THE YOUNG POETS TELL ME I'M OLD

THE YOUNG POETS TELL ME I’M OLD

The young poets tell me I’m old.

The old poets tell me I’m young.

Is it done, then, the work, time to let the sun go down?

Evaporate? Scatter my ashes among the stars

and out wait the eras to shine again?

Or is there still enough within me to immolate,

Take a firefly like the heater of a cigarette

and kiss the fuses of the supernovas, the wicks

of the unlit candles? I don’t feel dead

though I try my extinction on several times a day

to see if it fits yet, if I’ve grown my way into it.

What the river gives up in speed, in flashing

down the heights of its sharp-edged peaks,

its supple effervescence, it more than makes up for

in the mass and the depth of its movement.

Yesterday, a snowflake on a furnace. Today

an encyclopedic glacier greased by its own melting

all the way to the sea. Yesterday, bright vacancy.

Today, dark abundance. And the days and the nights,

this keyboard at my fingertips, the blacks and the whites

of these eighty-eights, is it time to stop playing

and bury it like the spinal column of unknown fossil?

The only pillar of the temple I could never tell

if I were building up or tearing down. Time now

a waterclock of ice, and frost on the garden?

When the wine is asleep in a dark cellar,

what does it dream? Does it remember

the bitter, green grapes, or the headiness of the red?

Does the watershed recall the fountain giddy with birds

or is the goblet empty, the hourglass left overturned,

the full-fledged sunlight dropped its flight feathers?

Assessment. My eyes are cracked like two year old

dry red oak. But they’ll keep you warm in the winter.

I have a ten thousand dollar smile that always has

a little hook of compassionate irony in it, and my crowns

are aligned like the zodiacs of Etruscan kings,

but it’s not out to catch anything, it’s not baleen,

and it’s never been a blue whale skimming krill.

Broke my nose, shattered my elbow, punctured my lungs,

splintered my instep, my right hand fractured and rewired

so many times it’s a necklace of puka shells

and the knuckles have all been punched back

from the Himalayas into the Appalachians.

And my skin is a cuneiform of scars,

a Proto-Nostratic alphabet, a stone calendar

of Mayan glyphs, a stamped passport

to the external world, the used condom

of a horned viper, a bag of water with nine holes in it

that has been shot through like a country mailbox

on the side of the road in passing, the parchment

of a gnostic gospel that’s leathered in the sand

a long time in a dark cave waiting for a goatherd.

My left eye has a black spider brooched to it

like a sloppy gunsight, the skeleton of an umbrella

from a partially detached retina. I grew up

with earthquakes, so I don’t shake when the earth moves.

I don’t drool, mutter, or flare an ear like a conch shell

to hear what the sea is saying. Sleep like the dead,

no dreams when I’m writing, and body still tight

and muscled enough to give the snarling crackheads pause

on a Saturday night outside the Shark and Bull,

and when I put it in black leather like a rat snake

I still feel like a famous eclipse in the moonlight.

Heart still a meteor that breaks its own rules

when I see a beautiful woman. Don’t drink.

I make my own sugars. So my liver and kidneys

are still donatable, and to judge from my last lover

still got a lingham to put a smile on the face of a yoni,

a jewel in the lotus, something Freudian in my slips,

and I haven’t forgotten how to encounter the lips of an orchid.

Smoke too much, but I’ve got a canary in my lungs

that lets the miners know when things

are getting too toxic. Wino of the coffee bean,

black, pure protein, but my nerves remain titanium

and I hear now, despite the excoriations of the past,

it’s a great antioxidant against Alzheimer’s

and people are eating crow like hot asphalt

on their doctor’s advice, and I’m not going to die

of a terrorist heart attack waiting for me up the road

like an i.e.d. without a bomb disposal unit.

Too bad, I would have taken a lot of them with me.

But on the apples of my love, no blight. On the sacred shrouds

of my indecipherable sorrows, no stain. My loyalty

still as suicidal as it’s ever been. My anger

still as focused as a laser and my indignation

at the pettiness, meanness, hypocrisy of my peers

still an early savage flint knapping obsidian spears.

Is the spring really a younger season than the fall

and the sum of autumn’s fallibility, the experience

the spring’s apprenticed to? Not likely, but my wonder

at just being here, doesn’t know what year it is.

My vices aren’t grey. My virtues are still as estranged

as they ever were. And even after fifty years of writing poetry

I still haven’t cracked the koan of my solitude

though I can juggle twelve thoughts in my mouth at once

and say what I mean, without hoping to be understood.

Didn’t have a middle-aged crisis. Maybe I wasn’t

all that important, or maybe everything’s been such a crisis

from the very beginning, I didn’t have time

to look up and notice. And younger women

haven’t been unkind, nor the older ones unmindful

of my boyish charms. And as for my spirit, the lightning

still hasn’t asked the fireflies for a starmap

and my human divinity hasn’t gone crawling to the gods yet,

but there have been moments that lavished felicitous eras

of mauve New England asters in a bolt of morning sunlight

in early September under an apple tree when all I could do

was stare transfixed at how perennially startling

the brevity of the beauty of the earth can actually be.

So my seeing hasn’t aged. Nor my imagination

flaked like paint off the flowers. And I swear

the return journey is a lot more innocent than the first.

Being is time. It isn’t something happening to you

from the outside. It emanates from your heart

and when the lucky day comes you see it’s all now

and in every moment, a whole new universe

flashing out of the void and returning to it

like the pulse of the dawn after dusk after dawn,

and the past is creative and the future’s already

been achieved, and death is not a reason, it’s an art,

how can it not be San Francisco, 1966, as well

as all the regrets you’re going to have about it tomorrow,

when you’re the radiant and the watershed

and the fountain time flows from resplendently

from the seed to the root to the leaf to the flower

and back to the fruit in a tree ring of water,

a sun dog of light, you can’t run from, you can’t

catch up to. Because you’re the sundial, you’re

the waterclock, you’re the pocket-watch, you’re

the hour in its prime just hitting its stride

and you’re the eternity with one toe over the starting line.

PATRICK WHITE