PEREGRINATION

PEREGRINATION 

Mauled by the infidel lions of savage hope;

my voice looking for its wings in the ashes of heroic doves

who were immolated like love letters

in my chronic cremation of the world that scorned me like a seed

and ploughed with a razorblade, I sowed shadows on the moon

and reaped a harvest of swords

to feed the open mouths of my wounds, a bitter, burnt bread

that tasted of my own embattled blood. Well beyond

the luckier stars of tamer constellations

I bent space into an igneous foundry of light

and poured myself into my work like a weapon

that would claim its own dark domain from the night

and defend the coronation of my indefensible solitude to the death.

Eventually the madmen and the clowns

and the lost pariahs who drank from tainted grails,

and those who were consumed without enlightenment

at the gates of other flames not strong enough

to grant their petitions of annihilation, and the women

who offered the vines and olives of peace with their bodies

but whose eyes were declarations of war,

and those who tilled their own dead planets

and the freaks and the criminals and the refugees and exiles,

and the dwarfs of envy with their sunspots and rashs

came to seek asylum on the uncertain slopes

of my tormented eruptions. And these were the days

when islands boiled in the sea, days

that stiffened like dogs in their death throes

swamped by the firestorms that tempered their hideous nights

under the eyelids of the tides that flanked the bay,

as skin by skin, I grew the pearl of the earth

out of the crude womb of the oyster slagged by the wave,

out of the black radiance of a ferocious heart

crushed into dark-eyed wine. I lived

as I could among the wrack of battered coasts,

among dismembered, used up things, smashed crabs,

and their fallen coats-of-arms, dead starfish

and spiny sea-urchins disgorged like the garbage of heaven,

and the deranged cryptic of delicate bones

that could only guess at what they’d once articulated,

the flayed pillars of amputated trees and huge molars

of tormented roots twisted by sun and salt, I lived

and prospered as I could

in an unsalvagable nation of the forsaken and marooned,

wholly at home around the driftwood fires

of the derelicts and castaways

who alone had died enough

to hear the oceanic lament that raved like a widow

in the fathomless depths of the bells

I abandoned like poems. But the sea is an obvious garden

that weeds itself

and eventually it uprooted me.

I followed a westerly east across the mountains.

Now I listen to the small thunder of wild apples in a night squall

dragging its nets of rain over a thousand shattered lakes

and the shipwrecks have turned into dilapidated barns,

and the shells of the hermit crabs

are the empty husks of the milkweed pods

that have pulled the rip-cords on a blizzard of angelic parachutes

and the planets still cruise

the same upscale configurations of the stars

casing their b. and e.’s for dogs and burglar alarms,

and in every leaf I see a wave, an ocean in the trees,

and the wind like the tide

still shows life’s asperities the way to my threshold,

but somehow over forty years and thousands of miles,

the poems have changed:

they’re no longer bells, though, bow into the storm,

I still turn the wheel loose

to counter the gales of the rages and sorrows

that overtake me; they’re prophetic lighthouses

on the promontories of hell

and despite the fact I know the dangers

of those dark waters well, and once abandoned them,

on the blackest of nights they’re still the only lights

that don’t forsake me.

PATRICK WHITE