UNDER THE BRIDGE

Under the bridge

with the rest of the homeless

there is a large, rusty oildrum

that a raging orchid of fire blooms in:

my heart.

Anywhere is now my only address

and everywhere the world crosses my threshold.

I know my own spirit

as the eye of the water

knows the moon’s reflection;

a mystic firewalk of luminous petals,

a shattered urn, the shards

of an ancient mirror

that’s never featured anyone,

sharp enough to cut space.

Under the bridge

where the lost keychains

gather to enlighten the night

with stories of the things they could not open,

my spirit is a hot, black rose

on a witching wand

with the crescents of the moon for thorns.

And I have never understood the loss

the heavy bell of my pulse calls me to

like a sorrow that hauls me around tidally

in a dans macabre

or lily-laden funeral procession

to mourn the lethal beauty

of our passage and separation,

the extirpation of the mystery.

Under the bridge

my spirit is free

and no one can evict the wind,

and though the lies and the truths

eventually mingle in a confluence of waters,

and the dead are

as often the shadowmasters of the living,

as the living are lighthouses to them,

I am still robed like a trembling king

in the oilslicks of my delusions

when the guest of my awareness

mistakes the host for a servant,

and the shining seems blighted with sunspots

that struggle pointlessly like flies

on the helical gusts

of my flypaper mind

and the windowsills are thick with the dust

of unattainable aspirations.

So much of what I was taught was wrong.

Under the bridge

the dead gather like leaves at the gate

for hand-outs from the living

who have even less than they do

and the lovers don’t dare remember

what it was like not to crave and despise each other

like the next fix.

Here is where

the sages of the street,

lost and found in the tao of concrete,

linger like ants in empty brandy bottles

whose labels have slipped from them like skin,

slurring their prophecies

in a demotic of scars.

Should you come here,

bring your own totem pole of eras and masks,

the stele of your subjective imaginings

you erected in the circus of your heart

like the axis of an amputated clock

to witness the running of your passions

yoked to golden chariots,

the single pillar of the temple

that houses your most cherished afflictions.

This is where the curses come to die

a natural death

and the blessings

are the enhanced shadows of whatever’s left.

Here even the barnacles

that make toy villages

and give the tiny molars of their dead volcanoes root canals,

have tasted the dark ecstasy

of a moment that spewed them out of their fezs

like the lonely feather of an astounded bird escaping.

Under the bridge

no one knows what the skeletons are pointing at.

I want a compass with a clean needle.

Under the bridge

the ashes and shadows

of hearts that were once certain

argue over what they are the lees of,

what lights and fires

have cast them into perdition

as they swallow their liquor like hourglasses.

Under the bridge I am spared all these meanings

looking for life.

Here meaning itself is meaningless

and I want a life so immediate

I don’t need to grind a mortar out of the stars

to assign myself a place

in what cannot be located.

I don’t want to know who I am all the time

and if there’s any need of a temple,

sanctuary in the quicksand,

let it be the wind.

Love is a coil of flypaper

hung out in the hope

of catching a star;

better to be the wind

and learn to let things go

like seeds and birds and the leaves

of a tree that burnt its own holy book,

tired of flames and feathers.

Under the bridge

where everyone is the missing link

in a chain of tears,

I don’t need to master everything I see

or tighten my spinal cord like a guitar key

to jam with the blind music of the spheres.

I attune myself to space
and sing back-up in the darkness.

Under the bridge

all human knowledge, all art
is graffiti expressed in passing
to make the emptiness homey.

I’ve been weaving my blood like fire

on a loom of bone

into flying carpets and curtains;

I’ve been painting dreamscapes

on the lunar sails in a bottle of wine

and sending them off

on every wave of a delivered heart

with a warning to leave me alone.

I cry along with the rain

to adorn a palace of water

and follow every river

back to the fountain-mouth of a woman.

I plough the nightsilts in the mysterious deltas

of forbidden civilizations,

knowing the pyramids are dust

and that everyone’s afterlife is now.


Under the bridge
the lonely and luckless thresh the oracles

of the candles guttering out in their skulls,
believing love can win a war with a blade of grass

against the serpent-fire of black lightning

that doesn’t need the witness of a nightwatchman
or the fury of a junkyard dog

to keep an eye on things.

One flash of its lucid eclipse
and the work is done.

Under the bridge

you wake up like a rootless tree
that’s free to come and go

like any other illusion

mesmerized by its own inconceivability,

or you’re the moon

eating your own afterbirth in a sea of shadows.

Under the bridge

enlightenment walks the way of the lie

like a forged passport to liberation

to show the refugees of truth
a little known escape-route
out of the war they declared against themselves.

Under the bridge

I am aging.

I am sad.

I am alone;

and there’s a spiritual oilslick

trying to convince me it’s a nightrose

and the golden chariot my heart once was,

stinking of triumph,

is now a garbage truck

reeking of angels

and the accoutrements of an outmoded purity,

the chipped relics of a secret sanctity

that bled to death through its eyes

when the solid turned real

and the fools gathered in amazement

like footnotes

to scoff at the text of themselves.

Now I saturate my silence with compassion

and leave the weeping

to make their own creekbeds

through the precarious terrain

of their infantile schemes

to dazzle the sun

with the candle of their insignificance.

Most still stick out their thumbs

for a free ride to a wild hope and a hunch,

but under the bridge

all the true pilgrims are roadkill;

and anyone who still believes in anything

is merely donating themselves precariously

to a foodbank for cannibals.

Under the bridge

the last resort

is always the burning gate of something better

and the most ardent optimists

are those without a chance:

seven come eleven,

but their only constellation,

snake-eyes.

Every morning I lift the mirror to my lips

and drink my own reflection

like blood from my skull

to forget what I am becoming

as I age like an echo among the mountains

even as a greater translucency

slowly enraptures me

in the competence of an unexpected freedom.

One day

you say good-bye to your voice like a bird

that adorned the tree

throughout the summer of its bearing,

the last flame leaps from the fire

into the darkness like a dancer

that stole everything from you

without offense,

and from that denuding on

everything you’ve got to say

is the wind in leafless branches

trying to sweep the stars from the sky

that might have shown you a way back.

PATRICK WHITE