I TAKE THE SLAG AND THE ORE OF THE HEART TONIGHT

I TAKE THE SLAG AND THE ORE OF THE HEART TONIGHT

I take the slag and the ore of the heart tonight

and in the igneous immensity

of country stars and fireflies

pour gold out of the dark crucible of my solitude.

Jupiter rising in the east toward zenith.

Venus blue white as a radiant snowflake

on a furnace that can’t melt it

following the sun down like a bullet

lodged in a cherry-peach flesh wound.

All my emotions, black plumes on a funeral horse.

Unhitch it from the cross and coffin and ecliptic it hauls

horizontally to the edge of the grave.

Unlatch the gate to the starfields

and let it run free

as a warm southwest wind over the wildflowers.

And make no excuse to the undertakers

and relatives of the deceased

why you quit dealing in slaves.

Tell the dead man in the coach

to stand up like a doorway

and act like a decent host to his guests.

And if anyone’s still standing there dumbfounded

with their hands in their pockets

and their feet in their mouth

asking themselves why

all these people are playing at being dead

and what kind of fun they get out of it,

remind him he’s only

the motive of the audience,

not its alibi.

And if he still persists at sticking to his story

refer him to the twisted exclamation marks

that made a big impact like dragonflies

slipped under the windshield wipers

like flyers for a Chinese restaurant buffet

or stuck like fridge magnets to a car radiator

the swallow, the sparrow, the wren

have learned to glean like a garden

in the middle of five acres of asphalt parking lot.

I won’t be cosmically interrogated

by the conventional curiosity of a death bound mind

that doesn’t know when to call it quits,

not when there’s so much to be done

like the work of the moon

to liberate the nightshift

from the sacrificial work habits of the fathers

who laboured like horses

to pull themselves up in the world

like stumps of hard candy

to hand on to their families

as their fathers did or didn’t do for them.

What difference if it’s a plough or a shovel

that digs your grave

or if a Bible or a spade packs down the dirt?

It’s all just a back-handed compliment

and left-handed warning

that you can take things too far

like most ordinary people in life

who stopped to grade and gravel the road

for others who would come behind them

but forgot where they were going themselves.

I take the slag and the ore of the heart tonight

and pour soft gold pocket watches

like the tears of time the size of pears

into new paradigms of awareness to replace

not just the broken windows

in the abandoned houses

along the old cow path of the zodiac,

but the drudgery of the view itself.

What can age if you’re time itself?

What can pass if you’re the space it flys through?

Who among the unborn

need to justify the legitimacy

of they’re not being here to answer?

And who among those who were

slapped out of a dream

their neighbour was having

in the apartment next door

can pretend to be awake

when they’re sleepwalking

down the long, dark, estranged radiant road

of one of their own going on forever

without a sign of arrival in sight

like the great night winds of being

that sweep the stars

off the stairwells of our seeing

as even the lights we used to go by

as far as they could penetrate into the darkness

all that radiance of lighthouses and fireflies

all the eclipses and comets

of prophetic afterthought,

all the oxymoronic selenehelions of insight

into the copulative engendering of opposites

from an optical illusion of consciousness

that never caught on to what not two means,

beyond conceptually,

in their hearts and human relationships.

All this transmogrifying commotion of lucidity,

this chaos of coffins and chrysalids,

this emerging cosmos

of elaborated orders of complexity,

this starmud of the mind that shines

down upon us like mirror images

of the long and short wavelengths

of mirages and oases,

enlightenment and delusion,

in all who settled on the windowsills

and helical stairwells of time,

knowing however much they wanted to stay,

in the squalls and gusts of life and death

they’d be swept away soon enough,

the trivial and sublime in the same breath,

the merest patina of radiant dust

between us and death.

PATRICK WHITE