Tuesday, July 30, 2013

NOT LOOKING FOR WORDS TO UNSAY

NOT LOOKING FOR WORDS TO UNSAY

Not looking for words to unsay
the sorrows and horrors of life.
The heart’s not always a bell.
Ultimate eloquence to let things
speak for themselves. Every solitude
adds a petal to paradise, a flame to hell.

A seance of willows glowing
like grey-green ghosts in the moonlight
as if they had bedsheets over their heads,
every one, a maid of the mist
behind a hanging garden of waterfalls,
gardenias of late summer stars in their hair.

Friends dead, lovers gone, children
grown and flown like waterbirds,
beauty and bliss, the happier shadows
of despair washing old selves off
in the abyss like the slow tears
of a window in the rain, a Burgess Shale
of encyclopedic pain, rising like Atlantis
from the alpha of the bottom to the omega
of an ark run aground on a mountain top.

Fossilized blood seals of ancient oceans
in the wild roses, the heart stands signatory
to a truce with time. The mind witnesses
its act of perishing like sunset in an apple
about to fall, an astronomical event
of absurd and insignificant proportions.
One bite for Eve. One bite for Snow White
in a coma still waiting for a kiss
to wake her up, and one for Aphrodite,
the toxin and elixir of the soul in a garment
of flesh when it goes slumming in its own starmud.

Whether at dawn or dusk, the patina of time
is never enough to occlude the radiant heart
with the grime of cosmic history allegorized
as human events. As the surface so the depths.
Even if you make a passing appearance
in front of your mirroring awareness,
the river tells me not to worry, the light’s indelible
and raises up a wave like a T-short
to show off the Summer Triangle tattooed
around the navel of the world with a diamond in it.

Might as well be kind about the eschatology
of the end times, given only sacerdotal fools
with limited imaginations know for sure
death, judgement, heaven and hell
can be quantumly disentangled like axons
of white lightning in your left front parietal lobe.
Let the mandrakes shriek if they feel uprooted.
I’ve watched the sabre of the moon slash
through that Gordian knot of hot koans more than once.

My spiritual advice after a lifetime of looking?
Proceeding into the unknown, keep your eyes open.
Who really knows? Que sais je. If it isn’t
a fake reality show of the dead in an unworldly habitat,
it’s a religion that never knew when to say
enough is enough, the cemeteries are full,
and we’ve enslaved the imagination
to the sacred syllables of a few dead metaphors
the first bloom has peeled off of
like paint and nickel plating on a deathmask
disguised like a snake-oil nightmare
in a choir of lullabies that makes the human spirit
cry itself to sleep defamed by infernal rumours of love.

I want to be looking up when I die at the stars
that have kept an eye on me all these lightyears
as if my creative freedom had always been
a starmap of my own making in the open palm
of my own hands grasping for nothing
that didn’t morph into a mirage of water and sand
like an optical illusion in a dichotomous hourglass.
The withered bloodstream of the grape
might long for the purple passages of wine
it once drank out of the skull of the moon
to the dynamic equilibrium between birth and destruction.
But bring it on like a holy war it will be a glory to lose.

I’ve always taken an aleatory approach
to the paradigms and pageants of chaos
like the cosmic morphology of a hydra-headed
shapeshifting multiverse expanding hydrocephallically
in all directions at once so we never notice
how much we grow from moment to moment
like an imagination run wild in a moshpit of stem cells
that yesterday waltzed in three four time
under the Fabonacci curve of Hapsburg chandeliers.
I’ve seen sunflowers spiral into galaxies like prayer wheels
and when the mind is an artist able to paint the worlds
I divided my canvases up two to one, right to left
in a ratio of seashells I could hear eternity in
like the surging of a distant sea of awareness.

Imagination isn’t an agent of hope
into espionage, so I’ve never been in the habit,
more of a standing visionary than a kneeling voyeur,
of peeking through the keyhole of an opening door
into what might be going on over
the event horizon of the next black hole
breaking into the false dawn on the brighter
side of things. Like fruit to the apple bloom,
like stars emerging out of the dark, like
the sea to the river that’s been following it
like the stray thread of a lifeline back
to the tapestry it was unravelled from by the moon,
everything will be made clear in its own sweet time.
How much the stars have revealed to the waterlilies
about learning to shine without diminishment
in the mucky skies of an umbilical riverbed
where the bloom’s never off the flowering
of the first magnitude starmud of the dead.


PATRICK WHITE

HITCH HIKING OUT TO RICHARDSON FOR DISCOUNT CIGARETTES

HITCH HIKING OUT TO RICHARDSON FOR DISCOUNT CIGARETTES

Hitch hiking out to Richardson for discount cigarettes.
A hundred and fifty cars go past, someone counting sheep
in a dream that’s got nothing to do with me.
I may look like a pauper but my vehicular inferiority
is more than compensated for by what I can see
close up and intimately in the grass, and the sun
on the brawn of my arms protruding from a tank top
like the Bronze Age. I’m a Mycenean setting sail
on the surge of the wind in the gladiatorial reeds
of the oceanic cattails at peace with the rage of the world.

The dusty white clay of the road chalks my runners
like blackboards of starmud in the Burgess Shale.
Six miles and I can already feel my femurs
starting to take on the air of fluted pillars
as my muscles stretch around the block
like hemophiliacs at a bloodbank gasping for oxygen.
I stick out my thumb like a spectator in the Colosseum,
neither up nor down, not the first nor the last crescent
of the trigger of the moon, one road in a yellow road
as if I had no opinion on whether the defeated
should live or die and I stare straight into the eyes
of the windshields like the Pythian oracles of Delphi
with no life left in them as they whizz by without breaking stride.
Nice try. Let them live. Empathy for the hell of it.

