Friday, July 19, 2013

HOMOGENOUS GREY WITH VIOLET TOWERS OF DELPHINIUMS

HOMOGENOUS GREY WITH VIOLET TOWERS OF DELPHINIUMS

Homogenous grey with violet towers of delphiniums
so intensely purple, they’re an imperium unto themselves
in a twilight zone between night and the dawn,
a mystic state of blood when the eyes in your heart
climb down from their firetowers like stars, vacate
their watch without leave weary of being on the lookout
for two bullets to the back of your head as if
it were better all were lost than to proceed by rote
at someone else’s peril. If only we could bleed
like the masterpiece of these waiting for our eyes
to catch up to the sleeping visionary within us all.

Would we see our dreams dying in the vastness
like the fragrance of flowers that exhaled themselves
like forbidden passions in a garden of moonlight and lemons
as if every moment of life were an encounter
with what’s most strange and mystifying about us
as the cowled shadow of the figure by the blind sundial
turns as if to ask at last, can you see me now? Am I not
more beautiful than anything your imagination
was afraid to meet for fear of falling in love irreparably?

Would the seed build the rafters of a new treehouse for us all
by impregnating the earth with more intimate metaphors
that embrace their own perishing like an enduring love affair
with what remains most daringly inconceivable about us?

Easy enough to explain, but whoever understands it,
inherits a dynastic empire of afterlives in a silence
so profound no one without the bloodseal of the delphiniums
in their heart has attempted it yet as a way
of inhabiting the unattainable by reaching out
like the stars in a spearhead of flowers
to the aimless distances in a passing stranger’s eyes.
The mercy’s in the blooming and the planets
gather around like the fruits of why it should be so.
The mindstream divines the way of water as it flows.
And what could the light that unites what’s most remote
from us to the aniconic images of love that bind us
to one another like delphiniums and gardeners
to the hidden suns of the seeds in the starmud
of our shining but inspiration, that wounded joy
made manifest in the eyes of the way we express ourselves
when we encounter love as if it were never meant to happen
like the royal house of the delphiniums in inexplicable rapture
they can trace their bloodlines back to the stars
as each of us, enthroned like the king and queen,
the prince and the pauper, the singer and the thief,
the sage and the fool, for a day and a night of love, ours?


PATRICK WHITE

EVEN IN THE DIRT, THE FRANGIBLE SHINING

EVEN IN THE DIRT, THE FRANGIBLE SHINING

Even in the dirt, the frangible shining,
the radiant silt, the lumens and the pollen
of starmud mirrors, whole galaxies in the dust
of an enlightened road going nowhere
with me on it, past the beaverpond
the road superintendent’s daughter
used to grow dope by she and the deer
and the rabbits ate, and the moon, you
couldn’t evade believing it, bloomed
like a waterlily on a lake with a no trespassing sign
as if you weren’t allowed to see Diana bathing
or how she renewed her mismanaged virginity.

No alibi in the mouth of anyone’s innocence,
out here in the woods people talk
along parallel partylines that never meet
even in the aerial distance of long distance calls
like hermit thrushes in the hills at night
but they don’t insult each other by asking
for each other’s forgiveness as if they couldn’t
manage that for themselves. Blood of the lamb
on the glacial rocks of the coydogs and doyotes.
Shepherds don’t last too long without wolf’s clothing.
Three bush cords of crosses in the swamp
make a cubic Kaaba of heartwood with
cracked tree rings like the haloes of wet springs
and now they’re ready for the fire and after that
once the mosquitoes have thawed out of their comas
beside the stove where the cats are laid out,
I’ve seen it for myself, Orion in the ashes and sackcloth
of late February when the ice age begins to melt
that gouged the eyes of the lakes out
so however deeply you looked into them,
there was nothing but tears in a mirror
that would put most telescopes to shame.

I’m alone on this road, and that’s ok too,
with the seven ghosts of the motorists it’s killed
for taking it for granted like wild curves
that ended in granite wailing walls where the swallows
tuck sacred notes of overly sincere grafitti spraybombs
into the caesuras of life that gape in amazement
at how easily death can overwhelm the feelings
of local highschools with a labyrinth
of cosmic sorrows they’ll wander in forever
like the waves on Wolf Lake where their friends died.

And don’t mistake me. I don’t mean to make light of this.
I was there. The darkness befell us all.
Like an abandoned snake house on a hill
in a clearing of the abyss nobody’s been near for years.

No end of the world out here, where nature’s
got its own sense of timing, and there’s more love
in the autumn than there is in the spring
when even the most vital pathways through life
are impassably disenchanting to the locals
who gravel and grade them like glaciers
the visionary potholes in the prophetic skulls of the lakes.

I’ll stay out here for the night and adjust to the darkness
like a berry of blood the mosquitoes can help themselves to
like a bloodbank while I sketch the starmaps
in the eyes of the lake for my solitude to follow
when it’s got a mind to look for itself
like the spaced out spiritual life of someone
who’s indelibly lost in the world like a poet
in a lighthouse of words he never heeds the warning of
to enter the dangerous silence of never listening to himself
to hear what the fireflies are whispering to the stars
about all the secrets I’ve been keeping from myself for lightyears.


PATRICK WHITE