THERE'S NOTHING COZY ABOUT REAL BEAUTY

THERE’S NOTHING COZY ABOUT REAL BEAUTY

There’s nothing cozy about real beauty.

That’s why it scares you to death

when you’re around it. You sense

that it disdains to kill you

simply because it knows it can

but that only makes you beg for the knife

even more, even deeper, until

you’ve suffered more death

than you ever knew there was to suffer.

It’s the same with the truth. The truth

isn’t the act of a well-meaning

coffee-table sentiment,

a hundred dollar book

of recycled paper

to help save the Caribou, 
a checkered impressionist table-cloth

with compositionally balanced butter-knives

that have never tasted blood in their lives.

If you can’t hear the shriek

of the red-tailed hawk as it plunges

toward a mating pair of killdeer

executing an aerial ballet in May

that would make you cry it’s so beautiful,

you can’t hear the hummingbirds

at the holly hocks either

even if you know sign language.

And no more than the truth, poetry

isn’t a mirror you hold up to nature

with preconceived notions of what

you want to see reflected there.

In hunting season around here

the truth can bleed Bambi upside down

from the bough of a willow

that lets its golden tresses down

all the way to the ground

until its tips are dyed in blood.

The truth can tear the heart of a wolf out

and eat it raw in front

of a classroom of schoolchildren

while it’s still beating.

Go ask any child army.

Go ask any street kid in Ottawa

or any bushwhacked adolescent in Lanark.

You asked me to read your poems

without holding anything back from you

and I have and I won’t.

You keep a tidy house

on the right side of the tracks

of a zodiac with astro-turf lawns.

And I see all your candles

have been dipped in scented wax

and write right-handed

with glowing nibs on the reverent air

and there’s a stick of sandalwood incense

protruding from a buddha’s belly-button

that makes me wonder

whether he’s committing hiri kiri

or lowering his lance at a joust

to let a lady tie a ribbon to it

as you have most of these poems

to designate them your champions.

You’ve bomb-proofed your church so well

with so many lesser lights

in cages and black outs there’s no chance

you’ll ever be struck by a bolt of inspiration.

The lightning doesn’t send messages

like sweetgrass in the beaks of doves.

You sip from the muses like bottled water

from the tears of crystal skulls.

But you haven’t yet learned how

to swallow their watersheds on the moon

or drink blood from the skull of your own

in a single gulp for fear

they’ve been contaminated by fracking.

Flying fish in a sea of shadows

that’s always at full tide

but you never reveal

the constellations of dead starfish

that reek to high heaven

like the stink of enlightenment on the bottom

when the tide bleeds out

like a white-tailed doe.

Happy lifeboats moored safely in port

as if there were nothing to risk or rescue

but a new paint job

as a storm front moves in

like a curtain call of judgmental grey.

All your feral cats have been fixed

and the darkness has no claws or fangs,

and that wilderness that used to howl

in an agony of sex and longing

under your windowsill of potted herbs

all unnerving night long

now purrs impotently in your lap.

You strew your path with rose-petals

but when have you ever walked barefoot

on toxic thorns or the plinths and eyelashes

of the splintered chandeliers of the stars?

You cut the polar ice-caps off

the extremes of a hard-boiled planet

and only eat the temperate zones

you can scoop out with a silver spoon

like the front left parietal lobe

of Humpty Dumpty’s sunny brain.

Blackholes do more to enhance

the radiance of stars and fireflies,

ignite the fire of dragons

on the other side of a wormhole hourglass

into the next coincidence

of a harmoniously contradictory world

than all those sunbeams

you try to keep on

like night lights in a morgue

because you’re afraid to sleep with the dead

and they don’t want to wake up without you.

And I’m not saying

you need to go out and mess up,

trample on your own garden,

turn Taurus loose

in the china shop of the Pleiades.

No one can go out and think their way

into an experience they haven’t had yet.

They merely experience their own thought.

Just another poetry book

having sex with itself

in the hopes of winning an award

to make it feel fulfilled enough

it can take what’s real for granted.

But even Rimbaud who

dissociated his sensibilities rationally

and then killed a man with a stone

on a construction site in Cyprus

discovered how dangerous it is

to broach the spontaneous deliberately.

