POETRY
Poetry isn’t a talking
fly
on a
one way street in a lightning storm; isn’t the orchid
that issued from the sword in the snakepit
that penned whatever it
saw in stone. What does this mean?
Forty-one years of trying
to push
the singularity of the universe
through the eye of a
needle as large as the reasons why
without twisting the
thread of the original theme,
without shrinking the
sky to an umbrella
in a glass skull freaked
with insistent translucencies.
Poetry isn’t breast-fed
by a doting Medusa
who will excuse your
wailing with a pat on the back
as you try to configure
your verbal relations; it’s not until
the lantern’s
overturned and all the stars and fireflies go out
and your mouth is
stitched shut like a wound
that will never heal, and
the flowers latch their honey-gates
in a surprise eclipse,
and even the worm is a lonely comet
in the eye of the rose
that called for your annihilation,
that the wonder of having
nothing to say for no reason
begins to gather like
light in the wishbone of a harp
and sings to amuse the
silence
with the posthumous
profundities of its own retraction
like a drop of water
crying down a mirror
that didn’t know it
cared. Free yourself
of what you think you have
to say about anything
to hear the urgent
fountain-mouths of eyeless dawns
that write with the
beaks of frenzied birds
that have absorbed the
night like ink. Live
on the underside of the
leaves that never fall
from the unpruned tree
on the moon
if you want to know the
nightmare of the spider
webbed to the morning
like a poem
between two blades of
stargrass.
There’s a storm with a
candle in it
that isn’t a leftover
star, more powerful
than the black-outs of
the lightning
that seizes the heart like
a hawk
and slashs it open,
a love-letter to the world with a knife,
to see what’s truly
phrases your blood to the moon.
Do you understand, do you
truly understand;
there’s a firefly in
the grave,
a soft, shy light like the
glow of a distant city
pearled on a blind
horizon, a black mirror
that absorbs the faces
it reflects like death,
so much brighter than the
white hole
of all that you’ve been
saying
that even the stars are
maggots of light,
commas in the wake of
summer swans,
compared to the oceanic
radiance of that shining.
Drown your paper
lifeboats in that,
add your grief like a
river to the nightsea
you’ve been walking on
like a messiah with a map,
and let go of yourself
like an apple from a bough.
Do you see the blossoms of
the orchard
swept up in the gutters
of the busy world
working hard at its own
extinction; those
are the withered eyelids
of poems,
the useless sails of
spineless foolscap
lined with blue horizons
that asked you where you
were going
and because you answered
like a compass
left you breathless at
the equator, junk-mail
on the doorstep. The world
has been discovered,
the metal capitals
starred like jewels;
the real estate offices
crammed with valleys and lakes.
Sink like a continent that
can’t be colonized
and show me the
thresholds you’ve sloughed like skin,
the footprints of your
transformations
where you jumped from the
tree
that swung you like a
bell
and walked away deranged
by the solitude of your
dangerous humanity.
Look for a door with a
broken hinge and enter.
Stop carving your name
on your bones
like the prows of old
shipwrecks, dismiss that harem
of painted figurines
you’ve bound
to the mast of your bow like a pen
and learn what it really
means
to be destroyed by a
living muse,
to hear the sirens
singing you to death.
There’s a ram and an
altar on the world mountain
waiting for you to drag
yourself up there
like an avalanche of
dead meteors
and plunge the last
crescent of the blood-crazed moon
through your heart like a
sacrifice
in the name of nothing
at all
if you want to true the
wind
to
the womb of your ghostly poems
with
embryonic whispers of “I am. I am. I am.”
PATRICK WHITE
