I WAKE UP LATE AGAIN. 3 PM
I wake up late again. 3 pm. More afraid
of what the world can do to me in the
light
than in the dark of the night.
Depressing grey
of the clouds smeared on the windows
like the salt and dirt of last winter
still clinging to my third eye where
the rain
can’t reach to wash it off. Why is
dread
always the alloy of the pain I feel
as soon as I open my eyes to the
devastation
I have made of my life, to write
something real
in fire and roses and ashes and blood,
to pursue
an earthly excellence from world to
world
well beyond the bounds of an ugly life
out of the suicidal folly of staying
true to an art
that’s keel-hauling me like the moon
over the hull of my own heart encrusted
by the corals and worms of my worries
and griefs,
the gnawing anxieties knotting nooses
in the frayed shoelace of my spinal
cord?
And the only ray of light at the end of
the tunnel,
this stoic sword that’s always
tempting me
like an exclamation mark, to fall upon
it like a man
and put an end to this long
apprenticeship
in a guild of sacred clowns. Put the
pen down.
Leave the page blank. Take my hands off
the wheel
of this apocalyptic moonboat in a
pyschic storm
of stars arising in the desert every
hundred years
like the lost imam of a long-awaited
mahdi
surrounding Khartoum like a galaxy of
dust and doom
being swept up into the black hole of a
vacuum
nature abhors. I steel my will like the
sabre of the moon
and imagine I’m anti-heroically
carrying on
this long-standing, counter-intuitive
aesthetic tradition
of winning every battle and still
losing the war.
Just once I’d like to surrender
before
shooting out the stars, raise this
white flag of a page
and say here, take my sword, give it
back to the lake
I found it at the bottom of beside the
herb of immortality
the snake stole from Gilgamesh,
bursting his bubble
as soon as he came up and fell asleep
on the beach,
exhausted by the trouble he’d gone to
to underwhelm death.
As I do, night after night, in a living
coffin
of a smoke-filled room, shedding my
life
like the scales and skin of an old
circumpolar dragon
trying to keep the horns and stars of
its constellation,
dry as powder above the uneventful
horizon
of the false dawns in the whites of
their albino eyes.
I play with my kitten. I talk to my
goldfish.
The walls are lined with a thousand
books
I never want to read again, including
my own. I attend
to the voices in my head by the third
summons
and wait for the mercy of nightfall to
put an end
to my relentless beginning. I never
wanted
to suffer the humiliation of another
art martyr,
still too angry at what happened to the
solitude of Van Gogh
for the cheap consolation of a
guilt-ridden reputation
he doesn’t even know he has. I live
and work in protest
of all the good reasons I have not to
paint and write.
I know I’m diving for pearls on the
moon.
I’m saying a mantra of sacred
syllables over and over
again to myself, like a rosary of
eclipses I made
to remember the names of God in the
echoless valleys
of an eyeless abyss. But she doesn’t
care
if I can’t bring myself to paint
another panicked wolf
to make up what I owe on the rent. Or
feel like the farce
of another domestic morality play of my
uncommon sense
in overcoming my biological imperative
to live
by writing another poem in my own
breath
diminishing on the cold window
in this neglected orphanage of
literature
where I’ve grown too old to be
discovered,
and too accurate about my darkest
prophecies
to believe that Venus is ever going to
cast my shadow again
like the lyric of another heartwarming
loveletter
on this blanched page of snow on a
moonless night
at twenty below the worst case scenario
of the frozen thermometer that’s
become of my bloodstream.
O, yes, I still dream of some random
fluke of circumstance,
some crumb of luck in the corners of my
eyes when I awake
every day to the same recurring
nightmare of white magic
sounding the depths to find Moby Dick
and remove
some of these harpoons like tacks from
a starmap,
needles from the eyes of a voodoo doll,
axial pins
through the thorax of transfixed
butterflies
like the critically acclaimed collected
works
of a posthumous die hard with a rock
solid alibi
for what I’ve done to myself in the
name of poetry.
If it weren’t for the indignity of
the past fifty years
of my prolific life in art, I wouldn’t
have
any self-respect left to live up to the
aristocratic penury
of the birthmark on my heart that
singled me out
to wear this laurel of stinging nettles
to the grave.
Three bucks for a loaf of genetically
modified
twelve grain bread, two cans of tuna,
1.07$ each,
ranch dressing, 1.57$, and a buck for
three lighters
because I haven’t got matches to
light a candle
to smoke a cigarette-butt from the
midden of the ashtray
at three in the morning, when nothing’s
open
but Mac’s Milk and the wound of a
penniless poet,
contemplating maggots in place of
commas
to keep it as clean as a run-on
sentence
as he searches the lean windows for a
star
like a blue jay gleaning a leftover
sunflower
over the blockade of tar paper rooftops
starving the eyes until one window asks
another
for news of the sky out of sight of the
heritage lamp posts.
The silence sings like a stave of hydro
lines in the rain
this dark hour of the morning
dogpaddling toward dawn
when the ghouls will fill my mailbox
with discounts on a funeral I still
can’t afford,
as a way of thinking ahead on behalf of
a family
that doesn’t belong to me anymore if
it ever did.
And God forbid I importune my loved
ones with death.
And the longer you live, the less your
suicide means
to anyone interested in the arts. I’m
intrigued
like a landlocked sailor in the
desolate music
of irreconcilable extremes as the
furnace pipe
knocks and taps and snaps its untimely
rimshots
like someone practising the drums like
the pulse
of a damaged heart, or ice cracking
like my lifelines
under the next step I take toward the
blowholes
of the mermaids who don’t sing to me
as well as they used to
clubbed to death like baby seals
shrieking in e minor
the moment they come up for air and
open their mouths.
PATRICK WHITE
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