WHITE NIGHT. UNHOLY SOLITUDE
White night. Unholy solitude. Big
flakes
pillow on the windowsill. A pincer of
dream anger
with its claw on my jugular like a
clothes peg
I want to throw down at somebody’s
feet
like an iron gauntlet just to watch the
parasites squirm,
the hypocrites, the frauds, the
uncrucial demeanors
of the literary slugs leaving slimey
contrails
like snotty scars on the mirrors that
hold us up to nature
and think we’re all soiled in the
midst
of so much magnificence, by the trivia
that sticks to them like the garbage
they’ve
picked up along the way rummaging
through the refuse
of other people’s attempts to garden.
Too cold out for the gypsy moths to
swarm the trees
in the mystical clouds of unknowing
they make
careers out of, teaching what they’ve
never tasted.
The Luna moth and her fire, the
butterfly and her flower,
that I can abide up to a point, but
self-appointed experts
on the malignancy of their own
ignorance, it’s
everything I can do from burning down
their house radioactively.
Time mellow me. Wisdom teach me to
level off
at the speed of light so all these bugs
can be frozen
in amber paperweights, toads
snakestruck on their lily-pads,
when time stops and I can put the
future behind me.
The snow ploughs snarl over the
pavement.
I’ve got to get my mind on other
things.
The majesty of angry lions is
squandered on flies.
I’m not agrarian enough to want to be
planting skulls
like crocuses in the killing fields.
These demons
don’t know how to act my age. Don’t
think
of Jesus when he lost it on the
moneylenders.
Don’t think of the Zen masters who
said
poor hole-dwelling devils. I know what
you’re making your living at. Then
beat them
out of the zendo with their horse hair
hossus.
I’m trying to live up to the best of
my delusions
concerning spiritual imagination as a
way of life being poetry
the way water is fish and the air a
flurry of birds.
Whenever you see scales turning into
feathers
you know there’s a snake nearby
getting ready to fly.
Evolution has as active an imagination
as I have.
And nobody, as Dogen Zenji said, likes
a real dragon
but what’s that to the dragon
compared to the effect
it’s going to have like two days of
intense heat
at the end of May, on the tiny jawed
blackflies
back-biting a flamethrower that just
got woken up
from enlightenment in a bad mood on
Okinawa?
God give me the patience to bear myself
like a tuning fork in a snakepit trying
to establish
a little harmony among a lot of
dissonant wavelengths
hissing in the background of the choir
like snowflakes on a furnace burning
holy books
on the pyre of Savonarola at the
Bonfire of the Vanities.
If Luther got to throw an inkwell at
the Devil,
isn’t it only fair the Devil gets to
throw one back
like a black hole at a lot of bad
writing once and awhile
or even as a reasonable compromise
between
taste and compassion or the truth and
pollution,
a partial eclipse? The scariest thing
in my existence,
a blank white page, the obstructionist
angel in the way
that says, No pasaran, thou
shalt not pass.
You just know you’re going to walk
away like Jacob
with an iambic limp, and you’re never
going to win
or pin that kind of intensity down, but
this is the point,
you’re never going to walk away from
the encounter weaker.
You can only lose to your own
advantage.
And the bruises, the scars, the wounds
that never heal
where your heart was pierced by a spear
of bliss
you’re never going to get over, your
bloodstream
efoliating like a rose in heat for the
rest of your life,
that’s the kind of language you can
be proud of,
those are the sacred syllables you can
address the gods in
as if they spoke the same mother-tongue
as you.
If you turn the light around, get yours
eyes off
of whatever they’re glued to in front
of you
like flypaper buzzing with bad genes
helically twisting
on a snakeoil chromosome rising to the
music of their flute,
uncharmed, to get their wings off the
page.
I’ve got a message. The medium is the
messenger.
Not the message. That’s just one
petal of the whole flower.
A drop out, if you will, of everything
that’s being said.
Seven waves of water don’t make a
housewell or a Pierian spring.
Bright vacancy. Dark abundance. Listen
to yourself
when the wind is cooling the white gold
of the wheat down
like a loaf of bread cradled in a tea
towel, when
you’re a widespread famine in a seven
year long abyss.
Listen to yourself like an empty silo
when the wind
is trying to play a tune like a drunk
who remembers
something from his childhood, by
tooting it out on the rim
of a hollow bottleneck. That’s a real
mantra.
A true shibboleth. That will get Ali
Baba and his forty thieves
into the cave quicker than you trying
to pick the lock.
If the hucksters want to be tricksters
or sacred clowns,
the ultimate angle, if you need one, is
to be real,
be the thing itself as if it never
existed before you.
That’s a kind of respect for yourself
when you realize
nothing is confined by an identity that
isn’t a good guess
or a pineal projection mythically
inflated on space and time.
There’s more poetic potential in
being absolutely nothing
but what you see before you as your own
mind arrayed
than there is a muse in the actuality
of what you’ve achieved.
All the haikus are pointing at their
homelessness like autumn leaves.
The messenger is formless. With big
ears.
He sings like three hands clapping in
the dawn,
the wings of waterbirds getting off on
their own applause
as if they didn’t need the
approbation of anyone else
to do what comes most naturally to
them, a native joy
like breathing and seeing and flying in
a sky
their minds bent over them at birth
like the sky goddess, Nut, bridging
heaven and earth.
Poetry isn’t made like an aqueduct.
It’s exprerienced
like water being poured into its own
absence
like a mindstream, not a waterclock, as
a means
of giving time something to listen to
at night
to remind it like a love song that its
temporality is eternal.
Mystically specific. Blind, brilliant,
divine
and infernal. Lightning signing the
rain when all eyes
are upon it like a flash in the pan for
a very few moments.
PATRICK WHITE
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