THE STARS WILL NOT DEVISE

THE STARS WILL NOT DEVISE

The stars will not devise a way out of your life

that they haven’t already offered you

and the sprawl of green fountains

that hallows you now, the victorious trees,

will later drop all their keys

like a nightwatchman too drunk to get in.

You must stand in the ashes if you want to study orchids,

you must fill your body up with clouds

and red-tailed hawks, and autumn leaves

torn from the pages of the history of fire

if you want to follow what the wind is saying

back to its mouth in the sun.

Everything else is the source of everything else

and the rain knows more about circles and arrows

than all the bows and compasses

of the sad magician who’s stripped his purities of flesh.

Stay close to the earth if you want

to look deeply into the eyes of the stars

and see the golden maggot that hangs from its lifeline

like a message in a tear delivered with wings.

Your blood, no matter how you say it,

is a prelude of wild roses beside a murdered brook,

and there are legends of light on your skin

that are ancient instructions

on how to bring it back to life again. Denude yourself

of those feathers and leaves and mirrors

you dress the morning up in

to go and sit on the corner like an open guitar-case

to deprive the music of the night before.

There are women everywhere, half-awake,

who grope the sheets for you like spare change

in an empty bed, and blue doors where you live

waiting for you to fill the tiny eyes of their spy-holes

with ruined moons willing to sacrifice themselves

for a few moments more.

If you give your word to me

you won’t desecrate their graves with shallow questions,

I’ll show you where the harps

of the enlightened peacocks were buried with honours

when they saw through the veils of the eclipse

that opened their eyes to a dawn

they hadn’t expected. Get up off your knees

in that house of chains and crippled ladders you worship in;

there’s nothing holy about the crutches you contrive

in a shipyard of able bones, and your voyages

are already blessed by the sea that pounds in your chest

to add you to her islands. Can’t you feel

the soft adagios of her secret distances

swaying the keyboard of your crossed horizons like waves?

And why do you quote the fool of your own silence

to contradict the wisdom of the night

that everywhere answers you

with the shadows of bells and owls

you can read between the lines of the stars;

isn’t it clear that all that vastness is a rock in a well

she’s singing to you, a fragrance of time

that wants to voice the solitude

of her lachrymose labyrinths to someone

who knows how to listen

in the nocturnal flowers of her native tongue?

Write, yes, write; by all means

show us the beauty of your soul

in its passage across the moon

whether coming or going, array your lonely jewels

on the carpet of the sky before us

like the fruits and tears and eyes

that have congealed from your sorrows,

and those dark drops of amber and tar

that preserve all your flights and fears intact

like supple summers jailed in a locket; let’s

hold them up, too, to the light and wonder

that you could endure such fables of pain;

and not just your bleeding rubies, not just

your emeritus emeralds and the radiant sapphires

that fell from the crown

that graced the domain of your regal demeanour

with a northern constellation,

but the painted fish and electric eels,

and the sharks and the crabs and the jelly fish

that live in the dead cities of your all night corals

like cheap actors in ravenous wardrobes of blood

playing for real; let’s see them as well,

and all the rank gardens that grow in the dirt

beneath the crescents of your untrimmed nails

slumming like landlords in places you wouldn’t live;

let’s see all of these and more lifting the veils

on the ferrous brides of your unimpeachable sincerity.

But when all the vows have been taken and forsaken

and your dead have been lavishly mourned

in brass, granite, marble, and staples,

let’s see if you know how to drink with the shadows

you go out every sunset

with your tongue as thick as a broom

to sweep from the stairs? After the cool, blue, jazz clefs

warming up like fireflies and fiddleheads

to the implications of emptiness improvising

on the black trumpets of the scorched daylilies,

let’s hear from some passing storm now and again

that you’ve learned how to die enough

that the pulse of a profounder heartbeat

that marks time with the breathing of nightfall

is all that keeps you alive.

