake up like a firefly if you’re
world weary of being a galaxy. Reverse your spin.

Get entangled in an affair with your quantum self
without worrying whether it’s a delusion or not.
I’m thinking about the kind of knowledge
that puts the petals back on the rose instead of
severing its eyelids to see what it was dreaming underneath.
Are there not as many thresholds ahead of us
as there are rungs behind? The whole
is not the context of the part anymore
than a wave of emotion, breaking on shore or not
is any less oceanic than the vastness of the heart.

The secrets aren’t hiding under the stones
of shepherd moons like life under the carapace
of a turtle on its way to war quixotically.
One beginning runs toward another as if
it were the end of things. The waterclock
never comes to a full stop like a fossil of water.
Time doesn’t go extinct just because you lose sight
of what hour it is. Take the patina off the eyes
of your peacocks, and you’ll see things
as they are clear enough. Bored with your life
change your amniotic fluids once and a while
and look at the world as if you were born of methane.
Teach your houseflies to roar like dragons,
like singularities in a black hole creatively deploying
its emptiness like a plenum-void to teach
the sea stars how to bloom like galaxies in fire.

Is beauty the same in an old mirror as it is
in a young? You can spend the rest of your life
trying to reknow what you knew but that’s
a ghost’s way of going about living,
a candelabra of smoke and mirrors
held up to the sky like a leafless tree
looking for the lost constellations of last spring.

More dark matter in the voice of the watershed
than there are rivers in the trickling
of a mountain stream from the wellsprings
of the muses I once drank from but from
the first whisper of light in my eyes,
until now in this monkish scriptorium
of ashes and wax where I labour elaborately
to match kells like treble clefs to the starmaps
of the names I’ve given to total eclipses
like an elder among the tribes of the Ojibway
who sustains the history of his people
like smoke on a distant hillside in the autumn,
it’s been the terrible solitude in the song
of the nightbird that’s been the longest standing
continuity of my life, the existential music
of trying too hard not to live in vain
by approaching the creative agony of my starmud
with as much light, oxygen and rain as I am capable of.

In this anonymous darkness I am the skeletal frame,
the scaffolding of the light, the rose arbour
of galaxies that arc like blood and burning doorways,
the trellis of starclusters on the vines of wild clematis,
the unknown boughs that blossom like rafters
in the houses of life that shine like zodiacs
over the entrance to the dark passageways
of mystic black holes in the eyeless hoods
that web the veils of widowed constellations
like dangerous executioners that kill you back into life
as many compassionate times as it takes for you to realize
you don’t need a starchart to plot the flightpath
of your inimitable singularity when a single wavelength
of your indelible shining is enough to fill up
the whole of the nightsky in the lantern of space
you’re holding out like an empty hourglass of time
in front of you as your heart pumps new watersheds
like a housewell into the empty cup of your prophetic skull.

Bright vacancy, dark abundance, the coat of arms
on your shield, stop tilting at dragons of your own making
and even the emptiness is full of a strange longing
to reveal itself like a hidden secret that wanted to be known
like a starling in a birch grove when you’re out
late at night on your own, shadowing your mindstream
like a river you been following down the mountain so long
like the Rideau canal, you’ve dug yourself
the longest grave in the world like a creekbed
to sustain the flashfloods of Orion rising over
the black walnut trees like the flow of life
through the radiant valleys of the astonished dead.
Like love, like the universe ageing into its renewal,
trying to catch one last fleeting glimpse of what
it once was in an eyeful of parabolic mirrors
orbiting like the hanging gardens of Babylon,
the morphology of knowledge is the shapeshifting
of your own mind as it flows from one sky into the next.

Yesterday’s earthbound scales that crawled on their bellies
swallowing the eggs of the mourning doves
they were about to become, are the clairvoyant totems
of tomorrow’s dragons pursuing their craving for the moon.
If you want to look into the future, look at what
you long for now. Your desire’s giving birth to you
like a waterclock in the cosmic womb of a galactic fire eater.
I can hear your eyes from here calling out in distress
as they drown in the mirror like a flashback of yesterday.

