Monday, May 6, 2013

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN


I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I see you in the eyes of the rain
and in the broken aspirations of the swallow
that hit the windowpane dead on.
Fire that no longer burns.
Water that no longer drowns.
Earth that no longer receives.
A gust of air that no one breathes.

I see you in the tender, green tendrils
of the wild grapevines clinging to life
like the last plank of a shipwrecked lifeboat
washed up on the shore of the moon.
The most bitter farewells are those
compelled by understanding
to cry a little in the open doorway
and leave as if there were nothing more to say.

Words lightyears beyond communication.
Metaphors like burning bridges
that never quite make it to the other side.
And o how gentle an eclipse comes
to a lover’s coltish eyes
when it’s time to say good-bye
and if you’re a bad man, it’s revenge,
and if you’re good, it’s a sacrifice.

Good-bye, get out, be gone,
I’ll live on in my palace of lonely windows
like a man with class in an hourglass
and I’ll write faceless songs
to the passage of time as autumn approaches.

Leave me now to the pain
I must wrestle with alone
like an angel in my way
that knows I don’t have what it takes
to pull up stakes like a heretic
before I burn for the mistakes I made
on your invigilated test of love.

Once I feel like a loser again
I know I’m at home with myself
and I can feel the clouds laughing in tears
as I get around like rain.
I loved your body like a wishing well.
You loved my brain like an occult spell.

Three afterlives of a star, once you left me
holding the medicine bag of your absence,
I named a desolate street after you
like some kind of municipal gift
to the run down ghetto of a sub-prime heart.

My pain is consoled by my art
like a weather vane is comforted by the weather.
I ghost write the lyrics of the storm.
I incite riots against the norm.
I blood my poems like spearheads
in a wound that never scars the moon.

I shall be the nightwatchman
who makes the rounds of the zodiac
inspecting doors and windows
that are steadfastly closed to him
like lilies in the festering gene pools
of the idle rich in their bridal tents
spawning into money like goldfish.

I shall be an eagle at the extremity
of my wingspan and soar over the smoke
of burning cities like a cinder of freedom
in the eye of a failed revolution
and I will not lament my own extinction
when my starmud settles like a constellation
into the hearsay of bloodshot mirrors.

I will linger in precipitous heights
then shriek like the paper airplane of a poem
down on some bumptious homing pigeon
that was promised a comfortable flight
from here to there, until it was
snatched from the air like a pillow fight.

I will do this because I can feel the glee
of my talons sinking into hypocrisy
like the three crescents of the moon
with an eyrie full of skeletal snakes
that look like a pit full of twisted combs
without any meat on their bones.

Liars convince. Communicators convey.
It isn’t what I say. It’s the way I say it
that makes all the difference to the meaning
that tones me like a moody chameleon
resonating with a tuning fork of colour
that flickers like a photo-op of lightning
trying to get a glimpse of itself in the mirror.

And then I’m an illiterate divinity student
with a heart as big as an orphanage
full of baffled pilgrims that have lost their way
crutching through the labyrinths of the divine
on a cross that walks them to the end of the line
like the rapture of an apocalyptic anti-climax.

I talk to God about you and she talks back
like a comprehensive alibi for the way things are.
She’s got a scar as big as the smile
on the dark side of her face she keeps
turned away from me like an embarassed moon
she doesn’t want to reveal to anyone.
But I can see it in the rear view mirror
of my infernal lucidity leading me away from her
like an atomic Sufi reversing my spin
in the charged particle field of my happy sin.

I walk on the wild side in cowboy boots
in a truce with the shadows of Zen
that says a great general may establish peace
but that doesn’t mean he gets to enjoy it.
And I’m resigned to the sternness of my discipline
like salt to the earth, like a sail to the wind,
like a ferocious heart to a gentle mind.

PATRICK WHITE

UNLOST WHEN I'M WRITING


UNLOST WHEN I’M WRITING

Unlost when I’m writing, the going’s enough
and any path will do for the shining. Everywhere
space for the mind to move of its own accord,
dead bodies in the tide, waterbirds returning to the lake.
The pictures crowd together in the flames
and a flower blooms in the fire the fire cannot burn
and myriad themes are mingled in the same fragrance.
How else say it? I’m an alloy of stars, a weld
of metaphors that healed stronger than the original wound.
I don’t wholly understand this, but I’m changing
bodies on the fly, dying even as I grow,
and the more radiant I become the less visible I am.

The mindstream in its flowing is a flying carpet
woven of eddies and currents, of thought, of feeling
the heaving, fall, and rush of many waters
animated by the going, inspired by the approach,
and some bring an easel, a loom, a telescope
and when the moon is shining, there are feathers
scattered on ten thousand lakes at once
as the night writes starmaps on the eye of the seeker
all but the most middling minds follow like a dancer.

I live between the coming and going like a gate,
like the breath in my throat, the systole and diastole,
the ebb and neap of my heart, between the open sky
and the canning jar of a telescope full of fireflies
like a prism in a spider mount bending light through my eye
like a goldfish in water. The full moon, a coin
lost in the river that cannot be retrieved from the river
unless you grasp it without using your hands.
The way a bird on the wind enlarges a space within
and you can hold it a moment like the sky it disappears into.

