GOING THROUGH A DARK TIME

GOING THROUGH A DARK TIME

Going through a dark time. Antares, the red ant,

the bitter berry in the heart of Scorpio. Why not

blame it on the stars? How could they deny it?

Living penumbrally in the eclipse of a celestial body.

I want to paint my first old rusty bike that I found

languishing under the neighbour’s stairs, its

deflated tires, spider looms and jinxed prayer wheels

that hadn’t turned for years, want to paint it

with model airplane enamels again and run

a perfect red stripe down the middle of a black fender

gleaming like anthracite in the blue-yellow sun.

How many worlds away I am from that pure moment.

Dark in my heart, gnawing on the skulls of dragons

that have finally become like the moon

that’s never known rain, a frozen watershed

in a locket of ice and no light bulb in the well.

I’m striding down the corridors of a well-polished hell

and I’m turning the portraits of my heroes toward the wall.

Why not? I’ve got no use for their eyes anymore.

I’ve drained the lies out of the samples of their deaths.

I’ve chewed the flavour out of what it was they had to teach.

I’ve trashed my best features in dangerous neighbourhoods.

I’ve broken my own brain like bread with them,

offered them my blood like a rose with teeth

and watched them evaporate like stars in the sun

as if they never really knew they had my devotion.

What I made of them to set my own potential an example.

Something unattainable to aspire to

so I would be sure to lose as they did

preferring a brilliant failure to a mediocre triumph.

I think the quality of a human is a direct function

of the depth of their suffering. And I loved the ones

who cried out so beautifully in their agony

the night birds didn’t dare lift their tiny voices

up again for fear of being put to shame

for the pettiness of their desire. Or the wolves

ever howl at the moon again without being aware

of the absurdity of their longing for an old stone.

I have danced barefoot on the splinters

of the winter chandeliers that brought the trees down

like a palace of tears in a brutal ice storm.

I’ve heard the Pleiades crash like silverware

all over the ground of a botched burglary

and seen the junkies run like collapsed veins

to pick the spoons up like fences and crows.

Going through a dark time. The shamans

are dying in the treetops from the shock

of what they had to see and live to be

if they wanted to die thoroughly back into life again,

apprenticed to their own foreseeable pain like savage healers.

Winged serpents angered by the humiliation of the flesh

like a rose too beautiful not to be abused

by those who desecrate life out of their own self-hatred

that they are possessed by what they despise the most

and beauty will have nothing to do with their power

that isn’t forced, or broken, or garbaged.

The mirrors of the spirit freak and flake away

from the ideals of their silver lining in horror.

Funny how you can come to look upon

even the most passionate of loveletters

with the eyes of a three hundred million year old reptile

as if life could not be borne any other way than as a thorn

through the heart of a voodoo doll

that cursed the good in life for the passing of it.

What have I not buried in this desert of stars

as if one night I would be able to come back to it

and ask it what it dreamed of in my absence?

To see if the afterlife of a mirage tasted

like water, blood, or wine, or more real than death,

the tears of someone who had aged into understanding

when the windows that looked out on life

like a valence of silicon dioxide slow down

like glaciers of glass, and the mirrors speed up

as if they were running out of time for reflection.

Ask a man what he misses the most and listen to the echo

of how long it takes to reach his ears and if

there’s an ocean in his eyes he drowns in

and I’ll reintroduce you to someone you already know

talking to themselves in the dark to keep from going mad.

Who toys with the smiles of their approaching assassins

like the slash of a snake’s mouth breaking into blossom?

Life is the puncture wound of the staple

that was meant to mend it like a bridge

that sat cross-legged on a lotus in meditation.

And it’s easy enough to look at the fireflies after a storm

and the stars so out of touch with the world as it is

you long for the innocence of the childhood distances

you traversed every night you crawled out of your sleep

to approach the mystery of your own solitude

like an estranged familiar calling you to come alone

to the furthest extremes of the night and beyond.

Going through a dark time. Too many gates.

Too many doors. Too many worn thresholds

Too many threadbare carpets under the one-sided window.

Too many dead birds killed by a lack of transparency.

And still, I refuse the blindfold when I’m standing

in front of a firing squad of stars

armed with the latest telescopes.

I’ve always been one of those who prided myself

upon my strength to see it coming from afar off

and stare at my own death in the third eye of it.

And what monument could you possibly raise

befitting someone who made exile and rebellion

the two monolithic cornerstones of their life

if not a rogue planet beyond the reach of gravity

looking for a star they could thrive in the light of

without the slightest shadow of ulterior spontaneity?

Going through a dark time. I will not put my eyes out

by turning up the light on what befalls me,

as if there were something I could save myself from.

I will eat every detail of the pain and not waste

one unmarrowed bone of it. I will consume it whole

like a prophet in the belly of the whale, make the message

flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, and then

I’ll spit it out like a bullet I pulled out of my heart

with my teeth, my soul, the elegance of my desolation.

I’ll make key chains for the blind out of spite

and striate the rocks of this cold prison with the runes

of the horned ones who linger here with me.