O lady, you’re not the black dwarf of your former shining,
the Queen of Heaven in a coven of cowled candles
conferring the last rites on a black mass.
In the stillness of what you’re becoming can’t you hear
the perennial beauty of the crows reciting the haikus
of inspired dinosaurs singing like poetic eclipses
in the dead of winter celebrating their lyrical extinctions
as if their eyes were burning like young diamonds
in the dark lanterns of their ancestral shrines of coal?

PATRICK WHITE

A TRYST WITH THE MUSE AT AN UNGODLY HOUR


A TRYST WITH THE MUSE AT AN UNGODLY HOUR

A tryst with the muse at an ungodly hour.
The past creatively adapts to the moment
as readily as the future does. The bronze age flames
of your auburn hair, withered petals
of a fire flowering in the rain
that may be down, but not out.
The wellspring of a muse is always
the third eye of a woman overwhelmed by tears
at the approach of spring. Last night,
pink-lilac Mercury on the short leash of the sun,
Venus as bright as I’ve ever seen it
and nearby Jupiter dim by comparison,
Sirius southeast of Orion, then Mars,
and shortly before dawn, Saturn.
I stood for an hour at the backdoor
of the all night laundromat, out
in the parking lot behind the Chinese Restaurant,
while the streetlamps held their heads down in reverence
as if they’d all taken vows or something,
and I, cigarette in mouth, looked up
like a chimney spark in awe of a radiance
so unattainably beautiful all I aspired to
seemed merely the ashes of firefly by comparison,
a runt of light in the vastness of the fire-womb
of a busy, busy sky, while
I waited for my laundry to dry.
And the last time I can remember feeling like that
was combing my hands through your hair
as if were laving my roots in your bloodstream,
without getting my fingers burnt
walking on fire all the way
to the gibbous moon of your earlobe.
And here you are at the door again
like the red maple key
of a rainy night loveletter
that’s let itself in soaking wet
to inspire me to write it in tears.
To shed my eyes like the starmaps
of last night’s luminaries, to tear down
the old spider webs of the defunct dreamcatchers
hanging like constellations
at the broken windowpanes
of the abandoned houses of the zodiac.
I was on my way to the homeless oblivion of my bed
as if I’d found a heating grate to sleep on
to keep me warm for another night.
As I once saw a man in old Montreal
after a poetry reading at Concordia,
curl up on his cardboard flying carpet
as if he’d run out of places to go,
friends, family, lovers he used to know
and pulling the shadows up over him
let himself by swept up on the concrete shore
like a dead starfish on his own private island.
Every time you step across my event horizon
you break another taboo of mine, your voice
slips into mine like a watersnake into a moonlit lake
and you become the connubial chanteuse
of an unspeakable solitude with something to say.
It’s always been this way with you.
A fire-bird flies into the room at night
like inspiration through an open window
just as I’m about to put out the lights
because the music’s over and the dancing girls
of the candleflames have completely disrobed
and stand naked in gowns of wax at their feet.
And just as I’m about to leave my seat in a dark theatre,
you come in the guise of an usher
to show me the way out of curtain call
like the moonrise of a crocus in the snow.
And I can hear you from way off
like a ghost being summoned
by an empty lifeboat in the fog.
Like a fragrance of life returning
to the apparition of my spirit
when you kiss me and it feels
like someone doing cpr on my deathmask
to prove I can’t hide from you anywhere
even here, where I’ve said
who I thought I was in my solitude
and buried my name in the night
like a silver star-shaped locket
deep in the palm of your fathomless hand
for you to remember me by before I drown
again in again in the eyes of Isis
like a sailor who sees a different life
flash before him every time
he goes down for the night
and can’t get Venus off his mind.
Because even in the empty parking space
of my deathbed in a dark room
lying there like a crystal skull
that’s gone prophetically blind
in the shroud of the black sail
I’ve taken down like the tent
of a wild iris in mourning down by the river,
even when my eyes fail
before the unattainable,
I can feel through my fingertips
you coming on to me like a stripper in braille.

PATRICK WHITE