Saturday, August 24, 2013

I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I wish I knew you well enough to say
everything there is to say, one heart to another.
I wish I had the art to write this poem in stone like a glacier.
Write it in blood and honey and snow.
Write it in moonlight on the water,
in the sands of sidereal deserts
where the wind doesn’t sing
as if it’s the larynx in the throat of an hourglass.

It’s a hair breadth between seasoned wariness
when you’re on hallowed ground and those
who are scared to death of what it all means
and will discipline their fear into any kind of obedience,
give it all up just to make it go away.

Sometimes you’ve got to break a taboo
to get to the blessing, risk the dragon’s teeth
to get to the golden fleece, or as Coleridge said
imagination is obedient to laws of its own origination
and in a poet’s case, that’s inspiration.
And that’s the way space gets bent
like the nightsky of my third eye
whenever I’m around you like a distant shepherd moon
that’s got life on it, for sure, but prefers
to keep it as secret as solitude in a locket of rain.
Inflammable waterlilies blooming in methane.
A theft of fire that burns sweeter than the proceeds of crime.

Orpheus is trying to prophecy using his own skull
that he could probably get used to a lot of the same music
you like and if he were ever called upon
to go down into hell again before your eyes
got used to the dark and the darkness showed you its jewels,
I’d be able to break my heart like the wishbone of a harp
for someone like you to follow me up out of death
without looking back on the black lustre of oblivion
that has made us both feel at times,
like moonset in a tarpit that will perfectly
preserve our bones, if nothing else, so
the future can tell by the fang marks
what pierced us through the heart
like crescent moons into voodoo,
baring their canines like toxic dinosaurs
so we both look like we’ve been carved on
like a calendar of scars and Mayan dream grammars.

You’re the kind of lens that brings chaos into focus
You can weave a wavelength into
a beautifully disciplined flying carpet
and have it all intertwined like a wild grape vine
on a trellis putting flesh on a skeleton
that thirsts for wine from your heart well.
I may be the inspired in this, but you’re
the lunar inspiratrix, creative matrix,
a shape of space that teaches matter how to move
in orbit around you, even from this distance
where my solitude is urgent with ancient mysteries
to lift the veils as if I were worthy of being no one
and the dark queen doesn’t turn her face
toward the stranger at the stargate in Orion
for nothing. Sex and death are old bedmates,
but life always comes like a vestal virgin
or a sacred whore to these affairs and the stars,
who knows what they’ve seen in their time,
but whatever it was, or is, or will be,
they still shine, and the shining’s always new.

You may have your occultations, but I can see
the same thing in you as I do in the Pleiades.
Hot, bright, mystic fire in a blue negligee of light
as if you’d left your breath on a cold nightsky
and the windowpane of space I was looking at it through
like a smudge of radiance, the first wildflower
in my field of view for light years that have left
the present so far behind me I’m catching up to my past,
one warm breath, and I begin to melt
like a chandelier of icicles in a summer storm.
The stick arms of a snowman are covered in apple bloom.

Visions are greened again from the stem cells
of the crumbs of my dreams I rubbed from my eyes
when I began to believe they were seeing things
from the wrong end of a telescope that stood things on its head.
Now I know when I feel homelessly lost upon the earth,
even in exile, I’m rooted firmly in the sky as you are,
and if I’m not weeding the constellations
in secret gardens where the gates open
at the same time as these flowers in my eyes
it’s just because of the way I can empathize
with their plight, and heretic I can’t help being,
show some timely respect for the pariahs
burning at the same stake that I am for flaws
I indict myself of whenever Venus on a moonless night
casts me down like a shadow of love on the snow
and I take it as a sign of a woman I want to know.


PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

The night dances with itself like an only child
to the sounds of its own silence
when it thinks no one is watching.
Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,
poised, a word, a bird, a butterfly on a branch,
a sacred syllable from an alphabet that can dance,
caught in the updraft of a momentary insight
of falling to paradise like a flightfeather of light,
and landing the move just right, just so, with perfect timing.

The maples by day, easels for hot palette paintings,
red shift through red, orange, yellow, green
from the outside in toward the trunk, same
as a rainbow, same as the dynastic colours of a sunset.
Same as the fires of life returning to the root.
Same as the starmaps of the visionaries
flying like shamans from the nests they were fledged in.
Same as the ripening of the fruits of the earth,
or roses with green stars under their eyelids.
Different instruments, different voices,
the wind, the rasping of the leaves, the beaver
slapping the startled flesh of the water at my approach,
a twig snapping its drumstick on a rim shot
and the crow, and the squeaking bats, and the lapping
of the waves like the plectra of an aquamarine harpsichord
at the whole notes of the rocks, but a confluence
of picture-music washing the roots of the dead violins
of the wild irises and the timpani of cattails along the mindstream.

Merrily, merrily, row your boat, life is but a dream.
But to judge from the windfalls of green planets
shaken from the black walnut trees, it’s a dream
that’s urgent with the myriad realities of a multiverse
waking up in a place like here, and a time like now
with a lavish appetite for inhabiting itself
as if appearance weren’t just the rind
that had to be peeled away like the skin and the shell
of the meat of the real, the shapes of the known worlds
the rat snakes shed like intimate illusions
that have naturally outgrown themselves,
the new moon in the arms of the old, like a nightsky
leaving the Milky Way, a mythically deflated windsock
tangled in the tree line like a runway that tried to fly by itself.

Now the Great Shedding as the earth turns
like the old abandoned mill wheel upstream
like a circular waterclock making linear time
take its tail in its mouth like an eternal recurrence
that’s always pouring itself out of itself like life
into the emptiness between the equinox of one thought
and the solstice of the next like the silence between heartbeats,
the night between the stars, like the inseparable gap
between the distant moon and the intimacy of the moon’s reflection
on the newly surfaced dark skin of the water sequencing
its pentatonic scales to the seasonal themes of the mindstream
you can’t step into twice, as Heraclitus said in Ephesus long ago,
though it seems that way if all you’re doing is dogpaddling
like a delinquent green apple on a snow covered bough, instead
of going along with the perennial renewal of the flow
by letting go of your water skin with its lunar tattoo
like the bright vacancy of an old silo of the light
for the dark abundance of the new insight
into the nature of life when it full in October.

The fall. This hour of my becoming
when everything is burning like the sumac
with the fires of life but nothing is consumed.
Because fire doesn’t burn fire and death is unperishing.
And autumn is no less of a transformation than spring
as this new day dances as readily with the old woman
watching from her kitchen window as it does the young girl,
than the rain is to the tides of a lunar ocean
swaying in its shadows as if it were dancing
with its river reeds like a lonely child
in the embrace of her imagination,
like a poet in the grip of his crazy wisdom
flirting like a firefly with the dragons of his madness
without listening to the search parties of the lighthouses
bellowing like the foghorns of mournful trains back on shore
being swept away into the distance like nightwatchmen
and unconvincing ghosts. Things are unmooring
like lifeboats full of seeds and the souls of the dead
taking to their wings like the oars of waterbirds,
and the lowest of earthbound snakes
are dreaming of feathering their scales
into the vans of a dragon firewalking with stars
around the wobbling axis of the earth
on a potter’s wheel, turning it like sentient starmud
that’s fired up in autumn like an urn that burns like a kiln.


PATRICK WHITE