Sunday, June 16, 2013

ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

Anything goes at three in the morning.
I’m dogpaddling in the salvage of the day
after the sun went down like a shipwreck
with all hands on board. A train whistle
mourns its lonely mile and I’ve known
since I was twenty six, the night is not a reward.
And the heart not a starfish you can easily drown
to keep from shining as if it had
a sense of direction all of its own
even if its just a momentary flashback
of a life you’d forgotten on your way down.

The darkness bruises my solitude.
I bleed like deadly nightshade
and talk to myself and the stars, the lamp posts,
the glassy-eyed windows with smut in their eyes
like the rose of life with a wounded mouth.
Trying to express the silence through the afterlife
of my voice, as if I were the ghost in the machine
of a transfixed medium you could get your bearings by
like a candle at a seance that suddenly goes out.

Or maybe I’m just the smoke of an old demon
who feels more like an exorcism sent into exile
like a scapegoat for things I might have done
if they hadn’t been done to me first by the sanctimonious
to purify a long winter of soot, incense, and snakeoil
like an oilslick contaminated by hypocritical rainbows.
But I mustn’t grow bitter. It’s moonrise
and the windows across the street, dirty
as these I’m looking through, seem sublimely elevated
to be used like a lake or a drop of water
when it isn’t raining, to reflect so much beauty
with a moondog for the iris of a third eye
that’s always urging the mindstream
to take a look for itself to liberate its seeing
from a purple passage in a bad dream that doesn’t end well.

The raccoons and feral cats are giving the dogs
something to bark about as they entangle their hind legs
like Houdini in a labyrinth of chains
to keep from running the deer to death at night.
Strange place, this earth. This starmud
that’s an alloy of blood and passion and mind
trying to second-guess where its presence comes from
as if everything had to be derived from something else
to lay a claim to the mystic specificity of its cosmic origins
and to understand that originality’s most unique feature
is that it shares its characteristics with everything else
so the more a human embodies what he perceives,
in his confusion, his horror, his bliss and sorrow,
that forms don’t appear and disappear for him to believe in,
that their passage isn’t a work of time, but the way
life shapeshifts from one dream figure into the next
without leaving the hands of anyone’s who’s ever
grabbed it by the throat and hasn’t let go
like a snapping turtle that’s just got hold of the moon,
its beak full of the flightfeathers of a waterlily
rising off the lakes of the windowpanes as unconcerned
as Cygnus flying over the tarpaper pigeon coups of the rooftops.


PATRICK WHITE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE

Drifting tonight, a poem in the corner of my eye,
maybe a crumb of sleep from last night’s dream,
the willows have grown up a lot since I last came here
but the stars they fix like flowers in their hair
even the lake can’t rinse out, haven’t changed much.
I seek out this precarious granite ledge
shaped like half an anvil or a stone age bicycle seat
with its thatch of moss and yellow grass
and this little patch of dirt, struggling
to cling to the rock, I’ve come to trust empathically
as if many others sat here before me
and watched the moon belly dancing on the undulant waves.

Abandoned heron’s nests in the boneyard
of marble trees, broken statuary in the moonlight
wading through the wild rice with their skirts
above their white, white knees. I come here
to listen to my solitude like a Tarot deck of constellations,
missing a couple of cards when it was stolen from the Sufis.
A nocturne of fate I’m being very cool about
I sing in dark harmony with the nightbirds
counterpointing the silence with sudden rills of longing
my heart resonates with like the hidden wavelength of sorrow
that it’s almost autumn, getting too late for anyone to come,
except for one firefly shining behind her veils
like a diamond in eclipse, a tattoo on the eyelids
of a black velvet painting of bullfighting rose.

And something deeper, more dangerous, like pike
moving just under the surface like nuclear submarines
under the Arctic ice-caps of circumpolar cataracts,
while night creatures are out hunting each other’s flesh
all around me as if the loss of life and the joy it took
in being a field mouse with a mouthful of seeds
were merely collateral damage in the owl’s eyes
of remarkably no significance at all. Life smells
of carrion in the nest, though we all light incense
to deny it. And try to feel as convincingly as we can
life heals its own absence like a wound in water,
like a mouse squealing in midflight above
the waterlily starmaps that hide the snapping turtles.

Generations have sat here before me
with their heads on the flying buttresses of their knees
to relieve the stress of the dome of their prophetic skulls
on the walls of a cathedral wilderness
pioneered into the empty one-roomed
wooden churches around here where the flies cluster
like spiritual footnotes with no real faith in what they say.
And the pioneers have all been ploughed under
and then exhumed and placed in a less savage cemetery
than the earth without black iron fences and gates
trying to imitate the tree line of a militant event horizon
around the graveside of the black hole we all fall into
when we attribute a meaning to death it doesn’t give to itself.

And life and love follow suit, knowing there’s nothing to risk,
nothing to shed, nothing to reveal, nothing to explain or understand
that isn’t whispered in your own voice into your own ear
so nature could imitate art by deepening the mystery
of the human spirit walking like the stars on its own waters
as if it weren’t a miracle the whole sky
with all its legends of shining doesn’t go out in our tears
and love turn into a black farce of suggestive preconceptions
dancing for our heads, as if we’ll be eating
honey and locusts, dressed in the hides of wild jackasses,
or in this lunar wilderness of shadows and wraiths
wolfskins on despondent shamans with
two heads on their shoulders like snake-eyes
trying to howl like smouldering volcanoes at the moon
with one heart, one mind, igneously alloyed
to the heartache and longing that can suddenly
startle and blossom out of the darkness
like the blue fire of the Pleiades flaring through
the crowns of the trees as if love were a conversation
between two, like a star and the eye it’s shining in,
it only takes one to sing.


PATRICK WHITE