Saturday, May 11, 2013

SERIOUS AS A BELL, DEEP AS A HOUSEWELL, I WAS YOUNG


SERIOUS AS A BELL, DEEP AS A HOUSEWELL, I WAS YOUNG

Serious as a bell, deep as a housewell, I was young,
too big for my skull, tight as a nut in my shell
with the sweetmeat of the moon, immense
among the stars, intense, angry, almost scary,
seething with ambitions I took for granted,
like discipline and talent, love I’d be fulfilled by one day.
Blue fire didn’t shoot out of my eyes like a sky dragon,
but I was born in a low place and I liked to put wings
on the snakes I could relate to, scorned as they and I were,
I answered my detractors with brilliant oxymorons
that baffled them into thinking I was mad. Nine in the fifth place.

Of course, I was. Gone, gone, gone, altogether
gone beyond the history of scars that was my childhood,
though I was too experienced at the time to remember
what innocence was and how it doesn’t always
make you vulnerable when you’re nine in a garbage can
where they throw people like body parts and rank orchids
that didn’t get invited to the dance because
they never learned to step on anyone else’s toes
but their own and those immediately closest to them,

crushed hearts like strawberries someone heeled into the dirt,
cigarette butts, left to rot among the black rosaries of the ants
from the enterprising world that carried them away
piecemeal as if they cared, and that was the best
they could hope for. Baby never got a new pair of shoes
and the second hand ones never quite fit
like a yoke of oxen coupled to your feet as they grew
into the tumuli of bunions like moonrises on your toes.

You wanted to learn to walk, you had to get up on your own.
You wanted to learn to see you had to know
what you had to close your eyes to. I could read
books and faces, and which of the housewives
with rollers in their hair, hanging up the laundry
with clothes-pegs in their teeth, hands raw with bleach
and four kids in the yard like manic laughing gas and blasting caps
would be washing her face in the bitter tears of her hands
tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow that never came
like a husband home from the pulp mill who wasn’t drunk
with a paycheque in his hand that wasn’t clenched in a fist
for having to return to her, the kids, the dismal job
that underrated him two rungs under the burning ladder
he tried to climb out of the cesspool on like a spider
fighting for its life in the death trap of a toilet bowl
he flushed like the last word he had to say about himself.

I could read the stars. I could read danger leaning
in a doorway like a social worker, a Sunday school teacher,
a truant officer for delinquent offenders, an ex-con
out on a weekend pass who thought my mother
had been waiting for him all her life in isolation.
Egypt and Mesopotamia amazed me with the mystery
of all those lives I could wonder my way into
like the mirages of time, planets I’d never live
to walk on to see how different and strange
everything could be beyond the windows
of my boarded-up bedroom to keep the ghouls
and the pervs and the thieves out. Shadows
on the other side of the curtains that made me lie
very, very still under the covers hoping they
didn’t hear me breathing so I wouldn’t be called upon
to be more afraid of being afraid again than I was brave.

PATRICK WHITE

LOST AND BROKEN, LONELY HOUR OF THE NIGHT


LOST AND BROKEN, LONELY HOUR OF THE NIGHT

Lost and broken, lonely hour of the night. Wounded,
but it doesn’t matter by what anymore.
Intimate estrangement with the sleeping town,
don’t know whether I’m a streetlamp or a window,
but it’s all right, all right for the moment.
Enticingly sweet, almost peace, when
I remember my exile isn’t dishonest
and how far I had to come to believe in my solitude.
Hard not to betray your imagination sometimes
by resenting what you had to lose to stay true to it.

I don’t. There’s a soft beauty like an autumn night,
though it’s spring, in the voice of the ghost
of the train whistle howling by and a distance
even space can’t conceive of that comes close
to breaking my heart like the rain acquainted through tears
overflowing with the sorrows of too many eyes
to care whether it’s a freshly dug grave
or a garden it falls upon. Things we attribute
our mortality to bloom and perish like the new moon
I can’t see through the clouds tonight, but trust is there.

This is the rose of dark abundance. This is the thorn
of bright vacancy. If I saw a star right now
I’d think it’s light were a mode of longing
for something beyond love and death it doesn’t
even know about on the neither side of its shining.
Maybe it wants to whisper something into the ears
on the towers of Pleiadic larkspur that will change their lives.
Maybe it’s just tilting at a galactic windmill
that keeps quixotically turning and turning
over and over again in its heart like a gust of time
blowing on a prayer wheel as fixed as a sundial
following its own shadow like a direction to the light.

Or maybe in some kind of indeterminate way
we’re both wavelengths in synch trying
to sprout wings for the immensities ahead,
fireflies and dragons alike, staring into the darkness,
hoping to open the eyes of wildflowers on a hillside
that have reclaimed the far fields no one’s ploughed under for lightyears,
me, for a bit of blue sky that’s never witnessed a false dawn,
and it, for a loveletter that finally wrote back
though there was nothing but solitude and silence inside,
and the fragrance of burning doves in the emptiness
that take shelter under the eaves of this house of life
that keeps rising out of its own ashes at the faint sound
of the half-familiar song of a sacred syllable
we derived an inalienable solace from once as if
the only way to respond to pain were, indelibly,
with flowers, waterlilies and wild irises down by the river,
blooming in the urns of our childhood like pyres in the rain.

PATRICK WHITE