Monday, January 2, 2012

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