Thursday, April 25, 2013

FIREFLIES FLASHING LIKE A SEANCE OF MEMORIES


FIREFLIES FLASHING LIKE A SEANCE OF MEMORIES

Fireflies flashing like a seance of memories
out of the low-lying fog of the past,
extemporal images that took me to heart
a long time ago, friends, lovers, children,
faces I cherished and could not live without,
gone from the bough like birds and blossoms.
I still feel this dark serpent energy coiled
in the marrow of my bones like the spring
of a ball point pen miscarrying in my pocket,
but the wavelengths are getting longer,
red-shifting toward the west into more
compliant sunsets than the youthful Armageddons
that confirmed my faith in looking for panaceas
and cure-alls in the heart of self-destruction
like particles of God in fissionable visions of creation.

Is this my half-life, uranium 239 stabilizing
into lead like a child’s sparkler returning
to the burnt out ores of some radiant conception
of what life and love, poetry and mind were,
meanings that elude me now in the vastness
under my homing wings, a crow in the dusk,
the crumb of a dream in the corner of a third eye
that sits atop my prophetic skull like the cupola
of an empty observatory half-closed in sleep like a cat?

I didn’t abandon the oceanic cosmologies
I shed along the way like skin so much as outgrow them
like rivers I’d floated down before all the way to the sea
where things get blurred and vaporous as desperate terminologies
trying to give a name to the nameless. The time
I wasted in the world’s eyes like a waterclock
of wishing wells trying to saddle-stitch my insights
like starmaps of the constellations of my age
that stare at me now like a blank page of silence and light
into the mindstream of what I am flowing through alive
urgent as an empty lifeboat drifting on a nightsea to know
where I come from and where I’m going
before I’m gone where I come from as if
in the depths of my eyeless seeing, I’d find a being
as blissful and sweet as the man I second-guessed my way
into wanting to be, writing in the shadows of the apple bloom
that crept across the morning grass like a beatific farewell
to things that can’t last longer than a specious moment before they pass.

I watch the stars that used to follow me through the woods
settle on my windowsill like dust and and the cinders
of exhausted houseflies. And even in this, there’s
something intriguing and strange like hidden jewels
in the slag of mined-out starmaps, that it should be this way
and not another, that it should be at all, and I be here
in the presence of my metaphoric awareness seeking
what can’t be sought like the sign of a flawless mind
in what befalls us from the inside out like chaos
embodied in the creative potential of time in the unlikeliness of us.

Nothing to weep over. No reason to indulge the heart
in a silence it can’t afford. Or sublimate your eyes
like dry ice in an isolated Martian mindscape alone at night
watching Deimos and Phobos, fear and terror,
eclipse your field of view with the cybernetic optics
of an Arctic labcoat looking for signs of life in a dustpan
of fossilized pollen. Like the queen’s clothes,
the sartorial flowers of life never bloom twice in a lifetime.

PATRICK WHITE

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD


MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.
The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.
The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.
Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.
Even the glowing concrete seems benign. The gates
with their rusting guns triggered like locks, the fences
holding the occupying gardens with their placard poppies
back like riot cops. Time without haste. Consumed
by a moment as perennial as summer on earth.
Nothing urgent in the fulfilment of small destinies
in the grass, no antecedents necessary to know
how to live this, no event trivial or especially significant,
I’m as open-minded as the wind on a shoreless afternoon
that tastes of the stars gusting in the dust at my feet.

Wild parsnip, Queen Ann’s Lace, mullein, goldenrod,
purple loosetrife and cattails in the ditches along the roads,
Lichens of the moon on the staves of the cedar rails
where the red-winged blackbirds sit
to paint their picture-music on the unprimed air
like the musical notes of a cadmium red and yellow song
with overriding tones of nocturnes to come.

Sweetness of life when it takes its mind off of everything
and requires nothing of the living but attendance.
Just to be here like a vagrant wavelength of awareness
among things as they are without trying
to gouge your eyes out like bluejays at the sunflowers
to get at the roots of the flowering mind deep in the heart
of the hidden harmonies basking on the surface
they’re joy riding like the elegant riffs
of the dolphins and flying fish that leap out of the shadows
into the enraptured atmosphere of their own auras
like blue damselflies and green tree frogs and old guitars
working their necks like weavers, or fleet-footed spiders
walking on water like heavy metal on a Ouija board,
like thorns in the eye of a bubble, hoping it doesn’t
wash them out like tears in the eyes of a voodoo doll
looking through the keyhole of a needle it couldn’t find
like paradise on the other side of its blind blessing.

Not for long or far, I’m still walking a habitable planet
full of wonders. Though the road keeps getting shorter
like a fuse behind me the further I travel down it,
and the asteroids keep making newsbreaking fly-bys,
and there are rosaries of bubbling methane rising
from under the shrinking skull caps of the poles,
and people are still trying to keep each other’s attention
by stabbing one another in the eye, but for a moment
that isn’t concerned about whether anything lasts or not,
there are no omens stuck in the throats of the rocks,
or blood of children splashed on the hollyhocks. A re-run
of provisional innocence in a few hundred acres of woodland
swept under the rugs of abandoned farms as not worth the trouble.
Lapwing gates hanging by a hinge to distract
the wild grapevines away from her empty nest
as if it still cherished its emptiness out of a force of habit.

I look upon the Tay River at sunset, the reflection
of the darkening hill quivering in the cooling breeze
like the more mercurial downside of itself,
and the sky opening the blue-green eyes of the peacocks
like stars with too much make-up on, and a handful
of charred crows flying through the roots of the trees,
trying to make sense of themselves like a burnt manuscript.
And what can you say to the stars that are beginning
to look for themselves in the approaching night
except this too is the world where even the lost,
in attempting to return to themselves through
the unattainability of the past, shed light all along the way?

Nightfall and the silence intensifies the conversation
with bioluminous insights of the radiance
blazing out of the darkness of a white coma
as if it depended upon the contrast oxymoronically
just to be noticed like waterlilies in the shallows
of the conscious mind anchored by a spinal cord
to the reptilian epodes of its own illustrious starmud
as every thought moment is, like kelp and kites
and river reeds swaying like synchronized swimmers
to the currents and wavelengths, the turns
and counterturns, of thematic waters with a musical motif
that plays to its own depths from the bridge
of a burning violin dancing like fire on the water
with no fear of ever being drowned out by the moon.

PATRICK WHITE