I WANT TO TAKE THE MOON OUT OF THE SKY

I WANT TO TAKE THE MOON OUT OF THE SKY

I want to take the moon out of the sky

like a cup, like a rose of black wine

and drink it down to the last shadow of a mountain,

the last, lost eyelash of the light

that floats on the surface, the final crescent.

If I could inhale fire, or snort the stars

like a rail of radiant coke on a black mirror

and pull the darkness up around me

to keep me warm in the night

against the cold drafts that barge through the window,

if the darkness were a woman

I could throw my arms around

and hold her back against my chest in the bay of my body,

a shore I liked to wake up on

still drunk on the moon

and walk in the morning as she

dazzles me with her nakedness and veils,

the litter of the broken jewelry

she arrays in the sprawling waves, I would, o

believe me I would. I would

take this paint rag of a life

this hard, dirty smear of leftovers on the plate

of so many paintings, this injured towel

that has wiped the blood and tears and clouds,

the wounded sunsets from so many faces and rivers,

from so many brushes and knives and tongues

leeched off the rotten rainbows, the flags,

the bad water in the dark well, I would

take this skin of dirty flowers,

this Joseph’s coat of colours,

this blighted, blotted pelt of soiled skies

and corrupted trees, eyes that have dried

into blisters and scabs, lips

that crack like dry peonies, I would take it

and give it a decent burial, already

the poor, leather shirt

of some archaic Indian from the book of changes

lying in the yarrow of his scattered bones.

Or maybe I could acquire the thunder

of a large, rusty oil drum and burn it at night

in the backyard, cremate it and smudge

the evil spirits out of the house

of my prevailing stars, smoke

the adulterous virgin’s disease away,

like clothes after someone’s died of the plague.

There are days, and this is one of them,

when life seems kinder than I thought

to everyone else but me;

mornings and afternoons, but seldom the nights,

that seem like dead dogs

lying at the side of the highway,

ants in their eyes dissolving like soap

and turkey vultures unravelling

their organs and tendons

like the yellow and scarlet yarn of old sweaters

that will be reknitted into something else

that doesn’t fit, days

when I realize I was born middle-aged,

how homeless my heart is,

and how my voice,

though it’s been hurled into the dawn for years,

is such a lonely bird, not even an echo

disappearing into the silence

of the vast, unanswering spaces that overwhelm it.

I write in the air with the wind for a pen

like a madman who gestures at things

no one else can see, believing against belief,

he’s doing his part to better the world

though it comes with asylums

and bills to his door, demanding

mechanical birds on iron boughs,

and revisions not his to give.

I feel like a cinder in someone else’s eye,

a crumb of sleep shaken out of a dream,

a thread of smoke that stings people

into rinsing me out with anger and tears,

the stone of the new foundation cast away

though all I wanted to do

was astound the blind with stars,

make the dark flower with the wild orchids

of a more luminous fragrance,

arrive with islands of wheat and roses and wine

and lay the cool sage of the moon down

like a silver herb on a scalded heart.

I’m a brilliant hoodlum from the late sixties

as one of my ex-wives called me, leaving,

and we thought we could heal the world

with love and music and art.

Hearts change, times change, and maybe

I’m the casualty of a slow accident

and this is my coma, these days I spend

witching for water in hell,

for signs of life among the corpses

that fell en mass from a terrible height,

going from one to another,

lifting up their pale arms,

the limp necks of broken swans, looking

at my watch to time the indifferent heartbeat

of the pulsing cursor on the computer screen.

I’m a habit of buoyancy

drifting through dense fog,

an empty lifeboat crying out

to a ship that may have gone down years ago:

“Is anyone out there, is anyone alive?”

And no one answers

but the gargantuan vacuities

of the atomic distances between us.

PATRICK WHITE

I WAS A BOY IN CAMPBELL RIVER

I WAS A BOY IN CAMPBELL RIVER

I was a boy in Campbell River, six years old,

and my mother was crying because

she had been abandoned by my father

and had no food for her four children. I told

the strangers my mother was crying,

she had no food for her children,

my father was gone, and in the morning,

boxes of food, while we were sleeping,

stacked high on the wrap-around verandah,

not a gift of the fairies, though it could have been so,

but of the people, the good townspeople

who had come in the night, giving,

to spare my mother’s pride. I hoped

I was my mother’s hero

when she stopped crying. And secretly,

deep within me

as if I’d found a power jewel

I didn’t know I had:

the mouth, the sound, the word, and the heart

that listened: how utterly amazing

that I could do this, that I could speak

and things just happened, good things

for good people who needed help,

for good people who could help:

my mother stopped crying. And again, older,

with a passion for stars

because no one could soil them,

telescopes, because they’re women,

Egyptian mysteries, E.J. Pratt,

model aircraft, and Keats.