PATRICK WHITE

THE PALE MONTHS

THE PALE MONTHS

The pale months discharge their attributes of green

in the gripe of small, bitter apples

and the white blossoms

have got their laundry done like nursing caps

and the bonds of friendship with the young

have grown sticky and black, almost obscene,

as they lash the willow like bad actors and beauty queens

with long, drawn-out rehearsals of sappy plays

and the busy wavelengths

of petty mind worms inching toward the virgin cocoons

that might lark their threnodies with real wings

and flammable paper if the little mummies

ever make it to their afterlives. As it is, when they weep

their tears fall like the cold lenses

of leftover concentration camps

they may or may not have read about,

and the split seeds of their careful, furtive eyes,

the tender shoots of agile semi-quavers

run to the black and white keyboards of vinegar

thinking the moon’s just an old whole note,

and the silence that lies in state

like wine in the dark cellars of the sublime

is just another waste of time. They can’t imagine

how many stars and planets and lives it takes

to sugar the black holes of their photographic depressions,

how much light must give itself up to the night

to get one drop of translucent honey

flowing through the narrow veins

of their slim contingencies

and into the green flutes of their bones

like marrow and music. Okay, they’re not

the red wizards of autumn yet

forging swords out of the ores and eras

of the igneous sunsets that have purified their fury in the fire.

They’re too busy looking for their place

and white surplice

in a travelling choir with portable pews

and souvenir crosses of wood. They’re young

and imagine because they say the word good a lot,

they’re good. Let them stand for their hymns and anthems

as they will, it’s natural, it’s right

and there’s even a beauty

in their platitudes and repertoires, their reforms

of ancient hydrogen

that looks like the birth of stars,

the seven spoon-fed sisters of the Pleiades perhaps,

or the reluctant debutantes torn on the horns of Taurus,

white dwarfs and cepheid variables,

young pulsars turning their diamonds in the light

to see if they’ve been cut right, if all the facets

are correctly interfaced

to download easy solar systems from the night.

They’re goldfish in a shark bowl,

flamingo fan tails and neon tetras

in a cannibal aquarium

of tiger-barbs and brutal dime-angels,

they’re an army of baby turtles

holding on to their helmets

as they run for the beaches of Normandy,

strafed by the Stuka seagulls,

black panzers in heavier armour on the cliffs,

black wolves swinging their muzzles into the wind.

It’s a hell of a way to begin

the rites of spring,

but the best steel goes through the fire

and there’s a chastening beyond virginity

that’s got nothing to do with victory

or the peevish tempers of first violins.

And I look at the old women, the derelicts, the crones,

and the roadkill along the highways of life

unstrung by the turkey vultures like dead guitars

and the sad veterans of spring in the swan park

staring themselves to death like foodbanks for birds,

all the lamentable carbons of human existence

down to the last embers of their spent hearts,

the spare change of cogs and bobbins

taken apart like watches, and I see

another kind of beauty, the deeper innocence

of worn bannisters spiralling up like smoke

in the stairwells of old hotels panned by junkies,

sybarites of wood aged and polished

by the sweat and oils of ten thousand different hands

that steadied their ascents and fallings

through years of snakes and ladders

on the chromosomes and rungs

of these who’ve bleached their peptides

in the caustic salts of the sea. Born

a beachcomber among wasted, cast-off things,

the second-hand bins of the stranded performers

and dismantled wild-west shows of the wave,

a seahorse, a Pacific cowboy from the lunatic fringe,

I look efficiently into the secret urgencies within

the Pre-cambrian tidal pools of their fossils and shells,

tears the ocean left behind in the undertow of a thousand farewells,

and a I see a darker kind of flowering

and the mysterious purple fruits

of a second innocence sweeter than the first

long after the apples are out of their diapers

and their blossoms are fouled by rust,

swinging from a dead branch of boney vertebrae

like bells, and moons, and chandeliers

clustered in an eclipse of black cherries,

and windfalls of seasoned planets

waiting to be pushed through the doors

of the hungry dead

in a jubilee year of pious offerings.

See yourself reflected in the face of an old man

if you truly want to understand what grace is,

or the well-used wood of a faithful chair

with a view of forever

beyond plans, if you’ve got the juice

to make something of yourself in the light and the rain

that can embrace the whole of the night,

can hold it like a syllable under the tongue,

a coin of insight, and not go insane. That’s what

courage is, not the charades of the young

besieging the sweetmeats

of moonlight in a nut,

raising their arrogant hammers

like stone gavels on the anvils of the heart,

mistaking their juvenile bias

for the robes of an older law

that presides without judgment

over everything that lives, not the breezy sail

of a quick voyage into the depths,

a love-boat cruise among enchanted islands,

but staring into the eyes of the Medusa

in the snake-pit of an oceanic abyss,

and greeting every grinning serpent

with an antidote and a kiss.

PATRICK WHITE