Sunday, September 22, 2013

SITTING AT AN OPEN WINDOW IN THE STUDIO

SITTING AT AN OPEN WINDOW IN THE STUDIO

Sitting at an open window in the studio, nothing
on the easels, watching the night rain
in the storefront puddles on the road below.
Earrings falling from the lobes of the leaves
of the trees in the half glow of the overgrown streetlamps.

I rest the flying buttress of my elbow
against the wall of the abandoned cathedral
of my top-heavy head against a windowsill
chipped, pocked, scraped, thick with years
of old paint discoloured as scar tissue, my cat
a quiet sphinx beside me, and it’s one
of those moments when you know for sure
as it sometimes does like a wounded eclipse of the moon
without a word, or a sign, it’s come to this,
as if the insignificance of an entire lifetime
were summed up by the stillness, silence, and solitude
of a stranger at the gate death left open
when it grew tired of waiting for me to arrive.

Not much of a garden and still less of grave
to house my bones in autumn, somewhere tonight
an old man is contemplating suicide like the tuber
of a flowerless life and it feels all right
to be uprooted like an eye of rain in the dark
without hope of seeing anything bloom again
quite the way it used to. I’m blocking in
an underpainting of the truth to see if the truth
is beautiful or not or just mucky with thought.
Or careless of the way it looks, life blooms
and then it rots. All that contested magnificence
of the rose exhumed like Richard III from a parking lot
to be reinterred in a touristy tomb as befits an English king.

I turn off the lights and light a candle to remind me
of the vapour of a dream I once had
when the arpeggios of the rain last played me
like Scarlatti on the keyboard of a harpsichord,
but it goes out like the denouement of cathartic pity
at the end of an unappealing life in a tragic city
where everyone walks over the corpses of the chorus
as if fate were of no concern of theirs.
Bring on the darkness exorcised of the false gods
that don’t know enough to leave things the way they are.

Everything gleams like a coat of varnish
on oils that have long bled out like Proserpine
leeched by the underworld until next spring.
It isn’t easy to go down singing into death
knowing half of every breath you take
is the expiration date on a prophetic skull
that knows all too well that looking back on the past
retrieves nothing, even when you’ve got wings on your heels,
you can bring to the surface of consciousness
but a last gasp of desperate bubbles that flash
before your eyes like the life of a man drowning
in municipal puddles of agitated starmud
the rain keeps falling into like blackholes
in the asphalt of a road whose cup runs over
like the gutter of a grail drunk down to the lees.


PATRICK WHITE

IF I WERE TO CRY NOW AT THIS AGE

IF I WERE TO CRY NOW AT THIS AGE

If I were to cry now at this age
it would be a grey, September rain, running down
the half windows, half mirrors of my eyes.
Alloys of light. A veil of rivers and roads
I’ve firewalked on burning diamonds to get here.
A waterfall of waterclocks. Time run amok.
A dog let off the leash of a long continuum
to remember tomorrow as if it only happened
yesterday. No more eating the dust at the heels
of Orion as if he were chained to a parking meter,
the dogstar sniffs at the ankh-shaped fire hydrants
as it will, free of the master and his noose,
Black Dog shadowed by Blue Flower on the loose.

If I were to cry now at this age
it would be as a sage washing his face in his own ashes
to get the greenwood creosote off the glass
he looks through darkly into oracular dragon fire
dreaming the world on a lotus of flame
to ember in the blaze of two year old red oak
with cracks through the tree rings of former springs
to testify it’s aged right as eyes and wine,
and still burns hot as blood in the caldera
of a volcanic heart. Prophecy might be the art
of great discretion, but poetry should be as
open-faced as the skull of the moon in a mirror.

If I were to cry now at this age
it wouldn’t be for fame, sex, power or influence
among the literary politics of the nitwits
in the regalia of a kingdom of gnats,
nor yet as any kind of repentance for the life
that demonically guided me in and out
of the stations of the mystery through the rootfires
of paradise that blossomed like stars and waterlilies
in the fetid gardens of the fallen transforming
their swamp lust into paradigms of amorous enlightenment.
I disciplined the severity of my disobedience
into rules of thumb that let more of the defeated live
than the one-eyed angels with blood on their feathers
ever did. Heaven condemned my demon to compassion
for never taking offence at anyone else’s miscreance.

If I were to cry now at this age
I doubt if I’d remember precisely why I wept,
but my bet would be it had something to do
with life not cherishing its own creations
like a busload of schoolkids at a railway crossing
with a brutal sense of timing, or twenty-five million children
who starve to death every year in their mother’s arms
while farmers pour galaxies of spilt milk out on the ground
to keep the price of human kindness high
as a subsidized quota of children that have to die annually
to reach the projected goals of unweaned shareholders.
Why so many children open their eyes like flowers on time
to be flogged by the whips of their own umbilical cords
like weed cutters along the fence of an indefensible border.

If I were to cry now at this age
it would be for the beauty I discerned growing
in the cracks and crevices like blueweed and dandelions
between a hard place and a rock
that kept rolling down hill at the peak of life
like the door of a tomb somebody used
for the foundation stone of a corrupt house of life
built on sacred quicksand that lost its footing
like a burning ladder of rafters in an earthquake
that buried the priestcraft of a snakepit
without the last unction of an oilslick on its forehead
as if God looked upon the works of humans
and spit on their eyelids in disgust at a waste
of quantum foam that frothed like hydrophobia
from the shrines of the dry seabeds of their mouths
as if every ditch of hell were once an ocean unto itself.


PATRICK WHITE