SAVAGE ASHTRAY

SAVAGE ASHTRAY

In the early grey morning trying to tune the tinny rain

to the fleeting keys of the pentatonic birds,

a bad musician lost in the labyrinth of its ear

like a spider or a sodden note with too many sad flags

caught in the torn stave of its saturated web,

I arrive like a messenger from far coasts

and the exotic nightlife of the bright cities of the stars,

having crossed the passionate ocean of the poppy

that dared her maiden voyage in a bottle.

And I say to myself, because no one is listening, behind seawalls

of black coffee and rolled cigarettes

because I own no part of the sky, no

fraction of the leaking house I’m quartered in

with a library of pleading guestbooks I refuse to sign:

look for the secret gold in the crumbling foundation stone,

pull yourself out of the rock like a charmed sword

or the mad ore of a sad crown in a kingdom of one.

But pauper that I am, I’ve never managed more

than an empty throne, and the antiquated office chair I sit in

was crafted from the timber of burnt windowsills

I rescued like eyelashes from the cooling ashes

of my last revision of the schools of weeping glass

who loved the flaring of the mystic arsonist I used to be.

Whole generations can die in the pause

between one heartbeat and the next and I don’t remember

when it was that I woke up older than the rain

that once derailed my affair with a married sphinx,

but yesterday is not a bruise I want to wear tomorrow

and today is not wise enough to guess the riddle of my sorrow.

More amused than bitter in the expanding interim

of my cosmic solitude, there are graves ahead

I feel compelled to answer from the irrefutable depths

of the opulent silence that owes my voice

a god and a name. And there are roads that I must lead home again,

adopted rivers that have never met their natural headwaters,

and valleys full of fireflies I must endow like brides

before the waxing crescent of the autumn moon

severs the fruit from the wombs of their lachrymose guitars.

And I am weary and scared and inconsolably alone

in the stern mirrors of the morning that reflect my face

like an apology that came too late to make a difference,

or bridge the distance between one beginning

and the next. This is my life, I tell myself, and hope I’m lying.

This is the blue stairwell of my irremissible longing

to suffer the unattainable until I am wholly transformed

in a single embrace, to die with eyes, to heal the wounded beast of coal

so much like nightfall in my blood with salves of flowing diamond,

or crawl from the ashes of miscreant angels with wings.

This is my life on earth as it is, and this who I am in the changing.

a lightning rod in a makeshift morgue

trying to raise myself from the vast surrender of the dead

I was born among to weld their chains to the clouds

in a flash of liberation. And this is my life in the ruins

of darker aspirations that squandered its victory bells

in useless assaults against the intransigent walls of heaven,

the adamant gates of hell. And should I now deny

out here in the open with my small army of masks

depleted by desertion, what I haven’t even admitted to myself?

There never was a way to wage peace against a world

collegiately braced for war. There never was a way

to campaign for love and survive the treaties and truces

that snarled like poison kisses on the cheek of the moon

I could not turn, the bitter cups and skulls and crazy wines

of the sacrificial knives it kept refilling like a garden.

So now there’s this exordium of islands and exiles like me

buried every step of the wayless way ahead

in our own footprints, casualties of the blessings and bullets that missed.

This is my life, and I will not decry it like a stormbird

off the precipitous coasts of savage ashtrays

nor haunt the shore with reading lamps to jackal through the salvage.

PATRICK WHITE