Tuesday, September 24, 2013

NOT LESS THAN THE SUM OF ALL MY YESTERDAYS

NOT LESS THAN THE SUM OF ALL MY YESTERDAYS

Not less than the sum of all my yesterdays
this now without origin or end as the stars
turn from summer to fall and the lake
is all farewells, herons, geese, Aquila
and the Swan, in the sad demotic of waterbirds
that echo among the hills as if a ghost
were crying somewhere among the shedding trees.

And I don’t know if it’s just me, or time,
or the gene of an ancient sorrow that hasn’t
been named yet, or the eerie coiling and uncoiling
of the low lying fog chilling the air
with spectral possibilities of seeing something
when you’re not supposed to be there,

like a child sharing a bedroom at night
with her own imagination after the door’s closed
and the lights go out, and the darkness
has been smudged by wishful dreams,
and the moon is huge and bright behind
the glowing curtains like a veil on a face
with an unbearable smile she dare not open,
but the waters of life have grown remote
and unfathomable as tears in a strange solitude.

As if the drowned were about to claim the lake
as their own again or a love story that was
still mourning how tragically wrong it all went
a hundred years ago, and would be for the rest
of its unexplainable afterlife, suddenly revealed
how shockingly beautiful she had been
in a frock of homespun moonlight and bare feet
sitting on a rock watching the waterlilies gather
like soft, evocative candles around her as she
slipped as easily as an otter under the waves
to become as sacred to them as she had been to him.

As a great, vast open silence holds a finger to my lips
and says, hush, human, her absence is not
a negative space that can be embraced
by shading in the background with broken mirrors.
Years haved passed and the water still cherishes
the memory of the wound she entrusted to it.


PATRICK WHITE

I WANT TO WRITE

I WANT TO WRITE

I want to write something that will impress you, 
a blue virgin with a silo of hand-picked stars
for a heart that we might begin with,
the soiled velvet of my collapsed parachute
that came down like the night over everything,
the miscreant sky of an ancient descent
that keeps snuffing the candle of blood
I keep using to draft poems on the mirror
that suggests an emergency of fire and ink.
I want to write something like a pulse
that doesn’t belong to anything in existence,
the mythic inflation and collapse
of a sail or a lung or a womb
that might engender something extraordinary
among the plaster cherubs
and efflorescent gargoyles of this abandoned theater
that no longer stages the improvised encounters
of the demons or the angels,
whose silence is the salted earth of a city
that traded its wilderness in
for a cemetery of clowns and scarecrows
and traffic jam of golden crutches. I refer,
of course, to the plastic bag
someone put over the mouth of my longing
and the cyanotic agony of trying to breathe freely
under the asphyxiating skin of the sky
that adheres to my eyes and voice like dew.

I want to write something fine and wild and exalted,
and enlighten the hinges of a vastly open door
with the raw ore of my meticulous urgencies.
Supple and eloquent, a sapphire river
flowing effortlessly through the night,
a rose of fire ashing on its own roots,
tendering its green thorns
like the fangs of an innocent moon,
I want to wash off the mud of the road with stars
that only bloom for those with the eyes to be them,
and throwing off the yoke
of all these sad windows
I collect like dogtags and discount coupons
of spiritual junkmail,
plough the moon with my tongue
and in a whisper of opening eyelids
weep like a silver tree
for the beauty of the dark-side jewels
that water my roots.

You must be in bed by now;
you must be mourning your lost lover,
lamenting the blizzard of ghosts
that coats your heart in the burlap and chainmail
of another winter that must be borne on your knees.
May I hover, may I linger,
may I spectrally request an audience,
pour this star-flavoured darkness into your ear,
can I be free without intruding
and rattle this chandelier of dragon tears
like a spell across your last shadow?

I want to astound you with the risks I take,
walking on my hands down this guitar string
keyed to the gaping annuity of the abyss;
I want to shed my skin
and stretch it like a playbill
over last year’s cancelled play;
and write you certified cheques
on the petals of luxuriant flowers
for exotic causes
only the homeless clouds could believe in.

And I don’t want to be loved for who I am,
I want to be loved for what I do;
as the wind is loved in its passing
for clarifying the sky like a rag of air,
for winnowing the grain from the chaff
after the threshing of the harvests of the dead
into feathers, waves and leaves,
for the muffled thunder of cannons and apples
going off in the distance
like a holy war of one
trying to overcome its own stratagems.

I don’t want to swing the planet like a wrecking ball
against the condemned tenements
that sweat from the pores of a selfish mirror,
and bury the poor in doorways
that exhale the nocturnal vapours of the hopeless
who rummage through hand-me-down poppies
for an affordable dream that might fit.

I only want to wear you once
in a mansion of water and moonlight
like a nakedness of space and cherries
I can’t take off,
and from the orchard of these black blossoms
that scatter like heretical doves from a fire,
this migration of the white phoenix
to a burning branch in a combustible solitude
that roots its holiest ladders
in the ashes of its own blazing divestment,
offer you the fruit of the crazy wisdom
of the fool who drinks from my eyes
as if the grail of this all night feeling
were a bar that never closed.


PATRICK WHITE