WHY DO YOU CAST ME IN THE WORST LIGHT

WHY DO YOU CAST ME IN THE WORST LIGHT

Why do you cast me in the worst light possible

when you know I treat you like the navel of the world,

the Pleiades, the ghost of a mountain

that was once my heart? Why do you lie to me

when you know there are doors beyond the truth

I’ve already walked through

like an initiation into a darkness

that will adorn your breath with stars?

Nothing mundane, nothing extraordinary

and yet I find myself here with you at sixty-three

having run out of mirrors and windows to read,

believing there are no more eyes

like wells in a desert to drink from, no further

delirium of the spirit that won’t prove me a clown

if I were to believe in it at my age

when every hour is either a funeral, a storm, or a crisis.

And yet how much I do want to believe,

how much I long to discover

rain on the moon, mystical fireflies

in the punk and tinder of the cattails,

sacred keychains on the ground at my feet,

a phoenix in the ashes of the blue guitar. At times

everything is ecclesiastically vain, contaminated

by the insight, bad meat in the mindstream,

that everything I ever cherished and tried to emulate

is nothing more than the shabby dream,

the random action of expiring illusions

indifferent to their embodiment in blood or blessing,

child, martyr, suicide or saint,

prick, pariah, or prophet, all

without exception, true to the vision that is them,

even the madman convinced of his private verities

as the apple-tree is convinced of its leaves

and the sun espouses the flower. Is it not absurdly vain,

knowing all things are vain

to feel abandoned by the assurance,

so blithely and brightly assumed when young

among the junkyards and the orchards

that life has not been endured and transcended in vain,

that the tender transience of the fire, and the shadows that it cast,

the myriad transformations, the chrysalis and the coffin,

and all the ore of ardour refined

by the pursuit of an igneous excellence, the grace

of a virtue slowly attained like the taming of a wild gazelle,

or a chair well-made by a man

with the soul of a tree, were not without the grandeur

of a hidden harmony more crucial than the obvious,

no life lived that was lived to no purpose?

I can give myself like a seed to the wind, I can

sit down at a table of elements with the atoms

and toast the bonding ceremonies of carbon;

and I can shine into the vast openness of an endless night

with the exaltant ferocity of a ray of light

certain there are vital planets

in the path of my shining,

astronomers, lovers, sailors, and birds

to mitigate the expansive vacancies

in the breach of intelligent eyes. And behind

the order, the law, the function,

the dazzling billboards,

I can wander for hours aimlessly in the dark fields

stretching forever beyond our accommodations of chaos.

In the wyrd of perceptions,

sensations, thoughts, passions and ideas,

the mysterious abundance of my sentience,

I can depose the petty elector of myself

and confess like a key to my homelessness

there never was a threshold to cross,

or a door that didn’t open

to greet the emptiness either way as guest or host,

There never was a country, a shadow on the wall,

to obey or rule, nothing

but a devastating freedom that longs for chains

that cannot hold us in our passing because

we alone are the chain that binds us,

the stone that shuts us in,

and even the most infallible of prisons

in the glimpse of an insight, is dust on the wind.

And yet I long, as I have longed for you

and implored intrusions of the night to stay,

for a sweeter affirmation, even of chaos,

than these diminishments of seeing that turn me grey.

In a waste of fear and fire, against

my own unknowing

I long for a lie that’s worthy of the truth, a truth

that masters the masters of illusion

by revealing a place to hide

that is not hidden, an infinite openness that yet embraces

the hard crystal in the heart of the dream-catcher,

and a law that doesn’t condemn

the selflessness of everything that it’s forbidden,

and a mystery that discloses without an exegete

who you are, who I am, what a rose is,

an origin that isn’t a defamation of the end,

an impersonality with the face of a friend.

PATRICK WHITE

TOO FAR FROM SORROW AND TEARS

TOO FAR FROM SORROW AND TEARS

Too far from sorrow and tears, and the terrors,

old blood on the blade of the moon, and the faces I wore

too long in the sun, my eyes peeling like paint,

and even the shadows of the bridal cherry the dull afterword

of a book that’s done its laundry, and all the crimes

that outran their statues and imitations, fossil fingerprints

that laid down their own tracks against the law

with ladders and portable crosswalks, buried

in unsanctified ground with question-marks for gravestones,

decapitated hangers, my heart rudders in the shadows

of the mindstream just enough to counter the flow

without moving, a fish in the tiger-stripes

of the river-reeds just below the drunks on the fieldstone bridge.

Maybe the gravestones will turn into hooks

and a corpse will catch me napping in the shadows,

take possession of my soul and show me where I belong

on an outdated starmap or some water sylph

come floating downriver with a lily in her teeth

and touch up my portrait with a glaze of emerald eyes.

And it’s okay to be this nullity for the moment,

I tell myself, guilty because there’s nothing leaflike

about being a deflated life raft in the spring, because

I am not tormented by money or women or poetry

or crazed by the ions of a gathering storm

and I couldn’t care less if the ashtrays are published or not.

If there’s a theme to the morning I should have sought,

some emptiness or meaning lost in the grass

like an engagement ring in search of a virgin whore,

or a metaphysical wallet that can prove that it exists

I have not found it. All I know is

the first ant of insight just crawled under the door

like a comma with feelers, or a mad composer with two batons,

a tiny eighth note, blacker than anthracite,

looking for inspiration in the eye of a dead guitar,

and it’s beginning to rain, one blue tear after another,

the cachet of a soft violet lament that smells of lilacs,

a moist breathing on the nape of the neck, the kiss of a ghost

that feels like cool cherries, a shudder of light

down the spine of a lightning rod on red alert.

And the wind begins to play the sheet music of the trees on sight,

and crystal chandeliers of elegant water

fall from the lobes of the clouds

and shatter into fangs of glass

like the brittle constellations of last night

that no one was ever born under,

and off in the distance, from a fury of torn shrouds,

a rolling kettle-drum of sesquipedalian thunder

as another recusant kneels before the guillotine

of a raving maniac, unrepentant of his place

in the thirteenth house of an underground zodiac,

and I remember all the things I’ve ever died for.

PATRICK WHITE