Tuesday, October 29, 2013

HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

How strange to recall childhood as an aging man
as if nothing had changed for the last sixty years
you’re watching yourself as a young boy
from a point of awareness somewhere in the air
above him like someone he couldn’t have foreseen becoming,
looking back upon him with great tenderness
that I’m what I made of his future as he
tries to reverse the bike chain he caught
his pant cuff in, and I can do nothing to help him
at this remove, except love him as someone should have then
when these strange tears didn’t taste so much of time.

Who could have guessed it would take all these years
to fill the absence in his heart up by becoming
the intimate familiar of the solitude of a child
who could befriend anything that was as lost and wild
and wounded as he was and yet could dream
of doing great things up late in his room at night
to prove he was at least as loveable as any achievement.
He was off to fight a holy war of one with himself
like a single infidel against the whole of Christendom
that I’m the living ruin of because sometimes it’s wiser
to be defeated than it is to prevail supreme
against your own dream of being worthy of love.

Time ripples in the growth rings of a tree
echoing the song of a well-seasoned nightbird
in the heartwood of a shedding maple
that remembers all the lyrics of longing and lament
it sings to itself at times like an arrow, a burnt guitar
struck by lightning, or one of the strong rafters
that uphold the soul like the keel of a lifeboat overturned
on the great night sea of a death in life
it drowned in more than once like moonset
among the corals that tore the bottom of its hull.

And how many cold nights did it take
before the syrups began to run sweetly in spring
and the new leaves forget the history of their roots
as I tried to abandon the child that I was
by the side of a road that led him away from me
because I thought one of us had to go homeless
in order to survive the firestorms of his outraged innocence
and the unaccusing guilt of mine as I grew up
letting him down in ways that only he can imagine
as I spread from one burning building to the next
like a new religion that wasn’t looking for converts?
But if you were to ask me now, I’d say it’s funny
how he turned out to be the Buddha sitting at the base
of the Bodhi tree of my spine, and on a good day,
at my best, before the fall, I’m Lucifer leading
the sun up at dawn like a child guiding a blind prophet
by the hand long before the morning star appeared
like Venus to those who were seeking enlightenment
without me or themselves to witness what neither of us
had attained like the key to the mystery of a universe
that had no locks on it to begin with to shut anybody out
or keep anybody in. The man in me doesn’t blame the child
for existing the way I do now trying belatedly
to embrace his rejection as a way of life
I can make up for by sharing this wounded solitude with him
like an injured animal he can see himself in
as a potential friend he could identify with
as if what had happened to me had once happened to him
and we could both approach each other with compassion.


PATRICK WHITE  

BARED OF ITS LEAVES LIKE NATIVE PEACE TREATIES

BARED OF ITS LEAVES LIKE NATIVE PEACE TREATIES

Bared of its leaves like native peace treaties
with the westerlies who never kept them,
the last red planet of the chokecherry falls
into the claws of a black squirrel eyeing it
like a space rover looking for life on Mars.
O the myriad worlds you can see in a single mystic detail.
Bring me a hair of God and I’ll pass through it
like a wormhole into the dark matter of the mind
going on behind the light like vital events
that are deeper than skin and blood on stage.

Just count the number of pathways through the woods
compared to the roads to know whether
you’re in a good space or not. If people
wander to work in their own good time
or rush from one abyss to another
trying to get ahead of an ion waterclock.
Take the solitude out of society
and there’s not much left worth talking about.
So I enjoin the silence to keep the acuity of my wonder
sharp as the thorns of a heart with nothing left to guard
after the wild rose ran off in one of her phases with the moon.

I have long conversations with the stars
without a word or a gesture of grammar being said
in either of our mother-tongues that can’t be understood
immediately, without the intermediary of a metaphor
or a dictionary that gets to the roots of things
like a star-nosed mole with no flowers in its soul.
No end of the distance between us when you measure it in miles
but insight travels faster than the speed of light
and both of us are shining in the same dark space
like an eye looking back at itself from a long way off.

The night is lonely, cold, and ageing but there’s a fire
blazing in my heartwood the trees huddle around
as the shadows of the flames dart from trunk to trunk
with the alacrity and cunning of a wolf
that knows it’s the last of its kind in these darkening hills
to embody the magic of its elders in its way of life.
Fear is the mind-killer. So I stay enthroned
by the stone navel of my firepit flowering
all around me like the corona of the sun at midnight
just to say I know the protocols of being as well as the rocks
when I rise to embrace strangers in my solitude
as the new spiritual familiars that will accompany me
on my long firewalk to the stars that are never
any further away than my future is from my past
or now is from here to there every step of the path

The stars spin their webs in the crowns of the trees
into dreamcatchers with mythically inflated origins
that answer the paradigms of the constellations
by connecting the dots like wild grape vines
to the shapeshifting starmaps of the mind
I keep shedding like leaves and feathers and scales
to understand the underlying scaffoldings and skeletons
I climb up on like monkey bars
to repaint creation in everybody’s image
but my own. My fire. My heart. I’m the host
of an expansive space that’s generous enough
to embody it all without standing in jubilation
like an angel in the doorway as if there were
somebody home no one could account for.

A stranger in the thirteenth house of a misbegotten zodiac
of birthmarks driven out into the wilderness
like maniacs, prophets, poets and astronomical wise men
as scapegoats for the fate of upper class tattoos
that don’t wash off any easier than the wind
teaching the stars that have just learned how to print
this cursive script I’m writing in like a mindstream
punctuating its passage with toadstools and pine-cones,
chokecherries, black walnuts, wild crab apples
and shepherd moons in decaying orbits around
the black hole at the center of the universe
we’re all attached to like hinges to a gate
that only has to swing open once to everything
and it’s good for as many lifetimes as you want to go through
like a labyrinth of exits leading into a clearing
deep within your heart where nothing exists
and yet inconceivably everything insists upon shining.


PATRICK WHITE