Swathes of grass the road crews cut. Rags
of chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace have learned to duck.
Mandalic starclusters, doilies of brocade
in an ageing house of life, have you ever noticed
how they fold their spokes up after they’re flowerless
like inverted umbrellas into the most elegant nests
as if they’ve been tooled like Faberge egg cups?

I look across the open fields to the albino scars
of the birch in the border bush rows of a Euclidean theorem
about where to plant the cocker-spanieled ears of corn.
I see neolithic villages in the spikes of the wheat
as I have in the bleached hair of the blondes
I’ve gone out with wondering if it’s the ergot on the stalk
that engenders the little tree of the magic mushroom
that walks you through the stations of the Eleusinian mysteries
so you’re never the same after that, and why
in Islam the staff of life is considered forbidden fruit
if it isn’t at least as hallucinogenic as the gods
growing paranoid about how much we may and may not know.

Candelabra of purple loosestrife, vetch and clover,
and the evening primrose that reminds me
of all those sunsets I spent cooling off in paradise
with a woman more earthbound than Lilith or Eve
who believed in the way I painted the petals
of English ox-eyed daisies the wind had dishevelled
like matchbooks some boy had pryed open
like people and steeples before they were ready to bloom.

Black rimless shades. Do I look like a serial killer?
I feel like a mendicant Zen poet on my way to Eido
in Tokugawa Japan, minus the hossu and the fan.
Life overgrows itself, a niche-dweller, in the culvert,
the fence post, the asteroid belt of gravel I’m walking on,
no occasion for flourishing overlooked, its stillness
in a hurry as I am not, the milkweed nursing
its Monarch butterflies, the pampas grass
preening its plumes like the quills of hieroglyphs,
what a riot of overstatement it takes to makes its point
as if there was a point to it all in the first place.

A yellow Mustang muscles its middle-aged paint job by
polished like an enamel buttercup, but it’s not
going to stop as it sucks the dragonflies up like krill
through its grill, cruising for sulphur butterflies
that gives it that jaundiced colour as if Van Gogh
had been eating his chrome yellow again. Avaunt ye,
knave, I’m the errant dragon knight that isn’t
going to save you from the damsel as she says
soft shoulders go slow before she drives you off the road.
Part of looping like an eternal recurrence
through time I guess. But, yellow, man, yellow.
That’s a bad guess. Don’t you remember what
Henry Ford said. I don’t care what colour you paint them
as long as they’re black? How wide does
that racing stripe of yellow down your back
need to be before you realize you look like the lines
of a passing lane? Not cruel, brother, just got to
vent a little at your sin of omission. Where do you
park your horse, cowboy, at the drugstore?
You ride on like the Lone Ranger. Tonto’d rather walk.

A raccoon’s severed paw at my feet, the catatonic full moon
of an empty Tim Horton’s cup trying to civilize
pagan Germania in the Teutoburg Forest, brown paper bag
from the liquor-store, I’m in the middle of a modern midden
that runs like a country highway through a landfill.
Who needs the NSA when you can take on the identity
of what you throw away? Don’t underestimate
the power of the earth to remember and redress.
Wherever you keep your garbage. That’s where your home is.

Two miles more and my lungs are alien atmospheres
trying to cling to a habitable planet like an aura of air
laced with diesel fuel, hot asphalt, carbon monoxide.
The Taliban of the wild parsnip throws acid in my face.
A thousand yards of silence punctuated by birdsong
flooding the woods after the roar of the long thought trains
passing bumper to bumper like Bactrian camels
on the Silk Road behind a driver asserting his will
by mean-heartedly doing the speed limit to live forever
like an accident waiting to happen to a self-righteous caterpillar.

The road grows long. I’m doing my time standing up
like a red blood cell on a pilgrimage to the shrine
of the goddess of nicotine at the eastern doors
of the burial hut of Smokin’ Eagles, until my bones are dust,
and my spirit’s gone south with the Canada geese.
Whenever I make a truce with the world
I stuff my peace pipe with tobacco and pass it around.
In another life I think I might have been a hookah.
I’d rather be killed by the thing I love than something
I didn’t have any feelings for. You can live
three lifetimes more a moment when you’re happier
than you can when you’re doing it by a book
you didn’t write. Still think its dangerously debilitating
to be too wholesome like the smell of bread in a denatured bakery
that reeks of frustrated capitalism. The angels
only know one side of things. They’re cyclopic.
The demons have two eyes like we do. They’re stereoscopic.
Who knows? Maybe I’m dropping ashes on the Buddha?

As an SUV pulls over to the side of the road behind me
with the smile of a friendly New Brunswicker
who’s been living in Innisville for the last thirty years
and he immediately puts me at my ease because
I can tell he’s the real thing, a decent human being,
and I start talking cheerful normalese to prove
I’m definitely not a serial killer. Peace, brother,
beauty, love, the sixties fifty years later just got
into your car and to judge by that light show in your eyes
you were there, as an unspoken vision of life
binds us to this road we’ll travel down awhile together
like two passing strangers as the night approaches
the simple kindness and sincere gratitude of the encounter.
All part of the spiritual evolution of two retrograde revolutionaries
looping back on themselves like the second innocence
of the return journey, better than the first,
like green wine from wild grapes that’s had a chance
to age the dream awhile like coopers in our heartwood.

And too close to death to lie, still wonder what
it was all about. Did it do any good? Have we lived it well
over all these intervening light years we’ve been
holding it together like god particles without sacrificing
the creative freedom that comes with being vast
and spaced out. Did the effortless meaninglessness
of our evanescence ever make a difference to anything?
A chaos of fireflies or a cosmic array of stars in the sky,
one thing for sure, we’ll be long gone by the time
the light gets to where it’s going so the circle,
even squared with the way things seem, remains unbroken.


PATRICK WHITE