LEES

LEES

What a mess I’ve made of it in the name of an earthly excellence,

my life, in the pursuit of poetry, the afterbirth

of the stars that step out of the veils of the creative mystery

into the new legends of their shining. I’m the leftover hydrogen

the placental remainder, the outcast element,

the excess lifeline of an incumbent umbilical cord

that’s eventually eaten by their radiance or blown away,

the ashes of the moth that committed its kite to the flame.

It’s a foolish host that starves at his own feast

and I’ve been generous serving up the earth and sky

and all the things that water can be in these reveries of flowing

when the intimate strangers knock at my door in the night

seeking shelter from the storm; my heart’s on the table

and the slender goblet of the moon is always full

of the blood that I’ve aged into wine. And there’s a guest bed

with clean dreams and fresh paintings on the wall, and I keep

a nightingale on in the hall for the dead and wounded,

and sometimes I’m more of a hospital than a hostel,

but no one’s ever been turned away from what they seek, ever

been denied effusive accommodation on the other side

of my indiscriminate threshold.

What horror, sorrow, joy, rage, longing, lament, love, laughter,

petition, prayer, curse or insight ever arrived,

a pilgrim out of the void, dressed in rags or robes,

beggar and braggart alike, a whisper of waterlilies

or the igneous proclamations of prophetic stone,

to find I wasn’t there to greet their expectations?

What refugee from the boneyards of the butchered nations

ever found a gate, a guard, a border, a passport in their path

or that I was less than a tent and an ocean of wheat

without a shore, when they slumped their distress at my door?

Over the last forty years I’ve embraced them all

without judgment or deceit, ushered them all in

thief, lover, assassin, and sage, to be what they must be

as they take form in the abundant dark

and vacant light of me. Like the sea

in the lowest place of all, greeting its lost rivers, come in, I’ve said,

sit, eat, here’s a stage, a page, a heart and mind and fingertips,

take my seat and borrow my eyes if you’re blind,

my mouth and my ears if your mute and deaf, my soul

if you’re horned and cleft, my body if you’re passionate;

take and make of yourself what you will

until there’s nothing left of me but scrapings off a plate,

bread crumbs in the cupboard, the emaciate ore

of a depleted mine, tailings in the creek

or a crematorium of ashes under the iron fire-dogs of a cold grate.

And I have accepted it all with the grace of a leaf in the fall

and the dignity of a star as it pales in the morning light

to voice their entrance out of the open into being through me,

this eloquence of avatars born of the living word

that upholds the singing bird on the green bough

of an ancient apple-tree. And though time alone will winnow the stars

from the tares and eerie eclipses that blight the field,

even in the falling of the gifts I sought to yield

this is a noble calling that grafts the best to the real. I’ve accepted it

and accept it gratefully now with the humility

of the chrysalis and cocoon cast off

like tiny houses of transformation redressed by the sun and moon

as the dragons and the monarchs, and the lunatic pharaohs

dreaming in their pupae of wide-eyed moths

with feathered feelers. Or sometimes I’m an empty lifeboat

as big as the world, abandoned by the survivors and revivors

after rescue, full of night, without regret, cut loose, and drifting.

PATRICK WHITE