Tuesday, June 18, 2013

DON'T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT I HAVE ENDURED

DON’T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT I HAVE ENDURED

Don’t think I owed it to myself, but I have endured.
Scarred and broken and as full of escarpments
some bad mason laid in like a Cubist stairwell
in the Canadian Shield. Experience the sum
of all my failures, it’s a strange book to quote from.
I tell people not to listen to anything but their own hearts,
but they take that as a sign of creative sincerity
and continue to listen out of the corners of their lives,
defying my unmastery by paying stricter attention.
You’d think someone who had lived sixty four years the hard way
like a wild mountain goat on a high, noble path
the rest of the herd doesn’t take much anymore
as they did when the more siderealized shepherds
used to drive them to the Zen pastures of the moon,
would have his act down pat by now.

Still got a few gamma ray bursts of demonic energy
left in me yet, a black revolver of comets left in the clip
to take a few more pot shots on a drive by at the sun just for fun
as it’s going down like a mailbox at the side of the road
with a waning rooster painted on it like a fire hydrant.
You can spend your whole life as preparation
for a moment that never comes. Some people
don’t want to catch up to their star.
They just want to follow it as far as they can go.
They want to explore the offroad mysteries along the way.
Some ghosts radiate like well known constellations
and others roses in the dark that are just as happy to emanate.

Not in the habit of judging the ashes of others
by their constellations or their urns,
I’ve had more of a precessional inclination
to scatter them like seagulls on the wind
just to watch them hover motionless over a precipice,
each fixed in space like a mobile of sheet music
or the paradigmatic silence of a symphony
living the moment like a riff in the heart of time.
Wherever I’ve gone I’ve tried to leave signs
of where I’d been as delusory clues for those
sleeping walking in their delusional lostness,
roomy, lunar waterpalaces of the mind to move into
with more infinitely spacious windows
than there are condemned houses
in the slums of the usual zodiac of clockwork origins.

Not infrequently I can see time in a better light
than it deserves, and I like people that have been
sand blasted in the tide like a piece of broken glass
that washed up on the beach without losing its translucency.
An alumnus of the underground schools
for the occult science of new moons,
every moment of my life since
I’ve been the master apprentice of my own dark beginnings.
The serpent fire at the base of my spine woke up
like a fire alarm in the hallway of a burning house
shrieking for life at the window, and my vertebrae,
playing by ear, the silver-tongued flute,
and the picture-music within me, the snake-charmer,
swaying like a river reed going with the flow
to keep me on the same wavelength as lightning
looking for a place to strike, intrigued and alive.

It’s the arrogance of consciousness to think
it’s anymore than an eddy in the mindstream
that’s got intimate connections with the greater sea of awareness
it’s heading toward like a maple leaf with a flightplan
that’s got nothing to do with how things fall out.
The world turns and things are relegated
to stolen milk cartons like old albums weaned
from the nippled turn tables of a breast implant.
The past is a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces
keep changing shape like the fossils of a man
who isn’t comfortable in his death bed.

Over the course of time this vale of tears
slowly evaporates spiritually into the heat
like heart-shaped morning glory leaves
steaming into the dawn
like ghosts that had to get back to their graves,
arising off the lake like a mass exorcism,
or the third eye of the sun that shines at midnight
from the bottom up on the roots of the earth
as if it were trying to teach blind, star-nosed moles
to see the stars burning in the day
from the bottom of a dry housewell
that echoes like a firefly in the spider mount
of a hollow telescope listening to the cosmic hiss
of a message it’s waiting to receive
that’s already been delivered
like a star that’s strong and true,
but apocalyptically behind the times
as if one person’s past were another person’s present
and past and future and present
were all living co-terminously in the moment
like the triune identity of time looking three ways,
and probably more if you were take its lifemask off,
simultaneously, so when the wind blows
through my musical skull in this celestial desert of stars
because I listen attentively to the lyrics
like a nightbird waiting for an answer
to its amorous inquiry, I know I’m not
singing out of my ears just to overhear myself talk.
My world’s been complete since the Big Bang
and everything after, the prophetic echo
of a future memory of cosmic events
that happened without me billions of light years ago.


