UNDER THIS BLACK UMBRELLA

UNDER THIS BLACK UMBRELLA

Under this black umbrella, the eyelid of the black rose

that eclipses the pearls and starfish that I feed it,

my second skin tattooed with a map of undiscovered constellations,

this black poppy of a sky ribbed like a tent

with the bones of bats and dragons, stalked on the spine

of an interrogative scorpion who reverses questions

like a fishing hook, my heart feathered for sacrifice

and pierced by its stinger for bait, though I never know

what god I’m dedicated to, what ghoul of the depths

rises to swallow me whole, I have risked my whole life

against the run of my luck, open in the house

under the shadow of its wing, following a funeral for years

that has lost its way to the grave. No need to tell you

that the mourners have turned to salt

and wandered away with the rain; no need

to tell you that I never knew the deceased

except as an elegant sorrow famous among clowns.

Under this black umbrella, this widow-veil,

this pygmy parachute, this mistaken sail of a lethal love triste

that jumps from attic windows, a deacon of descents,

there are blind birds who have never known the dawn

and seeds that wince in the light, painters

who keep the drapes drawn and their sunglasses on;

and if I were to mention the impoverished nights

I slummed with colloquial carbons while flies

bounced like black holes against the ceiling

looking for emergency exits beyond their event horizons,

I could only bore you with broken-hearted cosmologies.

Under this black umbrella, this shallow bell

with a toad’s tongue, this bitter chandelier

inverted like a crown of thorns that’s had enough to drink,

this black dwarf that’s dwindled from the shining

like the memory of a miscarriage of the light

from years ago, mascara comets rave of happier assassinations

and liberated embryos; life gets around

on the stepping stones of pregnant meteors

and there’s a spider that hangs above me like a plectrum or a hand

trying to master bass-runs on my spinal cord.

Under this black umbrella, this mouth that gapes,

this broad-brimmed palmer’s hat, this radio dish

that begs for wavelengths it can understand

from a dying civilization on a catastrophic brain

tilted on its axis below the equatorial plane

of a decaying orbit light-years away from salvation

and all the lifeboats gone, and the only signs

of advanced intelligence, this swansong in extraterrestrial code,

there are no holy lands, there are no cruel exemptions left.

PATRICK WHITE

BITTER

BITTER

Bitter, bitter, bitter, the taste of men and the curdled perfumes

of their women putting on weight like the moon

and the gaudy hopelessness of their ejaculant children

living in the extinct carapace of a condemned volcano; bitter the lies

they whisper in sleep in dreams to the gods they keep

like spare rooms with skeleton keys

to their public coffins and closets. And bitter the nightwind

that vipers over the schooled sands of their cities

looming a harp of astringent acids into the whole cloth

of a funeral shroud, a body bag to contain the miscreance of their music.

Face after face after face, among orchards, planets, waves,

how many come to fruition, how many fall from ripeness

in unknown places, elicit arms, looking up into the sun that wined them

and sent them away without tears, mysterious sugars

in the fleets of their heart, and seeds, and green

superstitious stars tangled in the lifelines of their unmooring,

to unknown exorcisms on barbarous shores that fear them?

Their blood unspooled like a ribbon for a gift

they never gave, their blood, a scarlet noose of spectral chromosomes

slumped across a bough on the tree of their bitter knowledge

to lynch the lean thief and the ardent stranger

to the rigorous sorrows of their vaporous lustrations; bitter the fate

of the poor as they wait in a traffic jam of genes for the lights to change,

and bitter the restless, blood-drenched soil that receives them

like an embassy overwhelmed by the emergency of their arrival.

Are the paupers of dawn brighter in the root than in the flower,

is there no gentleness left in the flaring poppy to console them,

no milk that isn’t soured, no crumb of light in the pantry

to redeem the crushed heartscapes of a disinfected dream?

Bitter the monstrous sterilities of affluence

that dance on their graves like shovels full of deranged stars

elated by a fate unworthy of their shining, and bitter the church

they pearl around the lie of their filth

to convince the maggot of wings. That song is dead in the mouths of men,

that song is rock that once transformed the desert into roses

and gathered eyes like bees, like poets to their unfolding,

and bitter the aftermath of forgeries that heed the call

but will not answer the singer in the well

hoarse with mysteries in supple tongues

that confound the fallen towers with echoes, thieves, and voiceless birds.

And bitter to know this, bitter to say this, bitter

to discover this truth on the wrecked shores of the heart

the corpse of a beached dolphin suffocating under its own dead weight,

betrayed by the Judas-needle of too many messianic norths.

And there shall be no respite from the pettiness

of the enflamed parasite grown fanatical with the consumption of power,

no grace in the waltz of the tide that wears its gown of oil

like bitter weeds and formic nettles to a funeral ball

celebrating the providential death of excellence, no refuge

from the scorching wind that burns the eyes like glass

and welds a race of thorns to every planetary heart

ballistically deposed from the throne of peace where it once governed itself,

infused with the brilliance of a billion inquisitive stars

in the hidden court of the red mandarin

choosing his words like fireflies from the glowing honey of his lantern.

Bitter the stones of exile that once had a pulse; and bitter

the reek of numbers in the pores of our skin

that inform the wind of the approach of the faceless death

of a species blandly annihilated by its own generative toxins.

Where truth is a waste, a garbage-barge, and compassion

an old morality play doomed to an iron simplicity of outcomes,

the clarity of the vivid waters of life tinctured

by the mysterious bliss of the moon

grown infernal with the exudium of priestly acids

that mutate the grotesque ores of the contemporary mind

into reflexive arsenals that bark like junkyard dogs

behind the razor-wire of their impending intent, bitter, bitter, bitter

the snarling isolation, the wary silence of the hunted and condemned.

Our children the convulsion of our own contamination,

the wisdom of the old rotting on the docks of their delayed departure like wheat,

the futile shrines of the spirit desecrated

by the godless holy wars of bureaucratized science

elaborating the norms of death even as it decrys

the astronomical fluke of life against the odds of happenstance,

bitter the view that grimes the seer with faltering lamps

that black the clear day in their dying with the sulphides, scabs and cataracts

that occlude the light with the clustering flies,

the cloaking demons and starless nights

of the myriad immutable facts that enforce themselves like curfews on the vision;

bitter the darkness in the heart that tars the valiant greens

of spurned hopes that want to keep faith with the rain and the sky,

and bitter the schools in the refugee camps of the mind

where the sewers of thought run like open sores

into the tainted watersheds that defile the septic muses.

PATRICK WHITE