I LOVE THE WORLD THE WAY A MOTHER LOVES A DEAD CHILD

I LOVE THE WORLD THE WAY A MOTHER LOVES A DEAD CHILD

I love the world the way a mother loves a dead child

and sees its ghost everywhere.

I look at the stars and more and more

I see the disappointment in their eyes.

We waste each other like clear cut forests.

In the sacred groves where the priests

are the birds of death, you’re either

a chainsaw or a nail protesting a passion play.

Ever since the last lyric died an agonizing death

poems have become gadgets

in the hands of inventors without fingerprints.

No growth rings in the heartwood of a dead tree.

Tone-deaf door-knockers who write poetry

as a kind of white noise to drown out

the shrieking of the innocent in their crawl spaces.

Chronic renewal of one-eyed overviews.

Most people’s lives are just big enough lies

they’ve told themselves often enough

to believe there may be something to it.

Wounded earth, I weep for you like a slayer

weeps for the slain. You were not my mother.

You were my child. Nemetic humanity

raises its own assassin in paranoid despair.

Measure of the mighty in the power of a dam,

how easy it is to forget the omnipotence

of a drop of rain. It’s still possible to open

cosmic gates of the aviaries and let

all the winged horses fly free and riderless

like the silk paratroopers of the milk weed pods

or the albino umbrellas of smouldering dandelions.

But for the most part

beauty and truth lost heart long ago

and were turned out like fashionistas

on the celebrity catwalks of surrealistic irreverence

and now the peony is wearing the thorns of the rose.

I still go out at night far from town by myself

to amuse the stars with my humanity,

the dents in my shining, the legends of light

I turned into black farces of self-righteous fallibility

as if I had acquired the power to reverse

a diamond back into coal. The mourning dove

studies the occult magic of the crow

and the sacred clowns look for enlightenment

in their shame, in the irrelevant antics

of the painted tears that fall from their eyes

whenever they address themselves

like mirrors in a green room putting their make-up on.

Been in the tide of this night sea of awareness

so long now, I’ve developed a tendency

to round the sharp corners of the crucials

out into more spherically embrasive wavelengths,

kinder pieces of sand-blasted glass

to insulate myself exponentially from the details

as if a full moon were some kind of antidote

to its own fangs and the harvest wasn’t toxic.

But I know I’m only trying to divine my way

by white lightning on the moon illuminating a road

as wide as everywhere. And my childhood rage

is stilling tearing down gates and fences

around open fields where the wildflowers bloom

without starmaps, and the bounty of the earth

isn’t a menu that determines your place in the foodchain.

Poetry’s been the longest good night I’ve ever experienced

and life the deepest, most gracious bow

to all the people, events, and things I’ve ever cherished.

Not too hard to see the lowest common denominator

of all values has become a quantum mechanical lottery

and physics is just a screening myth

for what gets murdered along the way to the promised land.

Enculturated to our own pollution like fish,

though we swim out as far as the spring equinox in Pisces

to pour the universe out of the universe,

worlds waterclocking into worlds, still

after washing ourselves off in stars like water and sand

seeping into our graves like the mirage of an oil spill,

we’re still recognized immediately among the worlds

by the indelibility of our filth, having yet to learn

not to track our identity in after us into the house of life.

The ululation of the loons wailing like Arab widows

reverberating across the lake sounds more

like an angry plea, than a call to prayer,

but who could lament the immensity

of that kind of tragic absence in a single lifetime

without emptying their spirits out like dry wells in a desert

that navigates like a madman by the full moon?

When I was young, I opened up a night school

to explain what a human was to the stars,

but now my soul’s a lot more illiterate than it was

and it’s me that’s asking them to teach me to read.

Even if you look at it like a leather boot

that’s walked down one too many roads

not to feel the pebble of the world bruise its heel,

even though we’ve made a great mess of it,

it’s still a great mystery, yes? Give your assent

without hesitation, or the moon will know you’re lying.

The mysterium tremendum et fascinans of the Romans.

The bright vacancy in the dark abundance

of the ore of our unknowing. Even the hardest heart

bleeds like iron out of the sacred rock

transformed in the forges of the fireflies of mystic insight

into a sword of moonlight worthy of being

laid down upon the waters of life in tribute.

Even if you had to fall upon it more than once

to get the point before you returned it in gratitude.

PATRICK WHITE