NOT ANGER NOT SORROW

Not anger not sorrow

but the stillness of things enduring along with me

as if there were nothing single-minded about purpose.

Use is another matter.

I see my illuminated star globe

reflected in the open thermal-paned window

and I feel just like that reflection.

Uselessly redundant.

The understudy of the Milky Way.

A street cleaner hisses and swishes by

clearing the gutter of the long weekend.

Forty-seven years of writing poetry

and I still feel like a chandelier in a meteor shower.

The Alpha Aquarids.

I’ve been painting most of the day.

Making lewd decisions about colour

that are mystically suggestive

to a potential audience of holy men.

Now the night is hot and humid

and I’m sitting here in the glare

of my computer screen’s one-eyed page

trying to come to terms with my age

like a bad burn that left a scar

in the likeness of an affable death-mask

inside the urn of my heart I scatter like ashes on the wind

to keep things perfectly clear and empty.

Ready for what comes.

I haven’t heard a car for hours.

I don’t wish to be young again.

With all I’ve learned about burning

I don’t think I could survive

the acid rain

that scorched like tears

a second time.

Once was enough of a bad neighbourhood

where I wore my starmaps

like prison tats on my sleeves

so no one would fuck with my solitude

as I reached for stars nobody had ever touched.

I hear from the philosophers

that a lot of bad breaks can make you stronger

if you know how to weld them back together again

but just as often

as the angel in the way let’s you go

to transcend your character like the Ubermensch

it can leave you crippled for life.

I know people who didn’t get up after the first blow

and maybe it was stupid of me

not to squat on a comfortable footstool

in the corner of my coma

but I didn’t want to throw the fight

win lose or draw.

I didn’t want to make a career of betting on the wrong man.

Now its all dirty windows and deserted streets

and watching the daffodil lamp posts

shine as they might

trying to open their buds like love letters

that never come to full bloom.

Well past midnight as Mayakovsky would say

for nine lines more

before he picked up the revolver

and declared the Russian Revolution dead

in keeping with the kind of heretic he was

and the reactionary nature of love.

Lost on the vast night sea

without the blessing of Isis

after your ship’s gone down

it isn’t the flare that comes to your rescue.

It isn’t the darkness that blows it out.

It isn’t the depths that drown the captain.

Things just happen

when you strategically retreat

and turn the wheel over to the storm.

God bless you Mayakovsky.

I cry a watershed of mirrors

that don’t break when they fall.

And there are birds dropping seeds

like poetic airlifts

on the new islands of life

you left like afterthoughts

in the widening wake of your volcano.

But you knew as well as I do now

that things just take their course in life

like skulls and rivers and revolutions

and if you live them out to the bitter end

everything you ever dreamed of

that was beautiful and luminous and free

turns into the black farce

of a prophetic heretic

burning at the stake

in no one’s name but his own.

Nine lines of poetry past midnight

and it wasn’t as if you’d run out of things to say

you just realized

as we all have since

that no one was listening from the very beginning.

Period.

A bullet hole.

Poppies of blood spatter

spreading like gypsy wildfire

among the Queen Anne’s Lace of the curtains.

It’s not the windows

but our eyes that thaw like glass

in the intensity of the clear light of the void.

Any welder will tell you

the hotter the flame

the lower the candlepower.

When you’re burning perfectly

you’re invisible.

You become a black mirror of dark energy.

Undetectable.

Indelibly invisible ink

you have to hold up

to the stars to read.

Some people look into it

and don’t see anything.

Nothing but lamp black.

Others tremble like divining rods

above the watershed

of its dark abundance

and feel free to be what they want.

Appearances are only deceptive

because of what you believe.

They’re the fall guys of the truth.

They’re the scapegoats of what you conceive.

They’re the illegitimate children of reality.

They’re the martyrs of a misspent youth.

They’re scarecrows on a makeshift crucifix

that shoot themselves in the head

with snub-nosed words

to scare away the birds

who think they don’t mean it.

It takes the spunk of a drunk poet

with a downed powerline

and a short circuit

to shoot out the stars.

I’ve heard it said

that poets love the pain.

That it’s the wound

that drives us insane.

But I don’t think it’s that way.

We hate the scars

that make child’s play of our nightmares.

We hate the clock on the wall

and its whirlwind of scalpels

that tells us all things are healed in time

like those old one-eyed one-armed house wells

we used to draw from

for inspiration

until they were capped

and taken out of circulation like a tree-stump.

The betterment of human kind.

Rimbaud said be thoroughly modern.

You agreed like a locomotive of poetry

on the wrong gauge of track

and died for the oldest of reasons.

A change of heart.

Deeper reasons the party would disavow.

But when and what did they know about you anyhow?

A revolutionary can’t afford

to have an identity of his own.

Wasn’t that the point all along?

All for one.

One for all.

But millions of people

can’t fill the absence that one can.

You lent them your emptiness

and they filled it like a hall

with politics and poetry.

Eventually the people

will make holy relics

of the hands they cut off

for the usual reasons.

Someone tried to help them too seriously.

The wolves are tolerated among the flock

as useful sheepdogs for a while.

But wolves don’t pant for praise

from their master’s hand

and sheepdogs that want to run with wolves

don’t last very long.

Well past midnight

and I can hear you up above the timberline

howling like a mountain at the moon.

But I don’t think it was love that killed you.

You were thoroughly modern.

It was getting late

and you didn’t die a moment too soon.

You weren’t the content of the revolution.

You were the timing.

PATRICK WHITE