Thursday, September 19, 2013

NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

Not sitting here trying to flint knap the splinters of a mirror
into Clovis points for pygmies to go hunting mammoths with.
Maybe if I can make them small enough to go on Twitter
or Facebook, two minutes with a hook in the imagination
and I might be able to make of a little stardust, a big constellation
of gaping fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake.
I might make a big splash, like Basho’s frog,
for the lifespan of a haiku in prime time for nitwits.
I want to lay my vision out like a surrealistic starmap,
I don’t want some lazy idiot laying its egg on my forehead
like a carnelian, or worse, a contact lens on my third eye
to cure my astigmatism by eating little peep holes in my vision.

I don’t want a news feed for an intravenous muse
spoon feeding me whatever she wants me to hear
like a distant rumour of inspiration running like an opioid
at the end of a morphine drip with fangs.
Beauty’s not an ephemerid, nor the truth
a media fashionista on a catwalk, or an anchor’s desk,
that doesn’t so much as illuminate and deepen
the darkness and the light, but distract the heart with agitprop
and show off its lipstick as if Van Gogh just ate his paint again.
God bless the insane glorious souls dying alone in vain
as the old order changeth and giveth way to the new
and the language of the spirit that expressed itself
in a grammar of wildflowers breaking into a purple passage
of New England asters, is all thorns but no roses
on a bouquet of razorwire that was born without leaves
but still fits the brow of some silly poetling like Apollonian laurel
for having enough money to buy a good book review
if you don’t have the breasts or the chest or the talent
to get it for free. Literary criticism in a dead spin.

Why make a mockery of the lie poetry used to be
when yours is so trivial and petty your pretty snowflake
is going to piss in its pants if it ever encounters
an emotional blizzard or a spiritual avalanche?
And that little night light of yours you keep on
like a dream journal beside the bed, isn’t going
to seed the darkness with stars when all you’ve got to sow
is artificial sugar and organic sea salt. And even then,
you’re not Carthage, though you share the same impotence.
What does the candle know of the calling
of a lighthouse on the moon, waiting for light years
or why the foghorns are always in mourning
for the ghost ships it exorcises with a warning
not to come near, or its all downhill from here to the bottom
of a housewell with the literary ambitions of a black hole
the fireflies won’t come to sip from without going out
because they won’t drink from any fountain mouth the stars don’t
and you haven’t even gotten drunk on the blood
of your own skull yet, singing by a river to a moonrise.

Let the strong rope unravel as it will into a million weak threads
clinging like a mountain to a spider web, or a spinal cord
that’s never been frayed like the delta of a river or a mindstream
that can smell the great nightsea of awareness up ahead,
or even a shoelace passing like a needle through an eyelet.
The planet’s on fire, this is Dresden, this is Hamburg,
this is Gaza in a squall of white phosphorus, this is the inferno
that sweeps you off your feet like a whirlwind of igneous Sufis
and evaporates your eyes like dew off the grass in a flash
of inflammable insight that not even your guru or your shrink
are fireproof enough to live through this astronomical catastrophe.
And you, you want to write and tell me, in poems
that make me want to ask them to come over and do my hair as well
how domestically troubled you are by the pebble in your shoe.
You blindfold yourself with a no smoking sign
in front of a firing squad that thinks it might be a good career move
to make a literary martyr out of you like James Joyce
going blind in Trieste while Ezra Pound
sends him cabbages and shoes to survive on.

Bathetic, trivial, irrelevant and effete, you think
it’s radical not to explore the roots of things
like an underground fire in a valley of cedars,
or immolate yourself like the sumac in the fall
hoping to ignite an Arab spring in the middle of your perishing.
Two parachutes on your back, and one in the trunk of the car,
and still you won’t jump, even when the stars
are underneath you expecting you to join in the firewalk
and Icarus hands you a fire-extinguisher
and says, here, put them out if things get too hot.


PATRICK WHITE

I SEE MY CHILDHOOD IN A BROKEN MIRROR

I SEE MY CHILDHOOD IN A BROKEN MIRROR

I see my childhood in a broken mirror.
Seven again. Yet not quite the same.
A baleful dream figure, a wraith of then,
a boy supercharged with apprehensive energy,
hovering pensively like a curtain in the broken air,
torn like a veil from the face in the broken window,
sometimes standing on the dank earth
that was always in shadow, but lightly, as if
the whole broken world had been saturated
in sorrow, and Patti Page was on the radio.
Evanescent, auroral, almost immaterial,
a lingering vapour of what he was then,
I retain some sense of what he was feeling,
but he has no idea that I exist as a furtherance
of those emotions, sophisticated and complex
as a quantumly entangled creation myth
shared in common can become. As
the apple is to the blossom that disappeared
to let things proceed as they must to fruition.

Sad, thoughtful, angry boy, smouldering
like a wet cedar bough to stay lost in the fog
of his innocence, or smudge his awareness
of the raw rash of a raging drunk that scratched
at his heart like a father until it bled to death
like a medicine bag that longed to be a cure-all,
you did didn’t you, but your magic was too small.
And your mother was the martyred lioness
who stood between her cubs and the ravenous man
who would have eaten you all, just to say he had.

And you, the eldest, when did you start to shoulder
that bell of conscience that somehow accused you,
by complicity, even as an onlooker, to the black farce
of tragic severance madly slashing the life
in front of you like the fleshy cheeks of a rubber doll,
with mechanical eyes that opened and closed
like a guillotine in a reign of terror that convinced you
somehow you must be bad, given you were
the lowest common denominator between two extremes
going at each other like opposite ends of a burning bridge?

How many younger selves have I fathered over a lifetime
to make up for the absence of one of my own.
Little arsonist, out of my ashes, I tell you
it wasn’t you who set fire to the world
that’s been burning down around you for lightyears.
I’m not going to climb the mountain and sacrifice you
to anyone, I’m not going to come to you
like a stranger to play father for a day
and assume you like baseball without asking
because I’m trying to float my way into heaven
at one minute to midnight like a bubble of apple piety
that refused to admit there were any thorns in life,
that everything was whole and mended, as if
there were no boxing events off limits you could
take a kid to he would have liked a whole, lot better
than a sport you were trying to indoctrinate him into like a cult.
I’m not trying to throw a right hook with a catcher’s mitt on.

You just stand there, as you are, little hero,
with that enlarged philosophical, poetic heart of yours
way too old for your years, as if you were trying
Keats on for size, wounded like an initiate
into the discipline of that fist clenched at your side.
Let me rest my hand on your shoulder a moment
like the stoic affection of one man to another
and by that let you know how much I admire and respect you
for those wild, childhood virtues of survival
you planted in me like seeds of wilful compassion
that grew like morning glory in a rose arbour with thorns.
I want to always remember you like that.
A small warrior. A dragon slayer. With a bell
on your head like a visor you tilted at a world
of windmills sword dancing with themselves
like the hands of a clock at a victory parade of its own shadows.
O inseparable, when the geese are overhead
scattering the ashes of the dead in a long rosary
of lament, I’ll take you with me when I go.


PATRICK WHITE