BURIED UNDER AN AVALANCHE OF TONGUELESS BELLS

BURIED UNDER AN AVALANCHE OF TONGUELESS BELLS

Buried under an avalanche of tongueless bells,

I want to scream. I’m an oyster shell in the midden

of an archaeological dig. Who shucked my pearls?

Trying to weep my way into singing away the pain.

What happened to the Algonquin village that once stood here?

My skull’s an empty locket at the end of the foodchain.

I’ve given more than the less I had to give in the first place.

What do the takers know about sacrifice?

I’m not a strawdog with a deathmask for a face.

My emotions aren’t tinfoil. My tears aren’t wax.

I embroider my dreams in blood on a pillowcase

of razorblades. That way they’ll last like a dye

that holds fast against fading in the bleaching sunlight.

But my varnish is cracking along the agitated fault lines

of my nerves. My shining freaked with gaps

like the dry creekbed of a splintered mirror.

I’m trying to condition the split ends

of the uprooted lightning I transplanted into an urn

of fertilized starmud with enough death in it

to make anything grow. But all I’ve done is burn

my green thumb attempting to turn this desert

in an hourglass into the fertile crescent of the moon.

No exit out of this labyrinth of dead ends,

I’ve eaten the breadcrumbs all the way back

to where my homelessness began. Cartographic spiders

weaving the fibre optics of my situation like starmaps

for unwary flies in the corner. Still, nothing shines.

Whose sign is this? I follow a trophy line of black dwarfs

like a rosary of flies all the way to end of a dangling modifier

but still I can’t find Aldebaran or Arcturus. Am I blind?

Or is this just another black farce of the constellation

I’ve been beading out of burnt match heads,

hoping sooner or later they’ll break into light again

and show me a way out of here like the first magnitude dew

of a new morning on a habitable planet

in an unattainable starcluster far, far from here

the dawn is about to befriend with another attempt at life.

Fat chance of squeezing the Milky Way out of the tits

of seven lean kind. I’m trying to sword dance

with the hard times I’ve fallen upon flat-faced

to the sound of one hand clapping in an audience of echoes

to the slapstick antics of a buffoon tripping over himself

onto the ritual blade that guts his dignity

like a hungry poet hung on a hook in an abattoir,

bleeding out like a blood red star over a bathtub

as the elements of life and light eat themselves

out of house and home like a periodic table from the inside out.

I’ve been shining too much. I’m ferociously lucid.

I’m probably mad. I’m scalded by the cauldrons

of my own visions. My heart wandering like a shepherd moon

in a loose orbit around a demoted planet at the extremes

of the darkness that surrounds the solar system

with the black walnuts of rejected cornerstones

or pine cones that fell far from the dolorous roots

of the sappy evergreens weeping slow glaciers of bitter tears.

Where the bright vacancy of orchards in bloom?

Where the sweet windfalls of dark abundance?

Some child take me by the hand and lead me

like a blind prophet out of this forsaken promised land.

PATRICK WHITE