IF I WERE A POEM YOU'D BE THE LAST LINE THAT ELUDED ME

IF I WERE A POEM YOU’D BE THE LAST LINE THAT ELUDED ME

If I were a poem you’d be the last line that eluded me

like a rope thrown to a man overboard in a perfect storm

of the picture-music that swept me off the deck

as if from then on I wouldn’t need legs whenever

I tried to walk on water to hear the mermaids

singing like the Supremes to Sam Cooke.

Late spring snow this morning. People drawing

their tendrils in like the blunted horns of morning snails

who were ready to venture out of their shells

like buds and tendrils, but got caught like crocuses

out in the cold, and it’s one more night in their coffins

before winter gives up its ghost. If I were a poem

you’d be the muse of fireflies in total eclipse

that lit up my life like the new moon in the arms of the old

for a while, the last nightbird to give voice

to an old growth forest struck by lightning and chainsaws.

Winter patina of candle smoke and nicotine

almost skin on the windows looking out at the grey skin

as if they had a reflectively depressed, unlucky opal

for a third eye coated in a cataract of milky ice

like a goldfish trapped like a comet in a frozen pond.

I usually identify with everything that’s going on,

empathize with the pigeons someone’s scattered like ashes

from the urns of the chimneys squatting on rooftops,

though I never knew them personally, I heard their word was law,

and there are states of mind, sublime and trivial alike

that can be reactivated by the garbage people

throw away in backalleys and parking lots

like lottery tickets and crushed coke cans,

cigarette butts put to the heel like a third world country

or left to burn out like the field fire of a relationship

that’s vaguely over, the mountain ranges of house keys

with tiny coded teeth lying like the jawbones of fossils

nature doesn’t have any use for anymore. If I were a poem

you’d be the caesura I kept falling through like a crack

in my skull when it opened up like the earth

and swallowed me whole like a dragon swallows the moon,

a cosmic egg in the nest of a red-winged blackbird

returning to the place of its childhood after long absence.

If I were a poem, you’d be the one word, like October

I couldn’t find a recombinant rhyme for, though

I read the dictionary like a parrot listens to a rap song.

Funny how we pearl our irritants into full moons

and the false dawns of sunrises in an oyster shell,

the silver lustre on the lining of abalone pit mines.

If I’ve learned one thing as an alchemist over

the metamorphic course of an hermetical life

is that it’s impossible to make an alloy out of inert gases

however resplendently they shine on their own

like secular stained glass on the Keatsian eve of St. Agnus,

and even when you do find empty chairs at the table

that enable you to bond periodically, the argument begins

as you start to forge a new life together whether

it’s better to be poured into the mold of a sword

pulled from the rock of a metallurgical wizard

or a ploughshare ready to till the moon like a fertility goddess.

Conquer or nourish. Make war on agriculture

or try to civilize nature with genetically modified wheat.

If I were a poem, you’d be the solitude I entered into

like a vow I made to the willows down by the river

that made me weep my heart out like a bloodstream

whenever the last crescent of the moon slashed my wrist

like the tongue of an envelope on a loveletter

I was trying to reread in private like a paper cut.

If I were a poem, more important than me,

you’d be the publisher and the literary award

I didn’t get for it as I sighed for another just as hot

sure to enslave the ripples of the rain at the growing edge

of the expanding tree rings in the wavelengths of my heartwood

and give all my literary root fires dry rot. If I were a poem

it would be difficult to explain to you how

my mythic deflations are a seasonal function

of my oxymoronic quantum entanglements with life

that exalt me as compassionate compensation for

enduring my humbling like a Zen samurai

writing haiku that caw like crows on dead branches in autumn

and drift like apple bloom or the swan of the moon

shedding its feathers on the lyrical theme of a nightstream,

without drawing my sword in ignorance

part way out of the scabbard then resheathing it

in a magnificent eclipse of being effaced by enlightenment

like a deathmask with a smile like a telephone cut from ear to ear.

If I were a poem, I’d be here and you’d be there

like an electron that can be in several places

at the same time and I’d be shadowed by enigmas

that would follow me for the rest of my life

as I walked on home alone without you

past the lunar tarpits where I used to go skinny-dipping

with the mammoths and staple gun Smilodons

as if I were swimming through penumbral oilslicks

on the moon like a snakepit of emotions at high tide.

My Papa was a rolling stone that came down on me

like an avalanche, literally, so I always feel

there’s a meteor shower out there somewhere in the unimaginable abyss

with my chromosomes. The building blocks of life

like Castor and Pollux in Gemini, snake-eyes

on the upside of the dice if I were a poem, you would

well-meaning enough, breathe on for luck, and then

where X marks the spot where we expected to dig up

our buried treasure, I’d be called upon to suck the poison out,

hoping there were no cuts on the lips I kissed you with

for fear of contaminating your wishing wells and aquifers

with local earthquakes caused by fracking

as I researched my panic in a maenadic state of Orphic dismemberment

for everything between you and I I was lacking.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT'S TO KEEP YOU FROM DANCING?

WHAT’S TO KEEP YOU FROM DANCING?

What’s to keep you from dancing if you’ve got nothing to live for?

Dance naked in your tears. Cry through your laughter.

Plunge into a black hole and come out the other side,

renewed, a virgin, no more feathers and tar pits.

No more dead petals in a dry fountain. Absurd, isn’t it?

When you begin to compare skulls with the moon,

not at all what you imagined you would see, not even

the prevailing consensus of delusion that passes for reality,

this neo-primordial soup of logos and memes

we’re all swimming in like fish in radioactive water.