I’ll be a mile-high corrective lens of ice

and putting one hand over my third eye

I’ll read the writing on the wall from memory

and renounce every sacred syllable of it like heretic

that thrives on fire, that scatters his ashes in triumph

and feathers the wind like a gnostic phoenix

with gospels of my own where there’s not one imperative.

Pain demands my obedience, threatens to break me.

I smash myself on the rocks like an empty wine goblet

and say, you can break what remains. You can grind

me down to dust, if you like, you can step over me

like Spinoza lying down in the threshold of the synagogue

to atone for what he opened the world’s eyes up to,

but my vision of life, though a squall of stars, remains my own

and the seeing isn’t in my eyes, and the one who suffers

isn’t in chains, nor the door locked on my heart

for fear of the night, for fear of turning to stone

when I look the snake pit in the eye with a microscope,

and observe the minutiae of the heart’s addictive attention to detail.

Though every word be a thorn through my tongue,

Yet will I sing of the agony of lemons and roses

bleeding on the razorwire in No Man’s Land for mercy,

and those compelled by the whips of circumstance

to dance themselves to death because it amuses the cripples,

and the little, amoebic man who never amounted to anything

and his wife who has aged like salt in a conquered city

still thinking she’s a garden ornament, I will sing

in the name of what even the worst must endure,

just to set this methane moon afire in the darkness

like a furnace in an abandoned school of unregenerate clowns.

Going through a dark time. A rite of ordeals,

the brutal pit of the mystery you can break your teeth on

like a koan or an iron-nickel tektite in Antarctica

to get at the life inside your own panspermic mind.

I should happily break my flesh like bread upon the waters

for the fish and the birds, and save the life

of an unworthy man from drowning

like bad meat in a well, or lose

my own precarious foothold on the precipice of an abyss

that humbles me to the point of no return. I should do this

for the thought-trains of the birds that shall come after me

high and late at night through the bars of my longing,

yearning to return to my ancestral homelessness

like a wandering planet that doesn’t give off any light of its own

but shines with life, despite the odds, shines

tenaciously with life through all these transformations

I take on like a river in its own running,

pouring myself out of one life wholly into another

like an igneous fireclock on the nightshift

that keeps adding more carbon to my steel.

Going through a dark time, I will not suffer

this passage passively like smoke, I will not plead

to abstract my senses from reality to deaden the pain

or thin my blood with holy water from a dirty fountain.

This dark child of my life shall not be an orphan.

I will not disown the pain, I will not drive

myself out into the wilderness like a scapegoat

to wash the soot off the temple I cry in

though they were my doves that were stained

in their own blood in the name of a useless sacrifice

to a unity that includes as much of separation

as of love that welds a stronger bond

that doesn’t scar the spirit, or dull the eyes,

or deaden the tongue to the taste of the stars

on the lips of the people who pass through our lives

like thresholds on their way to somewhere else

than this palatial homelessness we dwell in alone

throwing boundary stones like asteroids through the mirrors

just to keep things abundantly clear and open between us.

Going through a dark time. Swimming through a tar pit.

Another doorway without an exit or an entrance.

Another keel-hauling on the hull of the moon

trying to maintain discipline aboard a shipwreck.

And the unbearable sadness that crushes your heart

like a pop can in the depths of an unrevealing ocean.

Your face is a skin graft on a burn victim.

People reach out for you, but only with their hands

when there’s nothing at all, nothing at all to grasp

of what has already come and gone for good or bad,

who can tell? I’m centered like rain in my falling.

And there’s something vaguely radioactive about the way

I glow in the dark, though there are dozens of dead fireflies

on my windowsill that dropped like exhausted stars.

I move into the available dimension of a future

that hasn’t won my confidence, and the past

is the burnt foundation of a crack house in the zodiac

cooking rocks like a meteor shower with its radiant

in the eyes of everyone I meet who’s trying to shoot the stars out.

Going through a dark time. A bardo state. Nirvanic doubt.

The new moon no brighter than the last eclipse.

I hear the disembodied thunder of my amplified heart

making its way toward me like an enlightened storm front.

I’ve always chosen the hardest teachers to ignore

and where the road divides, I’ve gone both ways at once

just to give my earthbound guides a chance of a wishbone

to find their way back on their own by following

the choices they made to get here like an avalanche.

I’m as effortless about my despair as I am about bliss.

I treat them both as if they were none of my business.

The birds and apples come to this rootless tree

of their own accord and the tree does not protest

the unleaving of an earthly excellence

that blossomed awhile in the human heart and was gone.

A windfall of loss. The dead flower frosted with winter stars

in a dream where the waterclocks are frozen in time

and this is perfect and that is perfect and if you take

perfect from perfect, it’s still as perfect as it was then

and as it is now and shall be tomorrow.

I watch the moonrise without breathless aspirations.

I observe the sunset without lingering disappointments.

What I have received in joy, I will not deceive in sorrow.

PATRICK WHITE