IOTA
SUBSCRIPT
Devoid
of everything but metaphors,
the
bread gone hard in the tasteless cupboard
littered
with bees and flies
that
struggled alone with death
on
the plains of the upper shelf,
I
enrich my patrician poverty
with
poems and painted moons,
dreaming
of the unlikely day
without
anticipation
all
things will be corrected. Hope is a lichen,
a
sea of shadows on the moon
that
drains the water from the stone,
the
siren from the rock. Despair
is
a cuff of black blood
caught
in a bicycle chain,
and
if there’s a dawn to all of this,
a
day when it promises to change,
it
always comes up like a bride
getting
married at her own funeral,
my
heart waiting,
alone
with the flowers
in
an empty limousine.
And
madness is not an option
in
these days of disintegration;
the
asylums are full
and
they’re handing out straitjackets
in
the lifeboats of the survivors
who
jumped ship
when
the sea got rough.
I
could drink or shoot up,
but
that’s a parachute without a rip-cord,
and
besides, who’s got the elevation
to
get off on the rush
of
their falling? And I’ve grown old
as
a foundling
on
the stairs
of
an abandoned church; I have no faith
in
miraculous adoptions
or
the emergency exits
out
of hell, and the deacons of absurdity
long
ago gave up passing me around
from
heart to heart
like
a collection plate
when
they saw how little I rendered
as
the lean scythe of the harvest moon.
Now
the mirrors leave pamphlets,
celestial junkmail
on
the threshold of the mornings
left
to live. The years fly by
like
an abacus of birds
on
the sagging powerlines
that
weave compliant lightning
into
spider-webs.
And
everything I’ve caught
has
poisoned me
as the women came and went,
different styles of voltage,
brown-outs
and butterflies
surging through my heart
like
a new transformer.
Now
I remember them gratefully
as
so many incubators and used cocoons
beyond
conversion.
I
must be a lousy messiah
or
one of the lost wise men
to
have come this far
beguiled
by an elusive star
without
finding a manger anywhere
or
saving anyone
from
their unsalvagable selves,
least
of all me, baffled
as
I always am poetically
by
these luminous rumours of clarity
that
arise like women and waves
to
dispose of what I am
and
enlighten what I’m not
in
the bedrooms and Babylons
and
spiritual snake-pits
of
a dozen sacred brothels.
Aging
is not incremental,
drop
by drop,
a
succession of moments;
it’s
precipitious, a stairwell
of
continental shelves
I
keep stepping off
into
deeper, darker, colder depths,
each,
a longer fall than the last;
or
it’s like the rain
that
fell on me as a child,
and
falls on me now,
and
will fall tomorrow
to
open the flowers
that
will languish on my coffin
before
they launch my moon-boat
crammed
with farewells
into
the grave. On good days
poetry
is an encyclopedic obituary
you
can’t take out of the library,
on
bad, a suicide note you can
as
soon as you pay your late fees.
My
devotion has made me absurd;
and
my famous pursuit
of
an earthly excellence
has
treed me like a pack of hounds,
the
chronic yapping
of
a literally-minded audience
who
want the word made blood.
Out
on a leafless limb
I
linger here
with
only the rising loaf of the moon
to
sustain me, believing
for
lack of a better delusion
as
I scramble the stars like code
it
somehow keeps my life
hopelessly
important
to
bait my own dismemberment
by
maintaining this fire-watch
throughout
these long nights
in
a collapsing wooden tower
erected
by reformed arsonists
looking
for revelation in a lightning strike.
If
I have stayed true to the stars,
to
fireflies and candles,
and
poems that flare like a book of matches,
and
preferred instead
to
read in the upturned palms
of
the passing storms
not
the judgment of a god,
but
a cheiromancy of luminous life-lines,
the
humour is not lost upon me
nor
the danger discounted
that
the way I’m going
I
might very well end up
reaching
out for a rescue
that
condemns me to hang
from
a rope of my own, as usual
the
last to know
in
the name
of
my misplaced loyalty to everything
I
took my own life
to
consecrate
the
unhallowed ground
of
an exalted footnote
wandering
from page to page,
looking
for a cigarette
and
a purple passage worthy
of
its illuminating irrelevancy,
its
penny of qualification
in
the back-rooms, sewers,
short-cuts,
by-ways, alleys and gutters,
the
addenda, appendices
and
mystical errata,
the epilogues and variant redactions
that
wait like empty cupboards
and
extravagant cemeteries
to
annotate these endless drafts
of the unpublishable book of life.
PATRICK
WHITE