This pre-Cambrian efoliation of multitudinous sentience

re-inventing cuneiform to write it all down in the Burgess Shale

three hundred million years from now, fossil by fossil

and one among myriads, the lucky lottery ticket

of a fish with a spinal cord that will lead eventually

back to the saddest excuses in the world for the likes of us.

I’ve stood on bridges late at night by myself

watching the waters flow as if my mindstream

were going on without me, and the pain were too much

even for a poet to sublimate his way out of,

and I’ve lived my way to the end of a labyrinth of cul de sacs

and wearied of their chronic recurrence like a water wheel

at an abandoned mill that used to gamble on a river boat

things would stay afloat long enough to make shore

before the ship goes down. The crucial point here

is not to live with regrets as if you had something personally

to do with all of it. There’s no starmap

for the burrs of the sorrows that smoulder

like brown constellations in the slums of an inflammable zodiac.

You diminish your arrogance at the expense of your humility

that’s grown as gigantic as God, when you think

you know enough about the unknowable to fix the blame

as if you’d just come up with a new alibi for you and the world.

Could be a curse. Could be a blessing. Could be

an improbable concourse of unforeseen events

that’s been chain-reacting well before

the infinite beginnings of the multiverse.

You cut your skin with razors as if you were

playing tic tac toe on your thighs, hoping someone

would come along like an antidote and suck the poison out.

But life isn’t sweet when you’ve learned

to weep through your fangs. Go ask the moon.

There’s no holy crusade going on as if the rose

aroused its petals to go to war against the infidelity of its thorns.

Even the predators, in their own way, are the children of their prey.

The longer the fangs. The sharper the talons. The harder the armour.

Ever seen what an owl can do to a snake? Yes,

things can be bad, but not necessarily for your sake.

They can be good, too, but if you think it’s for you,

you’re going to end up telling lies about suffering in your sleep

like a flashflood in a dry creekbed trying to wake the frogs

that have burrowed deep into the starmud for the duration

by singing to themselves in the rain as if they’d just had a revelation

it’s wet on the moon again. I’d could give you any one

of a thousand interpretations of your eyes. I could

turn your sacred snake’s tongue where the rivers part

into a green witching wand twitching over the watersheds

of mystic lightning. I could scry the self-sacrifice of your next breath

like the smoke of a distant fire on an autumn hillside

and try to explain the fireflies as the popular demotic

of the proto-nostratic of the stars and how that relates

to the scars on your leg. Befuddle you into a salvation

that would last at least a couple of decades before

you could ever find your way back by your own lights

to where you were going with the rain before I met you.

You’re not wrong. You’re not right. I could say that and mean it

as easily as a principled astrolabe looks upon a starless night

and doesn’t try to see what isn’t there. It isn’t dark.

It isn’t bright out. It’s clear all the way to the next star

if you don’t bind yourself to a mental atmosphere

where the mind suffers at the hands of its own weather

like a child that thinks it needs to be taught to wake up

from its own nightmare when, in fact, once things

begin to bottom out it’s as over as a bubble rising to the top.

Pop! No more delusion, no more enlightenment.

No more mirages taking charge of the wellsprings

in the desert of stars in ruins around Jericho

as the wind shapes the sands in an hourglass

like a potter or a sculptor into a sea of eyes

that can actually flow like tears of glass in the heat

you can drink from like a dragon on the moon

just before it begins to rain. And the grasslands awaken

of their own accord. And everywhere guitar-shaped gazelles

are getting up on their own four legs like amputees

that haven’t forgotten how to dance to the elegant thunder

of their own leopard skin drums. And the rain

comes back to your drought-stricken eyes again

and runs like rivulets and the unravelled threads of your lifelines

through the starmud gullies of your brain breaking

into waterlilies of insight on the banks of your mindstream

tempering the broken swords of moonlight

that are offered to it in tribute, not surrender,

because there is no war, into alloys of reality and dream,

delusion, enlightenment, imagination and awakening

no one before you has ever fallen upon like a dancer

who was cut to the quick by a life she’s not been out of step with

by not so much as one angstrom of a wavelength of a firefly

for all the billions of lightyears along the way

you’ve been leading a pilgrimage of shadows deeper into the night

like a calendar of shepherd moons

you’ve been slashing like a sundial on your legs

moments away from the shrine of broken promises

you intend to keep like a vow you made to yourself

sleepwalking your way across the corals of your grief in bare feet

as if sooner or later you could tread all that blood into wine.

Put your dancing shoes on. Crystal slippers. Moonboots. Winged heels.

Stop carving your body like a deathmask you can wear in the world

like an alphabet with omega as its only child.

Why lie down on the grave of that morose saint of clowns

you prayed to deliver you from yourself like the spade

you were using to dig your own ditch on the moon

for the mass assassination of the innocent and obscene?

I’m a poet. And to me you’re as beautiful inside and out

as a blank piece of paper after the first snow

has had a taste of moonlight and softly glows in the dark.

Not Joan of Arc singing at the stake of her own serpent-fire

feathering her body in flames, in boas of smoke to cover up

the glyphs of the bird tracks on the secret loveletter

she’s been writing to herself in the flesh to really mean

what she says when she says I want to live, I want to love,

I want to give and receive the way I breathe without

meaning anything by it. I want to see, because I have

brave eyes, deeply into the light, into the dark, the mystery

of a life that keeps on going without knowing where it ends.

PATRICK WHITE