THE ATTRITION OF POETS IS NOT LIKE THE
AUTUMN LEAVES
The attrition of poets is not like the
autumn leaves.
Troubled lives. Holding a torch of
burning roses
up to the corners of their eyes where
the spiders live,
making up flood myths of their sorrows
to keep
the deep, lunar watershed of their
skull cups full,
happy, sometimes, as an exception to
the rule,
but on edge, metallurgists in the
Bronze Age
running a sword like the hour hand of a
water clock
down their tongues like wavelengths
witching for lightning.
Inadequacy, emptiness, abysmal solitude
of undertakers trying to bury corpses
on the moon
to put their ghosts to rest under a
mythically inflated gravestone
that doesn’t keep the wolf away that
isn’t a friend to man.
Poetry is the most compassionate sister
spirit
of all the sciences of suffering. It
lays a cool, silver herb
on your forehead where the first draft
of your fate is written
and the fever abates awhile, and the
dream that
boiled in your blood like Japanese
seawater
in the nuclear miscarriage of a
hurricane rose,
throws snake oil on venomous waters in
a toxic mirage
of kingfishers skimming the thought
waves of a heart
momentarily at peace with itself. I
used to sit
on a precipitious rocky ledge when I
was sixteen,
alone with the stars nobody in that
neighbourhood
had soiled with their fingerprints yet
and at that
remote distance from the world I knew
like a garden that had made a slum of
paradise as if
there was nothing original about sin
that hadn’t been
plagiarized from the brutal banality of
human nature,
poetry whispered to me in an immensely
liberated voice
like the rush of the nightwind in the
oceanic Douglas firs,
cool waters of life on the peeling skin
of the sunburnt arbutus trees, I am
freedom,
I am the horrific beatitude of love
within reach of the flesh,
I am the picture music of the
mindstream flowing
through the woods at night as if no one
were listening
but the nightbirds for the apparitions
of their longing
to pierce the apprehensive air with
reciprocal urgency.
I am the way out of here for those
among the lost
whose path is not blocked by the
lifemask they wear
like an identity that hides its face in
someone else’s hands.
I speak my secrets to the dead and the
living respond
as if they thought they recognized
their own voice
calling to them out of the fog like a
lamp in a lifeboat
on the moon, so far have they wandered
from home.
Eternal sadness in the infinite
tenderness
of an immortally wounded muse, I fell
in love
with the mystery that made me the
nightwatchman of her eyes.
And relativity damned, there’s
absolutely no doubt
it’s so much harder to pursue a lunar
life to the full
than it is to cut your wrist at the
first crescent
when the wheat is green, and the apples
are bitter,
and the seed has no faith in the
sincerity of the harvest,
and your first step up in a world of
artful loveletters
is the stone-faced altar you’re
sacrificed upon.
What else in life is there for you to
tear your heart out over
and hold it up like a new born as an
offering
to the unattainable in the pursuit of
an earthly excellence
that doesn’t defame the mediocrities
who weren’t
self-destructive enough to risk it all,
unendowed
by the white noise of their cosmic
backgrounds
to go supernova when galactic occasion
called for it.
They weren’t disciplined by
disobedience enough
like heretics with fire-breathing
principles
to stand up for things that have been
burnt to the ground
yet poetry looks over them like a
safety net
in a surrealistic circus tent, and one
day, shot
out of the chrysalis of the cannon
they’re asleep in
they’ll have the courage of
dragonflies to fall toward paradise.
Or they’ll cry real tears of
gratitude like sacred clowns
who’ve wiped their facepaint off in a
green room
without any mirrors to cast more
indelible shadows
than the ink of long memories that
blacken their hands
like the sooty candelabras of winter
trees at dusk.
What’s the point of adding more
feathers to your topknot
than the original three, if all you
want to be is a chief
in a tribe without fellowship or trust?
Poetry
is as meaningless as the night to those
who never dream
the inconceivable is talking to them in
their sleep.
Do the elders suffer writer’s block
when they’re asked
to name the children, each according to
their totems?
Who cages the effulgent plumage of the
morning
in their voice box and tries to teach
it to sing after it
like a fire-hydrant that’s all thumbs
on a burning guitar?
