Thursday, July 18, 2013

IN A DRASTIC TOWN WHERE THE WATERWHEELS HAD STOPPED

IN A DRASTIC TOWN WHERE THE WATERWHEELS HAD STOPPED

In a drastic town where the waterwheels had stopped,
and the swallows sorted mail in the fieldstone niches
of a dry birth canal, I gave my heart a name,
The Burning Apple, The Unfeathered Snake,
because there was no other bridge to reach out to
and I didn’t drink, my pulse the footfall
of a defeated bell of a man climbing the stairs
to an attic apartment I didn’t trust enough
to ask him what he thought about in there
or was it all mirrors lying in state for him
to undertake their burial like Horace’s country villa.

Three hundred rooms. Roman modesty. Imagine
the stars in your eyes you’d have to short change
like a conversation you’re really not involved in
to resilver the creaking floorboards of your life
the worn rungs of your bones, in moonlight
on the voices of the nightingales and pastoral pillars of that.

From one aside to the next, a gateway to nowhere
and then a fence, the people live as they can,
enslaved by their own need to own something
they can die in the service of like a graveyard
in the greater scheme of events. I sat at an open window
in the cool of the morning’s moodring and admired how much
the saplings had flourished into sprawling trees
that would soon be initiated into an unkempt ceremony
of township chainsaws that would keep them
from overreaching the powerlines outside the drugstore.

OutZenning my Buddhist inclinations, I killed
a mosquito that mistook me for a bloodbank all night
on the shadow of the wire screen like a partial eclipse,
thinking that nips the foodchain in the bud. I’m either
a penumbral tyrant, or darker yet, a great liberator
as I watched the lights come on in the earliest restaurant
to greet the dawn, as willowy waitresses young
as wet hair, roused themselves like dew
that’s been crying all night in a dream of humid stars
to the jarring nightmare of the sun at the door of their jobs.

Me and the cat, with no tribal rights to the window,
chattering staccato under her breath like a squirrel to constrain
the tension of wanting to kill the unattainable pigeons,
their barrel rolls and flybys, without giving herself away
like a secret lying in wait, a trigger of fate, disciplined
as a straight razor in free flight, as I numbly ruminated
on murdering worlds within worlds out of necessity and spite,
wondering if the ghosts of the mad see everything differently
when they’ve been clarified enough by death, not
to get caught in the light of their imageless exactitudes
or if life stays true to its word in the tombs of their dead metaphors.


PATRICK WHITE

SITTING IN THE DARK WAITING FOR A LIFE

SITTING IN THE DARK WAITING FOR A LIFE

Sitting in the dark waiting for a life
to catch up to him that’s never going to come.
The future already in his wake, his shadow late,
the content there, but the timing off,
a sundial at night, a waterlily in winter,
the light of that one lonely star above
the tarpaper roof of the laundramat
shining for all its worth like a thing of the past
trying to shed a light on now as if memory
were just a seance a ghost books into early.

He had his ferocious reasons for living once
but they got carried away like wallflowers
by the picture-music of his calling
and began to dance for themselves.
And it’s still the remote hope of a man
who has tasted love even if he eats his heart out
like a sacrifice to himself on the altar
of a false god somehow everybody will be nourished.
That not everything is worthless
he’s wasted his life upon going mad
like a crack in the windowless clarity
of remaining stark, raving sane. He got out
of the cosmic egg. He sees how vast the universe is
as he journeys the length of his wingspan
from one event horizon to the next.
You can tell by the firepits of spent emotions
on the moon, hic erant dracones, dragons were here
and they’ll be back like bracken in the urns of their ashes.

Eventually even the light resigns itself
to the shadows it casts like death masks
over the dreamscapes that perish in him
like eyelids that have seeded the wind
with everything there was to see in life
that took root in his starmud like fire and earth.
Like the faces of people he attempted to love
that always come to him this time of night
like the priority of a labour he failed at
or they him, though it doesn’t matter anymore.

He can smell the vague fragrance of distance
in their hair, and when they look at him now
as a few occasionally do, surprised he’s still here
as if their eyes continued to share the astounding secret
of who they were then to each other, he remembers
stray moments of intimacy when the stars first blossomed
and love was a modest entrance they made into the dark.
How soon the road wearies of those
who don’t walk it as if there were no end in sight
of how far they could go if they only realized
the going itself is as predestined as it gets.

Sad, yes, but no regrets, even if his persona
has asked him to say that as if it weren’t
just another mask he’s talking through
thousands of lightyears alone from home,
exploring his devotion to the anguish of culpable stars.


PATRICK WHITE