Friday, June 21, 2013

I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I could look at it with sweeter eyes.
The way boys and cowards romanticize war.
I could emphasize the honeysuckle and fireflies.
I could say that’s not a noose in my hand, it’s an ankh.
I could run an extortion racket of jukebox mirrors
and have them placed in all the best cafes
so when you put a quarter moon in
they reflect anything you ask them to.
You’ve got a beautiful face. Man
are you smart. Yes, you’re the son of Zeus
and I’m the oracle of Amun at Siwa.

And every occasion I can with integrity
I try to praise the larkspur.
I’m exhilarated by the waterlilies
that have almost come to mean
as much to me as the stars on a summer night.
I rejoice in extraordinarily ordinary events
between people, I don’t expect to experience again
the way he walks beside her like a green crutch
coming into bloom and leafing like a loveletter
trying to be a strong tree she can lean on,
and so much is so crucial to a blessed few
or a father walking down the street,
listening to his daughter as if she were the Buddha
or middle C and he had to keep his eighty-eights straight.

Born a cellular optimist or too stupid to be a cynic,
though there are days I live like a dog,
and I know that denying this suggestive reality
is to summon its affirmation as if
something in the context of life heard you
and though you’re never certain, out to prove you wrong.
And likewise endorsing it, invites its denial.
This is the middle extreme and it should be lived
immensely with intensity like a Sufi gyroscope
in dynamic equilibrium with your wingspan
whether you’re homing to a sacred grove for the night
and your heart is a bell of shadows
or you’re one of the good sugars of life
fulfilled by the dawn where all the birds
sound like one harmony, but if you listen a little harder,
they’re all out of tune with each other,
this one a bass run and that an arpeggio
on a water flute that can hold a note like a drop of dew
on the tongue of a blade of stargrass when it wants to.
When the long wavelengths of its tears
aren’t breaking ashore like a menagerie of glass horses.

My mystic guestimate is. In the dark beyond
the blazing memes that have yet to light a candle to the stars,
love silvers the harvest of the heart in moonlight
and comes by day with a golden scythe to thresh it,
and an understanding that puts its trust in the future of life
like a windfall of apples swarmed by wasps like a train
that had jumped its tracks, or dozens of whales
were beached overnight and crushed their lungs
under their own weight, though that wasn’t as buoyant
as the previous metaphor, nevertheless it’s not
an injudicious verisimilitude for what I’m getting at.

If your passion for anything is ferocious enough
sooner or later you’re going to meet a nemetic dragon
though I’m sure that’s just a dream cloak
for projecting my anxieties onto a blaze
of cold-blooded reptiles with inflammable wings,
and you’re going to look deeply into the fangs of its eyes
as if you had to go through this ordeal
to suffer for what you love to prove you’re real.
Today I lived like one long mouthless scream.
I could have kicked stars in someone’s face.

Too much of a black farce to be the credible dream
of the air corridor I’m trying to sustain
like a black hole to the other side of the hourglass
that’s timing all this like a heartbeat of picture-music.
Now I’m writing poetry beside an aquarium
at two in the morning with three goldfish
hovering in their sleep beside me like hummingbirds
gone back to the sea as we all do eventually.
And it feels good to see the likeness in disparate things
and bring them together like the moon on the mindstream,
maple fire dancing to the rhythm of northern water,
and though it’s impossible to assess the worth
of what I’m doing as a poet in the twenty-first century
I can feel the compassion of a crazy wisdom
in every feather of light that falls to earth like Icarus.


PATRICK WHITE

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

Jupiter gone from the window. Homage
to the ambiguously forgotten moments of light
that shine down upon the earth awhile
whether anyone’s watching this time of night
or not, intimate fireflies of the terrible largesse
of the diminished gods that once dwarfed our childhoods
in the shadows of the shepherd moons they cast
like an abacus of wandering stars. Thaumaturgic
strangers at the gates of our youthful wonder
as we cried ourselves to sleep at night because
we were born too early to walk on another planet
surrealistically pictured in the collectible spacescapes
of the bubble gum cards we swapped like Jupiter for Mars.

Nothing more hurtful than the unrequited love affairs
that ached with longing at the city limits of our starfields.
Postcards from the edge of nowhere left unsigned.
The first betrayal of astonishment on the thresholds of time.
A curse of distances that left us spell bound
by an abyss of inconceivable mysteries illuminating
the ancient texts of our estranged starmud homesick
to return to the original fire wombs of our shining
instead of being marooned here burning our ships
on the beach of a circumnavigable island
as if we could do nothing but under-reach ourselves.

Lightyears ago before I discovered thought was faster
in the gaping interstellar spaces of my own mind than light
and sight was a kind of love that touched the heart of things
and brought them infinitely nearer than a mirror or a lens.
That what I really longed for from the intangible brilliance
of their emphatic absence in my life was to
humanize the unknown with the evanescent metaphors
that bridged the gaps between our departures and arrivals
like analeptic waterclocks thawing the tear ducts
of cold eternities eager to learn as much as they could
from the brevity of our unbearable passage through
the recurrent perishing of our lives and unborn deaths.

No lack of midnight specials flashing in the dark,
I grew up looking down the long Buntline barrels
of alta-azimuth refractors with small spotting scopes
aiming at things impossible to hit. No collateral damage
from ricochets, except for the occasional planet or star
through the heart, and the childhood fever
of the wounded wonder of it all lodged there forever.

Despite what the Cyclopean optimists insist
with their big third eyes orbiting like automated proxies
for their spiritual lives in a brutally cold, space
you have to look into the dark if you want to see the stars.

I looked up at them out of the immensity of my solitude
and they looked deeply back out of their abyss into me
and once our eyes met and mingled like wary animals
in the woods at night, out of the corner of a window,
fireflies hair-braided into the willows, in the cuffs of a dream,
in the nebular chandeliers of a lover’s eyes moist
with the Pleiades, none of us have been the same ever since
like mini nirvanic flashbacks from the eternal sixties.
Light upon light, the way of gods and humans in the world,
and well beyond, o so much deeper into the dark
where seeing leaves our eyes behind, and it’s not
the insights that are revealed along the roadsides
of the starmaps we’ve memorized like wildflowers
that our divining aspires to, not the lamps
of the nightwatchmen with master keys to secure
the doors of perception our childhoods walked through,
light through the black holes and pupils of our eyes
and telescopes out into the open of our expanding minds
and their multi-tasking worlds, a seance of friendly faces
at the end of a tunnel of light, but to be enlightened
by the shining of the secrets that leave you in the dark,
burning in the window on the grave yard shift
long after Jupiter has set in the west over the Lanark hills.


PATRICK WHITE