Friday, January 13, 2012

MUSING IN THE AFTERMATH


MUSING IN THE AFTERMATH

Everything sings, the shadows of the winter branches against the streetlamp
laced on the windowpane ribboned by dirt, backddoors and rooftops
and yet I am enveloped in this silence without wings, this voice
that valleys the universe like a drop of water down the spine of a leaf
to the root of no flower, no heart, no simple mystery of the night
maturing into stars. I’m in a room with books, paintings, lamps,
plants, computers, easels and cats. Things are neither right nor wrong
though I flatter myself that I have grown from mistake to mistake,
defeat to defeat and cloak the sum of all my failures
in the unconvincing authority of experience.
It’s rude to take your masks off in the light.
I try to see myself in the darkness like a star
with too much to say that loves to give its hiding place away. Forgive
this indiscretion of my solitude, but my name has obligations
and there’s nothing in the house to eat but swans.
Soon enough there’ll be a term to all these spectral visions
that add their shadows to the lead migrations of my thought
and traverse the motionless deserts of the skull-faced moon.
And what can I say to the pilgrims who come to visit my heart,
all these lean feelings without deceit or art
who crowd around the miracle like damaged mystics and moths
hoping their agony will be immolated in the serene ferocity of the void?
Space is only the rough draft of my emptiness
and ghosts confer in the wings like uninspired actors 
or lie detectors trying to interpret the crimes of my last passion play. 
Before I was born to cross the sky in a blue coffin with a black rose
among all these islands of light, I was the ashes of a bird
in the cold furnace of my life, a jest of the indifferent wind
that toys with the lamp and candle of my seeing.
Now, in every word, among a hundred million burning stars,
it’s enough to watch a vagrant firefly, a constellation of one
blind the universe in a single flash with marvel
as I slide down the helical bannisters of every descending starwell
toward the dark by which the dark is known.
Together with everyone I heed the mystery alone
and I don’t know how I got this way
or if I’m a shadow or a wing, the gesture of anything,
but when the moon is in my window, the night arrayed,
musing in the aftermath of life’s homely escapade,
a little afraid, I feel someone dying, and I sing.

PATRICK WHITE

CRUCIAL DELUSIONS


CRUCIAL DELUSIONS

Thinking sometimes I may have gone in too far
and rendered myself mad on metaphors, thinking sometimes
the river’s turning has degraded into a metaphysical noose
and I’m the prime candidate for some kind of exotic extinction,
with or without enlightenment, and considering too
the exponential myriads of incommunicable interpretations,
as many as the radiant directions of a single shining, though even that
is saying too much, too little, or nothing at all,
I sit here in front of a computer screen,
smoking, drinking black coffee, priming the morning
like an eerie stranger to spring, even the willow
under the church spire, exalting
in its being poured out of something into something
like a waterclock. Over my life, as far back as I can remember,
even in daylight, even in the green morning,
I have always walked under a dark shadow of sky, a long night
that has fallen like a palladium, or radioactive dust
from an ancient, nuclear winter I must have survived
to wonder what food-chain I’m part of now. Who
can understand the myriad selves in a single moment,
the thousands of temples
whose foundations are sapped and torched in a blink of the void
when slavery changes masters and one by one
we become part of the new linkage, precisely
where we are most empty, most apprehensively free,
contriving a bond we can belong to, something
proportional to our courage to be, to create
a delusion that might convince us for awhile that understanding
is not beyond our capacity to make things up
and forget it all began as a kind of play.
In the brevity of always, I am the dark clarity
of the unnamed witness who is and isn’t me,
and I am the actor cast into the stage lights
of the dream and the dreamer, not the thread
of the tiniest spider between them. What
I see of myself, when I’m the cowled observer,
is a long night alone with time and the stars
among the vast indiscriminate deserts
that particulate our despairing monuments and distinctions.
I drink from my own muddy well of wisdom,
looking deeply into the perversion of my reflection
for any sign of love, for any
sign of assent in the light of my glacial seeing. Never
have I been assured of anyone or any part
I’ve ever played to the single occupied seat in the house
that neither applauds nor condemns
from the cold intimacy of its throne
the antics of these crucial delusions, deliberate or spontaneous,
that adorn the mental marquees, the garish neon
of the all-night feature that is me.
The same appalling silence greets the hero
as commends the clown, the theater itself
the owl of an inconclusive afterlife
enacted alike in a brothel or a shrine. No word
from the other side
has ever flowered here, no
ground of being ever sprouted keys to unlock
the efflorescence of this urgent spring, to liberate
the farce of my unknowing
from these straitjackets of affirmation and denial
and let me live sufficiently beyond both
on the nothing I am and the nothing I am not.

PATRICK WHITE