Friday, July 26, 2013

IT ISN'T RESIGNATION SO MUCH AS HALF AN ASSENT

IT ISN’T RESIGNATION SO MUCH AS HALF AN ASSENT

It isn’t resignation so much as half an assent
to the inevitable I know so little about
as I’m becoming it, living it like a lamp in my hand
shining in the dark to illuminate what’s there,
not by reflecting it, but creating it on the fly.

My eyes are bubbles on the mindstream.
The jewels of an animal in the shadows of the woods.
The star makes the eye it wants me to see it with.
Not just retinally with my iris like a moondog,
but interiorly in the heart of my imagination
where sight is a kind of love, and seeing
is dusty with stars clinging to the windows
the mercy of the rain cleans off when it’s time
to let the world see me anew as the light turns around
to look at me from the inside out, not two, not two, not two.

Music from the cover band across the street.
Apocalyptic hilarity of drunken ordinariness
extraordinarily trying to sing along to the lyrics
of the chantreuse who makes them feel special
about having everything in common with everyone else.
We can sing about pain. We can sing about joy.
And by the way we cry and laugh, know what we mean.

An apartment away, a man is endearing himself
to his own solitude without any separation in the tone
of the farewell he’s preparing, and nothing perennial
about the sacred syllables of that imaginary first hello.
He watches people’s voices rise like incense into the night air,
mystic paths of smoke disappearing down a road
into the intimate distances that deepen the darkness within
with the afterglow of humanity lingering among the half-cut stars.


PATRICK WHITE

O, AN OASIS IN A TARPIT

O, AN OASIS IN A TARPIT

O, an oasis in a tarpit when being alive
is more than enough, and happiness doesn’t scare me
half as much as it used to. It’s only an eyelid,
an opening and closing of doors, a Cepheid variable,
the blinking of the moon, blue chicory
among the stinging nettles, not the horrific beatitude
it used to seem when I was too young---
When was that? Yesterday?---to let it come
and go. A waterlily of joy, it blossoms among the stars
but its white fire is rooted in the lowest detritus
of the swamp that lives on its own perishing.

Happiness isn’t a reason to live. It’s living
beyond reason, unreasonably. Life without a buffer zone
when you can walk skinless in the moonlight
like a smooth stone in a medicine-bag of stars
that sends you skipping out over their reflections
in a lake without a name as deep as the mystery of life
and then you sink as if you’d been looking Medusa
in the third eye. And what are you, then, if not
a lifeboat of a fish swimming through the nightsky
of a bejewelled underworld resonant with soft laments?

I feel the effervescence of the Pleiades
carbonating the waters of my life. A great blue heron
flaps off like the headlines of yesterday’s newspaper,
or the first draft of another poem inspired by the abyss,
and I’m not unmindful of the sorrows of the world,
and that this is recess, a sparkle in the eye of eternity,
the exuberance of a boy on a dolphin in a great night sea
of perilous awareness, not lightyears of bliss
shed by a firefly that came looking for me in the dark.
I haven’t been rescued from anything. The depths
and the surface are one for the moment,
the highest and the lowest, the silly and sublime.

A dragon. A plumed serpent with a circumpolar outlook
a peacock of a dinosaur flaunting its boas
like a Fauvist painting of sex in the eyes of love and death.
A ghost dance, of sorts, where my beginnings
partner with my ends and together they make
one bird, one candle in a cowled plumage of flame
that took a vow of poverty but has the flightfeathers
of an heretical phoenix to spare just the same.

The nighthawk is riding its own thermals, the owl
isn’t encumbered by its wisdom. I’m free inside.
All the aviaries are empty and I’ve got an open door policy
on my voice-box. The chimney’s mellifluous
with bluebirds in the morning, and by nightfall
even the most feeble sparks of insight are exalted
by the constellations of the Eagle and the Swan.
No companion but my solitude is pleased with itself.
Everything I see and hear, down to the smallest
pale-green frog chirping in the cattails, silvered
in moonlight and water as the black snake tastes it
like a ripe strawberry on the warm, summer air,
is ancestor, bloodline, wavelength woven into
a flying carpet of picture-music I’m riding
like the multiversal destiny of my membranous mindstream
and because I love starmaps and leaves, I’m riffing off
the leit motifs of the stars, I’m writing poems in the glyphs
of the scars like birthmarks on the bodies of good guitars.


PATRICK WHITE