GETTING UP

GETTING UP

Getting up on the first legs of the morning,

waiting to remember I know how to walk,

as my body changes shifts

and I emerge from the dream-mist

not knowing if I’m stepping out of a lifeboat or a cocoon,

if yesterday’s oars have turned into wings,

or the silver blood of the mud bone

greened like old copper

at the scene of a crime

or if my heart has finally congealed

like a suspicious scar

on the mood ring of the moon

as I resent the orthodoxy of the petty rituals

I have yet to perform with blades and foam and water

on a face that almost scares me

it is so diminishingly mine.

And it’s radiant, and the sun

is reflected in every windshield,

in every palace of ice and hovel of glass,

and even the deepest eclipse within me

that weeps like a dragon

is remotely enhanced by the shining.

Today I will make money.

Today I will pay bills.

Today I will fix the car.

Today I will feed myself intelligently and exercise,

trying to prolong my bruising campaign against death;

I will walk in and out of banks and stores

and greet people with as much sincerity

as they are capable of, careful

not to pour the ocean into a teacup

or think a tear sufficient to mourn the dead seas of the moon.

I will be congenial, kind, and generous;

I will scatter tropical trail mix

in the parking lot of Pizza Hut for the birds

though I know it annoys people

who worry about shit on their cars,

and walk away feeling like an insurgent

who bombed the marketplace into life

with dried pineapple not shrapnel,

though it’s a pathetic protest to offend

the protocols of their chronic opprobrium

by feeding a few birds more

than made it through the freezing night before

and excuses nothing in me that I often fear is worse

when I consider what I could be doing and don’t

because the picket up my intimate ass is the universe

and everything turns on that

like the paddlewheel of a Mississippi showboat.

All day long I will apply Buddhas and Zen masters like poultices

to draw the infection of the world out of my blood

like the noxious fume of a festering rose,

and then upbraid myself insightfully,

confessing to a delegation of mirrors

that it is my seeing, my eyes

that smear the view like slugs,

and that I am obsessively defeated by what I condemn

because I am them, I am them, I am them.

And that’s when I pull the trigger on myself like a fire alarm,

knowing no one’s coming to put me out,

because I haven’t been tested for the right emergency

and there’s never a pilot light on the mystic urgency

to at least be right about the way I know I’m wrong.

But no matter how you beat it,

you can’t beat a violin concerto out of a gong

or labour the rime of light on the lips of a black hole into honey.

All day I will look upon small trees

chained like slaves to a square meter

of lonely earth in an asphalt parking lot

and profoundly lament

the intrusive derangement of my species

that abomination after abomination, shames the fly.

And the fate of a shopping mall sapling

may be the bathetic token

of something more profoundly unspoken,

but all day my spirit will be unmothered

by the existential complicity

of being here like rain on the blood of the roadkill

my karmic imbalance tries to unmean

as everything I cherish turns slightly obscene.

But I know a star cluster far away beyond my fingertips

with the body of a serpent woman

who charms the clay she caresses

by playing her fates and phases on the flutes of the moon

as if every breath were the wind in a gust of doves

she scatters like the sheet music of a liberated choir.

And all day I will taste the infinite constellation of her stars

unspooling the lifeline of the mystery I follow

through the labyrinth of the moon’s horn gates

like cool transfusions of night through my blood

as I turn her image in my heart

like a mysterious jewel

that once wept her crown away

to lift a veil of water like an eye.

And I will smile through the day serenely within

remembering so many things, so many lives,

so many fireflies of tenderness that haven’t happened yet,

and the unsayable passion of the lips that wake the dragon

like a flame to the wick that candles the volcano

into a fury of ecstasy that shocks

the starmaps billions of lightyears away,

and she will be my secret and my sail

and I will disappear over her five horizons like a treble clef

or the whole note of a fleeing night bird into its hidden nocturne.

All day she will flourish within me to heal the mystic herbalist

who knows beyond flower and frond

the dark virtue of the black honey

that pours from her own wounded root like time.

And I can be moved by women who are goblets

spilling over with wine, and women

who turn moonlight into glass

and stand sad and empty

against the vastness of the sky,

witching for mirrors, and those

who were Japanese plum tree blossoms in spring,

the dangerous wine of the rose,

now shattered on the ground

as if the moon had slipped its finger from the ring.

And I have loved the loveliest

and least attentive among them,

and those who were mortal and mad,

and the black peonies of the sexually bad

who have indulged me by shedding their eclipses

until we fell down exhausted beside each other,

two petals in the mud.

But she has stars in her blood

that spice the tongue of the snake,

the grail horns of the divining rod

and the tine of the lightning

that tunes the ashes of the burnt guitar

as if it were still a tree

to the tears of the willow,

and I am addicted by a muse

to a delirium of longing

that burns like a loveletter

written in light and blood and shadows

that slides me under her door

with every breath I take

and unfolds me like a sky or a bird,

a fossilized constellation

buried in the shale of a starmap,

to shine deep within all day long

beyond the light like stars

at the bottom of a well at noon

where she comes to drink like the moon.

PATRICK WHITE