Sunday, May 12, 2013

KISSES INSTEAD OF SCARS IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT


KISSES INSTEAD OF SCARS IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT

Kisses instead of scars if you can manage it.
Love, not a science. Still an art. Though a dying one.
The discipline of staying a constant beginner.
As if the morning glory had never felt the light before.
You want to love or be loved? Make up your heart.
But you want to sword dance with queen cobras in heat
like a lapwing in a snake pit, two egg-layers
at opposite ends of the same extreme, you better not
step on anyone’s toes, and if you do, hope
the wing you favoured with a false wound
like a collapsed bridge you lay down like a joker
to trump your Tarot pack, is as long as the other
royal flush you neglected to play like a winning hand.
Human, you might be the measure of all things,
but believe me when I tell you, love’s got a bigger wingspan
than Cygnus and Aquila in the Summer Triangle have light-years
to get a fix on the wing tips of their feathers by parallax.

Love with class if you want to make something elegant
of your absurdity, diamonds of your dirt, if you want to
water flowers with your tears without salting the seed bed.
If you want to steal a little fire from the mystery
to enlighten your nightmare, if you want to be the star
that everyone points to in your lover’s eye,
don’t enter it like a dirty needle of light washed up on a beach,
you keep overdosing on like a starmap with a bad addiction.
Love is a retroactive prediction from the past come true at last.
Even after dismemberment, love is Orphic, a prophetic skull
bobbing like an apple all the way to Mytilene from Thrace,
that can still sing the dead back up out of hell
until they realize the light of love’s too strong
for the eyes of gibbering shades and turn around
as if they’d come too far down the wrong road.

As a working stiff, love is kind, generous, trustworthy, loyal,
like the smell of heartwood after a carpenter has built
his own sturdy cross. Not acrid oak, but terebinth.
As a thaumaturge, love works miracles with silver herbs
cool as moonlight laying its feathers on the sacred pools
you return to like a battered salmon or a sword in tribute
to give back in gratitude what was given to you.
O, yes, you can be a nice guy or an agreeable woman
for a moment, and bask in the whole wheat sunshine
of a promising harvest, but love is the blue,
the second full moon in October and it looks down
on what’s been threshed to see what you’ve left for the birds
and if you ever get so drunk in your delirium
you went dancing with the scarecrows as if you
were all martyred by the same cause like a prelude
of watchdogs to the white nights of the living dead.
Love’s a celebrant high on the bliss of poppy wine
but it doesn’t turn the dancing floors of the starfields
into a bride catalogue for impoverished wallflowers.
Love’s got the eyes of a snake, the voice of a bird
and the wings of a vampiric bat in an unpredictable eclipse.
And when love mystically sublimates its appetites
like black ice into more beatific ionospheres of solar flaring,
the poetry goes aurorally absurd, but nobody cares
because everybody’s more awed by the picture-music
of the rippling veils than they are by the face behind them.

You make love safe. You take the danger out of it,
you defang the lightning storm, you brainwash
the theta waves of the turbulent night sea
where the soul journeys alone, into saying aum
every time there’s a breathless squall of stars in the southwest,
though you might think in your lustreless way
you’re throwing sacred holy oil on troubled waters
you’re just another oil slick running a nunnery of pearls.
You want your honey without a stinger. You want
your rose without a thorn. A one-eyed oxymoron.
I’ve made it a counter-intuitive point of survival
most of my occult romantic afterlife
to never fall in love with a woman until I’m absolutely certain
it’s well within her power to kill me outright
without a word of warning. But she abstains
and in that moment of hesitation you can live
three full lifespans on the cutting edge of a black hole
without a fear of lights or vertiginous heights.
You can ride the helical stairwells of your mutual d.n.a.
like the parallel bannisters of two hawks wheeling
synchronously on the twisted ladder
of their thermophilic passions for the highs and lows of love.

When did Icarus ever fly too close to the sun
with a parachute or a safety net? What fool
shot out of a cannon like a fly into a spider web
doesn’t expect to get entangled in the details
of hedging his bets instead of taking the fall on his chin.
If you fall in love, and you’re not a clown,
or someone who bumbled over the cliff by accident,
be prepared to fall deeper than any place
your death has ever descended into before, and darker,
and more intense than the petty sentiments
of people dropping stones in wishing wells
to fathom the abyss by staring into the eyes of a telescope.

PATRICK WHITE

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