As for me, I’ve learned

to delight in the despair

of my own crazy wisdom.

As for you, you might start

by turning the light and around

and looking into the darkness within you

not as a smudge on the reputation of your lilies

but as a chunk of coal

that didn’t let your diamonds down.

A suggestion I suggest you ignore

if you’ve understood anything I’ve said

about the nature of poetry

that makes any petty sense at all to you.

And the next time you

you run into your own clarity

like Galileo trying to show you

through his telescope

there are sunspots in your field of view

like bruises on a banana

and the moon is pock-marked

by one too many facelifts,

don’t try to paint the lens

as if you were airbrushing

the imperfections out of your own eyes

just realize how important it is

to open them from the inside out.

And as for those little black ants,

that keep inciting a riot of words

you’ve got no crowd control over

you keep setting honey-traps for,

to keep them from running all over

the planetary orb

of your moonlit peony in bud

like a chaos of minutes

looking for a fixed place

on a spherical waterclock

as if they were all

running out on time simultaneously.

Trust me, or don’t, they’ll let you know

when the sun shines at midnight

and your hour’s come round to bloom.

Meteors cry like diamonds

for the species they make a big impact upon.

And volcanoes eventually

weep their way into islands

that will be seeded by birds and castaways.

The eye of the rose

looks into the secret heart of the worm

and sees the wings of tearful loveletters

being born like butterflies in the rain.

And then the sun appears

and dries them out

like laundry on the line.

Or the negative of an eclipse

hung up in a dark room

like a flypaper map of the stars

in an alternative universe

on the other side of your eyes

that hasn’t come up with a name,

a fixed place, or a myth of origins for you yet

until you’ve passed

like the tiny planet of a firefly

through the gravitational eyes

of a constellation of black holes

without going out

like a flashlight you keep shining

nervously into the dark doorway

of a dragon’s mouth when you write

to see what was making the noise

like the universal cosmic hiss

of a flamethrower in a snakepit

of oracular wavelengths

that keeps you from going

downstairs to find out.

As a Zen master once said.

The stone is lustrous

but there’s nothing inside.

The ore is different

but from it comes gold.

And as any poet knows

who’s ever been inspired

you polish gold in fire.

You don’t write white noise

to block the darkness out

as if you were afraid

of things that go bump in the night.

Don’t fall like a snowflake on a furnace

then try to sip your tears like spit

from its prophetic mouth when you melt.

Be a star, be a Chinese lantern,

be a fire-kite of burning insight.

Light upon light means

the darkness shines as well

on the inside as it does without

whether you see it or not.

The moonrise of an emotion

follows the sunset of a thought.

Two tides of the same ocean,

the highs and the lows

the crest and the trough

of the same wavelength we’re all on.

And the mountain you’re trying to climb

is only as high and white

as the valley is deep and dark.

Not two is the furthest thing

you can say in a universe that isn’t a lie.

There’s a lot of shadowless noon

in your impeccable poetry

but where’s the starless midnight

on the other side of of your eyes?

Don’t orphan your first born

to legitimize your poems

like a forged birth certificate

you hope everyone will recognize

as your rightful place

in a table of contents

with the good taste of a menu.

A suggestion I suggest you ignore

if you’ve understood,

deeply understood

anything I’ve said

about the nature of poetry

that makes any petty sense at all to you.

And I don’t say this to be kind or cruel.

You know how

to harvest the full moon

like a sparrow

the gleanings of the light,

twelve grain whole wheat bread,

but you don’t know how to sow stars

on the dark side of an eclipse

that will sprout and bloom,

a phoenix feathered in wild fire

that will catch on and spread

like life itself

like the syntaretic spark

of the timeless with the fruitless dead.

Out of the dark abundance

of watersheds and roots,

the phoenix energy of your cells,

the bright vacancy of the full moon,

a blossom on a dead branch,

the new moon of a crow in autumn

on a green bough of night birds

that are never at a loss for words

when the truth and the beauty

of the light coming out of the darkness

leaves them as speechless

as a starmap of fireflies

where the constellations have no names,

going up in flames.

PATRICK WHITE