PATRICK WHITE

LIGHTYEARS AWAY FROM YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES

LIGHTYEARS AWAY FROM YOUR GREEN GREEN EYES

Lightyears away from your green, green eyes
in this labyrinth of black holes and cul de sacs
where the entrances to love are as inescapable
as the exits, and still, legends of the inconceivable,
unlost, unfound as I am, how could I have imagined
time and distance would not diminish the intensity
of your power to make the dark bloom within me
like a rumour of flowers on a previously
uninhabitable planet that keeps jumping orbitals
to release this ghost of a photon like an enlightened memory
of the interlude we were to one another once,
when all you had to do was glance at me
with that ferocity of intent to live life immensely
and I could hear my dragons singing in your flames
like heretics in the bliss of a revelation they never denied.

The myths of origin we attribute to the light
may lie over the course of time to protect the truth
like a passport that identifies the thresholds we crossed
like burning bridges to get to the other side of nowhere
real fast as we swore allegiance to our homelessness,
but the constellations we translated each other into
were the conflagrations of real dragons born
of the fictions of fireflies. Root-fires in our starmud.
The truce we both made with the warriors
of our solitude that ate our hearts like wild strawberries
if we ever did lose it for awhile like a holy war
that left Jerusalem undefended. I always loved
the metal in your spirit like an alloy of water and light
and the darkness of the ore they were embodied in
as I stood there beside you like the urn of a lighthouse
looking at the stars at the beginning of the Bronze Age
over the expansive starfields of the wine-dark night sea
as if all journeys had been woven on the loom of the moon
into the aniconic wavelengths of the flying carpet
we were riding on like serpentine picture music
over the precipitous event horizons of albino worlds to come
where blazing is the blindness and if you want
to see each other in the dark as we did you have to
blow the candles out like the masts of white canes
on a liferaft without a star to guide them.

You overwhelmed me like the eclipse of a hurricane rose
as I fell on your thorns, the crescents of your lunar moods,
and the antidotes in their fangs repeatedly like a junkie
on the white nights of a Saturnalian paradise
that shone like the sun at midnight on the winter solstice.
Even the shadow of your absence was a lost eyelash
brighter than this road of ghosts on a summer night
thriving with life I’ve wandered down alone ever since
the phoenix was fledged like the flightfeathers of the sumac
in the fall and it was time to abandon the nests
we laid upon each other’s heads like laurels and crowns going down
like Corona Borealis shedding its flames like the leaves
of the abandoned birch groves it’s still a delight to remember
once burned like a green dragon in the saline taste of your tears.

The black arts people practice upon each other’s hearts
in a shallow time shore-hugging their passions
like the eyes greater tides left in their wake might long
for love to sweep them away in the undertow of their dreams,
but at the deep end of the pool you knew how to hunger
like fire for the waters of life you wanted to dance upon
like the graves of your enemies where the skull and crossbones
marks the spot where you buried them at sea with hasty honours
from the flashing sabres of your laughter as they went overboard
like the moon in the way they fell for you on their own swords.

Imp of my spirit, water-sylph, rogue star and demon,
there aren’t enough tree rings in my heartwood
or skulls on the abacus of my calendars and rosaries
to count the times I stopped for eras along the way
and wondered what rivers you walked beside on your own
as if your tears were solely reserved for the stars
like broken mirrors and intergalactic chandeliers
that fell like a glass blown ice storm thawing into rain.

It’s not my place anymore to say much to you,
but I saturate the space around you with millions of eyes
that run like sacred syllables along my tongue
like a blade of stargrass on the cutting edge of love
that’s mastered the silence like a foreign language
only the two of us could ever understand. And I know well
the darkness within you that is deeper than the watersheds
of night, but even for a moment of insight
if I could shine for you one more time like a star
through the distant veils of your treeline, even
as it descends like Vega into the Orphic darkness
of its renewal, black Isis, Queen of Heaven,
who keeps the sailors from drowning who wear
the prophylactic of your sidereal tattoo
on the left palm of their hand like a lonely constellation
of one, what could I possibly say at this remove
to indelibly impress you with the staying power
of the furious tenderness of love except to thank you
for not blunting the sword on the stone you drew it from?


PATRICK WHITE