I’d write at sunset up on Heartbreak Hill,

where the old prison

that hung seven men

and buried them in the yard once stood,

the bones smothered in yellow broom.

I want you to understand this.

I’d write at sunset up on Heartbreak Hill

where “a thing of beauty

was a joy forever,”

and I was alone, as the night approached

and the hurtful world withdrew,

with myself, a telescope, and the stars

that nobody could touch,

that danced in the lens

like fireflies in a canning jar,

other worlds that knew better than this one.

I was published at ten, and then

awards, highschool, the emotional molasses

of big, sticky feelings that were real tears

but took hours to fall from the eyes

of the ages that groaned like my mother;

the usual tarpit depressions, lavish praise

from the unimpressible English teachers,

my hard, surrogate fathers,

and a lot of golden futures and abalone dawns,

but my best themes

were always wounded animals,

the underdogs, the ones with no voice but mine

which I honed on the stone of the moon

for war, justice, love, wonder.

These were my adolescent centuries

and I used them well, erecting

profound obelisks of thought

scrawled with immortal feeling,

the tragic graffiti of spring,

without forgetting I had a body

and two lives, one on the street,

and the other in my room

where blood and knives reverted

to roses and thorns, a chrysalis

for dragonflies. And the word had eyes

long before it grew a heart

that mattered. Until university, and a woman

who was an apostate madonna

with grails, a Magdelenic muse

who brained me with soft stones

that hurt like lilies, an Irish girl

I married for her white fire

and green eyes. Grails aren’t cauldrons

and cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky,

but the word learned

the triune identity of existence,

longing, celebration, lament.

And I lived everything in the name of poetry,

fucking, funambulism and fury.

The word made itself a god, a shrine,

and raised an idol to itself

and forced itself to its knees.

Only my daughter

was a grace beyond the creed. And these

were the decades of another darkness

deeper than night.

And then I met the black angel Aztec

who killed me, in a distant city

far from the sea. I buried

her knife in my wound, and the fire was hot,

blue, acetylene, and I was humbled by the word,

by the voodoo of her beauty

and without even realizing

I was dead,

truly learned to sing, doves

in the ashes everywhere, oceans

in the rose, stars

that struck like spears

and a long night that was not a reward.

And then the books and the prizes

they laid on my grave

to honour someone I didn’t believe in,

as if the word had disappeared like a bird

into the bright vacancy,

the dark abundance of the sky

with the thread of my blood in its beak

and I could never heal,

and haven’t. And these were the years

black lightning

used me like a filament.

But I moved to the country

with a noble witch from Westmount,

a private thorn with heart

and kept watch in a sacred grove,

King of the Wood

with a rubber sword

for a lightning rod. Paradise awhile

and then I fell again

without a parachute or poppy

to ease the descent. And the women came

with burning ladders

in negligees of gasoline

and tried to turn the phoenix green

but I knew too much about ashes

to dream for long.

For one, the moon was a scythe

and I was starwheat, for another,

a double-bladed ax

that had to fall

on the sons of the sins of the fathers

and didn’t care

if I were an execution or a sacrifice,

and still another, a cougar of desire,

spread her crescents into claws

and mauled my heart like a robin,

but the last, and the youngest,

the final dismemberment

and the worst, drank blood from my skull

when the moon went into eclipse.

And I bless them all forever

from the bottom of a well

where the stars walk on water

and the night is a fractured bell.

And these were the months

that drowned like middle-age,

and the word was robbed of its feathers

and learned to fly like a snake.

Now weeks, days, hours,

bring me their honey and lilacs,

and the old wars I fought for others,

the artillery of my books,

the fuses, the explosives

are matches in the sun,

the abandoned armories of hell,

my blood flagged at half-mast

as the skeletons of strange constellations

that litter the field like legends

unmarrowed by the changes,

mint new medals

for a black farce

that haunts me like the shadow

of the happy crow

that plucks the stars from my eyes;

and now the word is not a word,

and poetry is not a poem,

and the moon is not a widow

who waits by the sea

bruising her heart with gray roses,

but a moment of life, longer than death,

that sings to itself in the starless dark

in a language all of its own.

PATRICK WHITE