THE WORDS ARE MERELY THE PERFORMERS

THE WORDS ARE MERELY THE PERFORMERS

The words are merely the performers,

the jugglers and the acrobats, the fire-swallowers.

The fat lady with a moustache behind

her flap of tent. The Parsifals, the mottled clowns.

The Crips and the Bloods, the red rose and the blue,

the Mafia dons. Thought is not verbal expression.

The word, tree, can’t read. And clever’s a boor shy

of being intelligent. Keats was right when he wrote

how much superior humour is to wit though

he didn’t live to see very much of it.

And Whitman, too, when he made his exit

from the learned astronomer to witness the stars

as if the beauty of reality could speak for itself

and the science of shining had nothing to do

with starmaps. Things are words, labials of the moon.

Abstractions merely the ghosts of the senses

trying to get back to the earth before the dawn comes up.

Things teach us their names like a dynasty of kings

on the stairs of Incan temples. Generations of stars,

the demotic of light, the patois of their mother tongue.

And the way they relate to one another,

in a thousand different grammars, river reeds rooted

in tributaries all flowing into the proto-nostratic

of the one mindstream like sacred syllables of the rain.

The rain says wave, wet, water, and everybody

goes skinny-dipping in the womb of W

hanging on for dear life to an umbilical rope

at the local watering hole. Ever measure the red shift

of a consonant to determine whether it’s going away

or coming toward you? Are your vowels truly edible

or just the wax fruit that pose for your still lives?

In the Beth Luis Nion Druidic tree alphabet

apple trees ask the most questions about how

when, who, why, where, taking their Q from Latin

like a suggestion from a patron of poets. Horace,

perhaps, like a quarterhorse in the stables of Maecenas.

I can hear the windfall that drops from the tops

of the black walnut trees. I understand the semiotics

of the diadems of the stars setting fire to the hair

of the willows in winter plunging their burning tresses

in the river to put them out like matchbooks

in the hands of delinquent boys. Cruel arsonists

of their prankish joys. The fire gods come

looking for fire. The water sylphs hiss like sibilants.

Point is. As long as you’re alive there’s a conversation

going on all the time that you alone are privy to

even when you’re listening with your ear pressed hard

like a seashell to the walls of your skull. The silence

is riddled with the voices of things like space

is saturated with the red wavelengths of the heaviness

of our eyes, dying like the memory of old stars

that once considered us friends, after we finished crying.

The silence is startled by the sudden outburst

of a nightbird and the dark is seized by a longing

to step out of the shadows and reveal itself reciprocally

like a lighthouse calling out from its widow walk

to an empty lifeboat in the fog, drifting aimlessly

without the oar of a verb, or the rudder of a participle

trailing in the wake of a maritime moon, mute

as the bells of an unmoved sea to say three bells, all’s well, all’s well.

PATRICK WHITE