CARRYING WATER TO THE BURNING HOUSE

CARRYING WATER TO THE BURNING HOUSE

Carrying water to the burning house,

the bottom of the bucket falls out,

a ship on the rocks, a hemorrhaging bell

that broke one of the blood vessels

in its throat like a pipeline to its vocal cords.

I see a woman who went back into the fire

for her purse, her hands pleading against the window

like a Neanderthal cave painting,

melting into the glass like a fly in amber.

Charred vision of a dangerous day in the sunlight.

I don’t want to be writing about this.

I want to be writing about red-winged blackbirds

swaying on the cattails like dozy metronomes

and something sufficiently eternal in the suffusion of sun.

Undisciplined, as if life were all I had to do.

Deep within me someone is angry and weeping.

There’s a wound that wants to take over my mouth

and bleed all over the page like blood on the snow

of a small, warm animal dying under a juniper bush.

I’m usually too uncertain of myself to be

dedicated to this kind of suicide,

but I suspect I’ve fallen into a black hole

and there’s no starmap out of this one.

I’m trying to generate light out of my own body

like a firefly, but I’m only wasting matches

by trying to ignite them in a mirage of rain.

Is it my wound? Is it hers? Am I finished with dying?

It would take a crystallographer to know

how my diamonds hurt like wounded coal.

Whose life is it I’m trying to save

like a madman with a grammar of my own

that talks in tongues to the immaculate indifference

of an abyss that been listening for light years

to me scattering my ashes on the wind

in pointillist flocks of red-winged blackbirds

emerging out of chaos into urgent paradigms

of minerals that learned to replicate their fractals.

Either that, or panspermic microbes in

time capsule meteors landing in the Gobi desert

like the ejecta of Mars or Europa, fire or black ice,

the fashionistas of a planet in hand me down clothes.

Second or third pressing of the grape.

Someone stepped on the coke with stars.

There’s an arsonist in the methane like a fire storm

trying to melt its own polarized ice caps

like the skull of a dragon in total eclipse.

Who knows the secret life of shepherd moons

anymore than they do their own mind

this far from the sun? If there’s any compassion

in a perfect vacuum, God help them both.

If not, I’ve got to rely upon this poem like a lifeboat

with a hole in it the size of the universe

to save my life from the upwelling of things

I don’t understand about me in this tsunami

of hyperbolic sorrow and dysfunctional salvage.

Maybe it’s a sign I should go down with the ship.

Maybe I should affix a gold earring to my left ear

like a drowned sailor and hope I’m not buried alive

when I wash up on shore, a toy of the tides.

Maybe I should have had the star of Isis

tattooed on my left palm to keep me from drowning,

or paddled close to shore with waterwings

that keep the well-stocked poetlings from sinking

instead of being swept out of my own depths

by the roiling of this turbid undertow that pulls me down?

Dogen Zenji: When the truth fills your body and mind

you always feel that something’s missing.

When it doesn’t, you always feel you’ve had enough.

Have I had enough and no longer care what’s missing?

All my koans are in despair. I feel like

making a sling of my yellow belt and shooting

my skull into the sun like an asteroid that just missed earth.

PATRICK WHITE