Comes a swallow at dusk and a nation at noon
and you feel the easy parity of the two as if
they were both of the one intangible fleeting substance,
a birth-sac of dew about to let its water break
and bring forth the world as the youngest child of all.
An abacus of tears, worlds within worlds,
oxymoronic unions dispersing like somnambulant bells
into more inclusive realms of understanding
where every grain of sand is the cornerstone
of the cosmos elaborated out of it as if
neither small nor large, partial nor whole
one word is a myth of origin, and two,
the whole of its long history without end.

Transformative stillness, kinetic mutability,
I refine the ore of an old wisdom
in the crucible of my heart and pour it out like stars
into the available vacancies of space and time
waiting like a waterclock of begging bowls
for their emptiness to shape the tools they’ll use
to plough the moon with a sail and a rudder into fish.
How life gets around is the way I’m moved to think
in fireflies and maple keys, nebular intuitions
of the Pleiades rooting like rain in clouds
and clouds of unknowing where there’s nothing
to take on faith but the small voice on the hidden hill
calling out to you like an empty lifeboat
drifting through the autumn fog an eerie morning.

I lay my madness bare and offer you a scalpel
like the bud of a narcissus, and say cut here, cut there,
slash at me like a corpse in a surgical theater,
remove my skull cap like the lid of a cookie jar,
break it open like a fortune-cookie or a surrealistic lullaby,
a lottery you couldn’t lose, or American pie,
and don’t say anything teleological to me
about what you find, if there’s anything to find at all.
And then add me to the sum of educational body parts
on a river barge that’s going to scrape them off the plate
far out at sea in a feeding frenzy of marine life.
Star meat, my flesh, I’m adorned by the mud of the earth,
and my mind, who could find that, when
there’s so many more places to look than to hide?

Lightyears back I blundered into the open
like a tree on a hill in a field, running from something
ahead of me, when I discovered in a flash
of Druidic tragedy just how vulnerable words were
to the emotions I invested in them like ashes in urns.
Great dragons of passion that imploded on themselves
like caldera and women and meteors on the moon,
kissing stones subsumed in their own wombs
like nanodiamonds of insight into the impact.
And I might seem a lot gladder than I used to be
but there’s still too much to forget to be happy.
And I’m not truly certain I have the right to flaunt
the strange gifts that have given me the most joy
when the night comes on like the pheromone of a firefly
and I hear the unmighty groaning in their rooms to endure.

No trick to this. No elixir, no potion, no Latinate abstraction,
no apprentice, master, or skill, I could be making
straw hats among the enlightened conifers of Japan
on a mountainside where the old stones break into laughter
and the samurai class of the grass wants me to teach it
how to fight without regard to winning or losing
no matter how many times I’m killed unceremoniously
like the Buddha in the way of some fool’s redemption.
And if the king comes to your house, don’t
put out a serving, put out a feast, and move on
empty-handed as a man who’s given it all away
just to spite the keepers at the gate searching your exit.

You can buff a Druid into a gleeman like cut cocaine
and then you can step on it again like a court jester
and if you really want to feel sacrilegiously holy
you can burn him like a martyr at the stake of a cause
that accuses him of going to extremes to avoid the law
and then invite him to a reading to scatter his ashes on the wind.
And then beatify his spirit like a white stag you hit with an arrow
fletched by sparrows with the charisma of crows.
And that’s an end of what was so mysterious about him.
That’s an end of his ambiguous glaises, alphabetic trees
and golden sickles castrating fertility gods so there
was dew on the grass in the morning when the moon
gave birth to a swan in heat before the wheat
could turn from green to gold, and the Fertile Crescent
was fecund with dismemberment and bleeding mistletoe.

Death of a poet. What a small shadow among the gloom.
The eclipse of a lunar pearl in a coalpit.
And the greatness of the perennial mystery
that seeped into his blood like the effluvium
of the dark mother’s afterbirth, merely the cosmic hearsay
of what he hoped it would be, up close and intimately.
And his star, now, a cold furnace, and all the warmth
of his violated human nature, a curious atrocity
of the times that are these times just as readily.
I salute the madman addled by creative chaos
like a spear of light in a storm, like a spiritual warrior
who fell upon his own heart like a hand grenade
to save some ingrate his delinquent day of reckoning,
to temper the karma by rounding out the crucials
with compassion and liberated tolerance
as swiftly as his savage indignation killed
the nude empress of pornographic frogs with a kiss
back into her old life in the nunnery of a neurotic narcissus.

And he looked for the moon in a window of a room
in a brothel of experienced muses who didn’t
beat around the bush when it came time to ovulate.
St. Francis dances in the dust at the crossroads with the Sufis,
talking to the birds like David, and consulting the wolves.
Rasputin gorges on the flesh of the rainbow light body
glowing in a mystical aura of sex and death
like the dark rapture that embraces him
in the circular bow of the angel of infernal revelations.
And his accusers whip his eyes
like bi-valved goose barnacles
flagellating their feather dusters in the corals.
But there are some things that move inevitably like glaciers.

PATRICK WHITE