Fifty years, a lighthouse on the moon,
and the shipwrecks
to prove it, fifty years of lingering
in doorways
in this house of life, not knowing
whether they were
entrances or exits, but marking the
days
like a bone calendar of thresholds and
crosswalks
carved on the bars of a penal chop shop
until the incommensurable Sisyphean day
I’m released
to join the birds and the stars on the
other side of my eyes
where everyone keeps their vow of a
omerta
in a house of playing card angels where
every saint’s
a martyr to the ungratified desires
that drove them
out into the wilderness with a laurel
of thorns
hooked on the horns of a scapegoat for
what ails the heart,
a grail full of ashes greening this
desert of stars,
a dream grammar of ancient mirages
the waters of life call upon to express
the evanescence
of the quicksand foundation stones and
sand dune pyramids
life is built on like something not
meant to last
a starfish longer than literary
immortality in an hourglass.
Death and sex. Myriad ghosts at the
death
of the imagination that claims
maternity by virtue
of the pregnable medium she works in
like a procreatrix
fluent in the mother tongues she calls
like spirits to a seance,
autumn to a plum, blood and snow to the
scarlet letter
of the defrocked cardinal on the dead
branch of a tree alphabet,
that endures the immaculate deceptions
of renewable virgins
bathing alone in the moonlight of an
ice-age that doesn’t prevaricate.
Poetry in the course of time. Like
riding in the back
of a pick-up against the current of the
aerial perspective
of yellow lines and telephone poles
disappearing like the past
into focusing on the void as if there
were a point to all this
somewhere far behind you like a
destination that kept
receding from you like the light of a
star you’ve been following
into the available dimensions of the
future not much further ahead
as if it were more illuminating to go
along with it than labour
to understand a life in art you’re
never going to get used to
though it’s crucial to thank those
who stopped for you,
as if you were one of them, and life,
like art and love, were on their way.
Dangerous to forestall your life to
achieve something
that will either make or break you like
third man
on the short straw of a firing squad of
nine bullets
certain, and one imaginal blank of
doubt that takes
a long shot at the stars in your eyes
like a ricochet of light
in the dark we’re all blindfolded by
to keep us
from seeing it coming before we have
time to duck.
Fifty years of militant farewells to
the casualties
of an undeclared holy war between the
genies and demons
of what we wish we were born to die
for, and the death wish
in the heart of the fire we’re
consumed by like a thief
chained to a rock in the Caucasus, like
a stem cell
of the eternally recurring madness of
repeating the same offence
as if genius were a kind of creative,
criminal negligence
that seizes the moment like a spark of
life that enlightens
the strawdog of a scarecrow with stars
in its eyes.
A shrine for the unrepentant that isn’t
a jail or a church.
A school of enlightenment that doesn’t
maintain a teacher.
A death lament for the early windfall
of unripe bells.
A spider in the niche of a wall after
the lamp’s gone out.
So many suicides, burnt offerings to
unacceptable gods.
Nothing left to regret or forgive. A
lifeboat full of leaves
only the wind on a cold, neurotic night
in late November
reads as escapist literature under an
erotic brown cover.
Gone. From the light, the dark. The
mournful murmuring
of a punctured heart. The cyanotically
blue fulfilment
of the second born moon of the month.
Crows and worms,
making a living on the gleanings of
harvest after
the cattle corn has been shucked and
husked with gaps
in the toothy smile on the flyleaf of
an undistinguished skeleton.
I lay a sword of moonlight in tribute
on the waters of their lives
they have no need to fall upon again or
draw
from a stone like a blade stained with
coagulant roses of blood.
I cast no aspersions on the failure of
pain
to intensify the darkness in their eyes
into diamonds
the light passes right through without
leaving so much
as cut or a scar. I people their
absence with my solitude.
I voice their presence with the silence
of poems
written in the expiration of my breath
on a broken window.
I embed my eyes like frozen tears in
the night skies
of their crystal skulls and I weep like
an ice-age of mirrors
that shatter like an uninhabitable
vision of life
that can’t be mended once it’s been
fully realized
we’re either doomed to succeed, or
bound
by the book of life to grandiloquently
fail
and how much imagination it takes to
write
the Burgess Shale like the natural
history
of someone chaotically adaptable enough
to the piebald mystery
of the dark abundance, bright vacancy
of the shadows and light not to.
PATRICK WHITE
