THE FIRE HYDRANTS LOOK AT THE CHANDELIERS OF BLACK CHERRIES

THE FIRE HYDRANTS LOOK AT THE CHANDELIERS OF BLACK CHERRIES

The fire hydrants look at the chandeliers of black cherries

like Leonid meteor showers they’re never going to put out,

a pawn shop of new moons, a rack of tabled cue-balls.

A difference in the quality of heart, if not kind.

The stolid earthbound. The more translucently cavalier.

Hearts that function. Hearts that look for somewhere to dance

against the gathering storm clouds like fireflies under the stars

while it’s still clear enough for everyone to shine.

The galaxies whirling around their black holes

in three four waltz time knowing behind

all that beauty and grace, like a death mask of dark matter,

lies a chaos of rapture, a state of unknowing

that nonetheless knows, a crazy wisdom,

a lucid ignorance in the eye of a draconian eclipse.

Who needs a crystal skull, or a rattle of the spirit filled

with the sacred seed syllables of a dream grammar

that undermines and derails the logic of syntax

like underground rivers of lunar clay moving

under them in the night, not out of radical spite,

or delusionally estranged from a nature

that is neither true nor false, nor any desire

to see the work train topple into the lake as I saw

happen several times in the muskeg when I

was romantically labouring and teaching on an extra gang

lining and tamping our way through the wilderness

from anywhere to here we thought there was a purpose

as useful as a shovel in quicksand. As I said

who needs a crystal skull when you’ve already

got two eyes in your head and a mind behind them

to create endless paradigms and occult cosmologies

of the world as you see it, create it, and it becomes you?

Nights I weep mercury like a broken-hearted thermometer

taking the measure of my own entropy. Nights I weep

blood and water, cruel roses and compassionate rain

for love affairs I’ve never found the exit or the entrance to

though everything was self-contained and understandable,

but for the pain, but for the pain, expanding like space,

there was never a unit of measure or monad for that

when it’s wavelengths were millions of angstroms off

the scale of the Doppler Shift that would let me know,

in relative frames of reference, whether a heart

was moving toward me or apart. The birthmark

of a meteor with extinction on its mind, or a windfall

of black cherries like balloons in mourning released

like laughing gas at a black mass for poets and pariahs.

Tonight is agony without extasis. I may be

a high wire act crossing the void on my own spinal cord,

who knows how to land on his feet like the stars,

but balance is not peace, and tomorrow I’ll be jumping

through hoops of fire like a tiger of a comet in a circus

of endangered life forms when the lightning

cracks the whip like a ringmaster with a boomslang in his hands.

And the night after that I’ll be carving Mayan calendars

out of the petrified bones of my flesh and blood,

fossils in the Burgess Shale, to count the eras off

since I’ve last seen either of my children, feeling

like Stonehenge without a spring or autumn equinox.

A sun dial of the apocalypse, why has there never

been anyone here to explain this endless silence to me?

Why do the lies go on seeking God to justify themselves

and the truth refuses to speak for itself?

Hey, but I’m made of sterner stuff than that.

An adamantine alloy of necessity and imagination,

I’ve evolved a spiritual immunity to a whole range

of emotional insecticides crop dusting the wild harvest

of my jungle heart with napalm and agent orange,

as much by mutation as through transcendence

when I’m not morphing without roots in a salted wasteland

that’s forgotten the taste of bread and the fragrance of flowers

and everybody’s afraid of eating the polluted fruits of the earth.

PATRICK WHITE