Wednesday, November 13, 2013

EPISTOLARY FACEBOOK MESSAGE NUMBER THREE

EPISTOLARY FACEBOOK MESSAGE NUMBER THREE

No pennies on my eyes this morning. But I slept with these
on my eyelids like bells, like moons, like kisses on the forehead of a bruise,
as I fell through a mist of pharmaceuticals in a cloud of unknowing,
weightless with both my children in my arms like shepherd moons
and tumours. Two poems, two hills, two tombs, listening
to the anapestic trill of my mindstream hair braiding its way
through the woods. And the silence and the silence and the silence
that scans. When I see a skull there’s always a flower in it
and a star that wants to start a constellation in my eyes.

Shaking like an aspen in the rags of its last leaves in a frosty wind
hoping this chassis of a body can live up to its engine. Time
to look under my tongue. So I can tell the morning
how grateful I am to be so warm inside here with everyone
like a cat or a bird or man in the pewter lustre
of another morning on earth. Where did all the flowers
come from? I swear, Gus, I love the way the things of the world
are always getting out of hand. And the silence, and the silence
and the silence that scans.

You can’t imagine how much love there is in my heart
for you right now. All of you, though I’ve known many of you
since I was an upstart. New friends in the schoolyard, all of you.
I’m going to see what my mother packed for lunch.


Love, Patrick

DARK SHEDDING

DARK SHEDDING

Dark shedding. Translucent shadows of the leaves
on a lake without a name you once made famous for nothing
because you saw it dance in your awareness of enough
and touched it with your eyes like a secret that was meant
to be kept like the silence in the roots of the bracken.

Regrets? What was there to cry about that didn’t bloom
in retrospect? Did you miss the moon? Did you run
to the window in time? Have you seen it yet
through the rain and the smoke? Do you see a woman
or do you see a ghost in the garden that reminds you
of someone you knew when were young among
the sunflowers you grew? And the moon and the locust tree
you hung from like someone pendulous and blue
as time on the air of the unweaving hills? Is that
still true as a road that goes nowhere without you
like the sumac in the fall when it fails? Do the gates
still open as if they recognized you by the grace
and the colour of the bouquets you made of your skelton keys?

Gardens of scars in your eyes. Did you leave the stars
to the sage when you wept like smoke at the feet
of everything it didn’t say but you could foretell
by the silence that befell you before and after that you
heard it anyway like the flight of a homing heron
to the shrines of its sacred syllable in the heart of time,
in the eye of the light, in the mouth of the wind,
in the crowns of the fire, in the flowers weeping
on the dark waters within as if you’d been their only friend
to understand their solitude as a gift from their wayward ends?


PATRICK WHITE

I TOUCHED THINGS DEEPLY TO REMIND MYSELF THEY WERE NOT MINE

I TOUCHED THINGS DEEPLY TO REMIND MYSELF THEY WERE NOT MINE

I touched things deeply to remind myself they were not mine
but the fingerprints and echoes of time the way
the mind seizes whatever it befriends,
a handful of nothing that clings to the wind,
the ghost of the moon when its bones are dust
and the juniper weeps at the eastern door
of a stranger’s burial hut deep in its heart
and love, love must come and depart
like a curse and a blessing from the miraculous occult
and wonder is the atmosphere we wander in
wounded by the blessings of a hurt metaphor
that waves its crutch to the silence and says farewell
to the candle in the lantern with the wick of midnight
still in its spell. You don’t have to doubt it anymore, you can tell
as the words fall sweetly from the urn and the bell.


PATRICK WHITE