THE STARS WILL NOT DEVISE

THE STARS WILL NOT DEVISE

The stars will not devise a way out of your life

that they haven’t already offered you

and the sprawl of green fountains

that hallows you now, the victorious trees,

will later drop all their keys

like a nightwatchman too drunk to get in.

You must stand in the ashes if you want to study orchids,

you must fill your body up with clouds

and red-tailed hawks, and autumn leaves

torn from the pages of the history of fire

if you want to follow what the wind is saying

back to its mouth in the sun.

Everything else is the source of everything else

and the rain knows more about circles and arrows

than all the bows and compasses

of the sad magician who’s stripped his purities of flesh.

Stay close to the earth if you want

to look deeply into the eyes of the stars

and see the golden maggot that hangs from its lifeline

like a message in a tear delivered with wings.

Your blood, no matter how you say it,

is a prelude of wild roses beside a murdered brook,

and there are legends of light on your skin

that are ancient instructions

on how to bring it back to life again. Denude yourself

of those feathers and leaves and mirrors

you dress the morning up in

to go and sit on the corner like an open guitar-case

to deprive the music of the night before.

There are women everywhere, half-awake,

who grope the sheets for you like spare change

in an empty bed, and blue doors where you live

waiting for you to fill the tiny eyes of their spy-holes

with ruined moons willing to sacrifice themselves

for a few moments more.

If you give your word to me

you won’t desecrate their graves with shallow questions,

I’ll show you where the harps

of the enlightened peacocks were buried with honours

when they saw through the veils of the eclipse

that opened their eyes to a dawn

they hadn’t expected. Get up off your knees

in that house of chains and crippled ladders you worship in;

there’s nothing holy about the crutches you contrive

in a shipyard of able bones, and your voyages

are already blessed by the sea that pounds in your chest

to add you to her islands. Can’t you feel

the soft adagios of her secret distances

swaying the keyboard of your crossed horizons like waves?

And why do you quote the fool of your own silence

to contradict the wisdom of the night

that everywhere answers you

with the shadows of bells and owls

you can read between the lines of the stars;

isn’t it clear that all that vastness is a rock in a well

she’s singing to you, a fragrance of time

that wants to voice the solitude

of her lachrymose labyrinths to someone

who knows how to listen

in the nocturnal flowers of her native tongue?

Write, yes, write; by all means

show us the beauty of your soul

in its passage across the moon

whether coming or going, array your lonely jewels

on the carpet of the sky before us

like the fruits and tears and eyes

that have congealed from your sorrows,

and those dark drops of amber and tar

that preserve all your flights and fears intact

like supple summers jailed in a locket; let’s

hold them up, too, to the light and wonder

that you could endure such fables of pain;

and not just your bleeding rubies, not just

your emeritus emeralds and the radiant sapphires

that fell from the crown

that graced the domain of your regal demeanour

with a northern constellation,

but the painted fish and electric eels,

and the sharks and the crabs and the jelly fish

that live in the dead cities of your all night corals

like cheap actors in ravenous wardrobes of blood

playing for real; let’s see them as well,

and all the rank gardens that grow in the dirt

beneath the crescents of your untrimmed nails

slumming like landlords in places you wouldn’t live;

let’s see all of these and more lifting the veils

on the ferrous brides of your unimpeachable sincerity.

But when all the vows have been taken and forsaken

and your dead have been lavishly mourned

in brass, granite, marble, and staples,

let’s see if you know how to drink with the shadows

you go out every sunset

with your tongue as thick as a broom

to sweep from the stairs? After the cool, blue, jazz clefs

warming up like fireflies and fiddleheads

to the implications of emptiness improvising

on the black trumpets of the scorched daylilies,

let’s hear from some passing storm now and again

that you’ve learned how to die enough

that the pulse of a profounder heartbeat

that marks time with the breathing of nightfall

is all that keeps you alive.

PATRICK WHITE