FUMAROLE

FUMAROLE

The beast of a thousand unconsummated yesterdays

born without names in the gutter

roars in the rags of its own blood

for the poxy apricot of the rising moon. My voice

is a guitar without strings, the dark well

of an eclipse that eats the dragon

that has lingered too long in the depths without stars.

The crazy windows in this burning room

plead for a reason, a purpose, a sign

as they weep themselves into weary honey, sick

of the equity of their seeing, the sloppy script

of another dirty winter that scrawled

its drunken name in the amber penmanship

and metaphysical sunsets of nicotine

encrypted like scars or dry creekbeds

in the guestbooks of their sagging eyes. On the sill,

the ashes of birds, of stars, of dead fly hearts

smaller than the nuggets of gold

panned by the convict bees from the feigned tears

of the cocktease flowers who know how

to renew their virginity by giving it up

like a handful of keys to anyone who knocks. Hot ores

adumbrated into the slag of unapproachable islands

and treacherous harbours in chastity belts.

And though I know better, accepting

what I cannot change in this graveyard

of geriatric storms that have blown themselves out

against the implacable glass that disguises itself as the sky

and waits with its decoy of clouds

for the inadvertent sparrow

to dash the nut of its brain against the impassable windowpane,

I long for a heart of brick, a stone of dried blood

worked loose like a tooth from a crumbling temple

to smash my way out of this brittle museum of things,

this menagerie of balanced coffins

and cordless spinal columns

that account for nothing but the unearthly stillness and vacuity

of a reasonable effort to survive surviving

without a taint of life exceeding

their industrious accountancy. And though I know,

how has it not been drummed into me

by suffering the violet penalties

of love and prismatic separations, the madness

of trying to bridge your own mindstream

to the further shore with the peacock rainbows

of midnight oilslicks that let their serpents down

like the hair of a drowning Medusa, and though I know

and know and know the sad alleys

and unforgivable garbage that reeks like an over-ripe moon

in the cul-de-sacs that enshrine the priestly drunks,

did I not once tear my own heart out at their altars,

and wait for a divinity to seize me

like a flower of fire in ice, still, this long probation

that leaves me with nothing to confess

is a skeleton trying to masturbate, a chain of enslaving orbits

hauling the moon by the nose to a vicious market

that bids for exotic desecrations

to gild its impotence with curious compulsions. And my crime?

I ignored the prevalent hypocrisies of improvement

and self-advancement to occupy

my own harvest-throne in the midst of plenty

and raise myself up like a siege of gratitude

on mystic ladders that scaled

the burning towers of the stars. I obeyed

the stratagems of fire that voiced

the assaults of wonder I launched

like occupation fleets against the willing surrender

of my own mind liberated from the sapphire dungeons

of its own birthstone, the inherited castles of quicksand

that betrayed their own foundations. There was no clemency

in the sentence of the passing years

that hung me like a trophy

in a straitjacket of spider-webs, no poetry

in this exile from light, this starless sky

that no one has ever looked upon with yearning,

no music in the rain that falls from this nuclear winter

that nuns the cauldron of a sterile sea. And though I know

my fate might well be righteously imposed

because I played while others toiled, sang and danced

and squandered the abundant summers of my heart

on the impossible empires in a woman’s eyes,

made dice of the stars and rolled them against

the impregnable walls of chance like constellations,

thrilled by getting away with life

while my blood was still green and brave with expectation,

is it just that my shadow should die before me

longing to be buried in the light

as if it weren’t a suicide; is it God, and mercy, and reason and right

that a warrant for my freedom should have been issued

before a law was contrived to contest it

in the meager forums of feeble appetites? Damn me if you must

to the absurd tillage of these forsaken acres,

yoking the moon to a glass plough

that shatters on the prophetic skulls

of an unrocked cemetery opposed like salt

to the impudent resurrection of the dead.

A volcano thrust through the fault in your seed bed

I will install my shadow

like the relic of a sacred nail

in the perilous hole

it will drive

through your unhallowed head.

PATRICK WHITE