Friday, February 15, 2013

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE


A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A little thought in a big space, I’m falling
through my own immensities here at my desk,
one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.
My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.
I’m on the dark side of my eyes.
No one’s ever been here before.
No window, no wall, no door,
I’m on the threshold of my homelessness again.
I’m looking at stars, but I feel like rain.
I’m talking to ghosts that I don’t remember.
Might be the wrong medium, but it’s the right seance.
I don’t even know what I’m doing here myself
but it seems I’m free to go or stay as I wish.
I’m wearing my shadow like a candling parachute
that didn’t step back from the edge in time.
No point in pretending you’re an airborne dandelion
when you feel like a rock with a message
someone just threw like the moon through a mirror
disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial
if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.
Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke
before you came. And these words that are saying me here
have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.
Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?
Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away
from the lunar eclipses that aren’t in need of enlightenment.
Don’t know if I’m a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,
or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out
by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open
with a crowbar or a koan, and it’s nightfall, it’s
time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock
and see how the stars emerge out of nothing
as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing
that let’s everything happen spontaneously by itself.
Even if you’re the lighthouse of your dreams
that doesn’t mean you’re the nightwatchman
keeping his third eye on you in the shadows
like a theft of fire you can get away with
this second time around with only a warning.

If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
And if you did, whining about it in your sleep
isn’t going to help and who’s Spartan enough these days
to stash the fox under their tunic to keep
from being caught while it eats them alive?
If you want to be a dragon you’ve got to learn
to swallow people’s hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,
without wincing. The stars don’t come out
like emergency candles you’ve been saving
for exactly this kind of situation. And if
you really want to know the truth about illumination,
try and blow one out. Quick, now, look
and see immediately into the clear light of the void
what it’s like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don’t hide their nakedness under a cloak
of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in
but give nothing back like the second hand clothes
of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all
like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds
dazzled by how much a single eye can contain
whether it’s hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall
or going down the drain in spring. I know
you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace
and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is
as unique among billions as you think you are,
there’s not a star in the sky that isn’t a rite of passage.

PATRICK WHITE

MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED


MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

Mere threads of the life we once lived when our feelings
were flying carpets, and more unravelling all the time
where the frayed river meets the sea like the bloodline
of a mindstream that kicked the buckets from underneath
its waterclock after the house had burned down,
the fire was out. Now I ride grey horses with manes of smoke.

On nights like this. Quiet, after midnight, a gesture of snow
frosting the streets outside and my rage
at the atrocities of the pandemonious world,
weary of coming to exonerative conclusions about humans,
hoarse with shrieking murder at God and the stars
for this grotesquerie of death even the gaping silence
that shadows the wonder of being alive can’t answer,
knowing how many times it’s tried before, and failed.

On a night like this when my heart is exhausted
as an asteroid that doesn’t care if it makes
an impact or not in a splash of instantaneous diamonds,
meteoric insights generated out of the catastrophic heat
like pure fire in the heart of its apocalyptic translucency,
I just want to sit by the river and watch it take its time
as I drown my mind in the flowing like a sword
I blunted on the rock of the world and now lay in pieces
like the moon shedding its petals and feathers of light
on the waves of the waters of life, in peace, in tribute
like the falling of the snow, and remember
when I used to reach out to touch your eyelids in your sleep
so gently I could feel what you were dreaming through my fingertips.

I want to put these heavy bells of sorrow down
like a windfall of the fruits of the earth that have
sweetened over time like the labour of a human
that tried like the light and the rain
to add an element of heart to the mix
before the work were taken out of his hands
and returned to the root as he must be soon
with a little more love, a little more beauty,
a little more compassion in the visionary tastes
of next year’s apple bloom as you were to me once.

Awake or asleep, what a seance of stillborn dreams
this passion for life can seem sometimes,
and how strange the vows of the fireflies
we once exchanged, pledging ourselves
to each other’s stars as if they’d forever
remain faithful to the wildflowers of the earth.
Dream-figures in passage who don’t always
wake up with us when we do and so much
torn like a purple passage out of the book of life
like loosestrife from the wetlands, all you can do
is share your memories with your solitude
like the smell of snow in her hair, night on her lips,
autumn burning in her green eyes and the council
of five fires at the sacred meeting place between her hips
where the rivers of her legs met like green boughs
that made the nightbirds ache with longing.

Long gone, years ago, so far away by now
it’s annalled in the archives of the fossils and stars,
all the mystic details conserved like data
in the bottom of a blackhole, the open gates
that once banged in the wind like applause,
unhinged like lapwings and grown over with vetch,
and the black pearls of the prophetic skulls
we consulted like new moons every spring,
thatched over with green moss like a funeral carpet.

Disembodied vapours of what we were, our breath
gone from the windows we used to draw in
trying to get the light right on our tears
when the sun came out after a lightning storm
and waterguilded the rain that dripped from the leaves
like sacred syllables at dusk in a skin of gold,
and gently restored the direction of prayer
to the deranged fields, standing the goblets
of the poppies upright on their altars again,
combing the hairknots out of the disheveled grass,
coaxing the turkey-vultures to spread their wings
to dry like totems at the tops of broken pines
as if they weren’t the undertakers of road kill
for the moment, but war bonnets of eagles in disguise.

PATRICK WHITE