IF THE BREAD GOT ANY HARDER
If the bread got any
harder I’d be buttering stone,
and it’s morning again,
cooler than yesterday
that licked my face like
a dog
with the mosquito-breeding
breath of a reeking ditch;
and maybe there’s a
cabal of stars or confidential angels,
a thirteenth house of
the zodiac
that no one’s ever heard
of, with a garden of black suns
overrun by weeds,
blooming along the walkway
up to the sagging porch,
a place
where the dispossessed
gather to own each other, a hidden harmony
that manages my affairs
along with the stars and the ants
and knows with the
confidence of a nightwind off the sea
that I am supposed to be
here, broke, aging, alone,
dreading the landlord at
the door like the beginning
of another ice-age,
cataract, polar cap,
the shifting of a
continental plate
as I wait like a fault in
apprehension
of the final jolt that
will tear me down.
And all of this in the
name of poetry in a world
that holds the tail of
the new moon like an old black bull in one hand
and guided aimlessly
over the unfurrowed fields
sows microchips and
seedless oats, breeds featherless chickens
and patents animals and
diseases, pierced by the swords
of seven mad lucidities
with no known antidotes.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m
not crying. I’m not pleading for anything.
I’ve got the pride of a
pearl in a scabby oyster about me,
the indefensible dignity
of a pyramid built on quicksand,
the air of an exiled king
of shadows
living
in patrician poverty to uphold me in my solitude,
and
this ruinous occupation of deriving an earthly excellence
out of my sinking like a
mine, always deeper, in search of the ores
that glow in the night
like marrow in the bones of buried constellations:
that’s enough of a
labour to keep me dancing in my ashes,
enough of a continuity to
believe I might still be a road.
I do it for the crazy,
vicious, ignorant, greedy humans
whose lives are only a
ribbon of blood in the water
that boils them into a
feeding frenzy, cannibals on crack,
tearing themselves and
the world apart because
even they sense, wincing
into solutions like straitjackets,
they’re a prelude to
disaster. And I sing for the rare orchids
that are never seen, the
wild asters at the edge of the garbage dump,
the green flame of the
blade of grass,
hotter than acetylene,
that burns with life through the concrete
until it parts like the
Red Sea for an outlawed prophet of one.
There will always be
people
who know how to break
their hearts like bread
and I write to be worthy
of them, to remember them
the way the genes
recall, however faintly,
the genius of their last
selection, the first time a flower had sex,
and everyone’s eyes
have been the colour
of stars and olives,
earth, sky and leaves ever since.
There is something in me
that grieves like a fire
for the passing of
everything, that bleeds like a rose
on the blade of the moon
for everything
that is cut down in its
path without fury or malice,
and the children broken
like windows
that were never
installed in the house, and the poor,
and those, mute and
silent, but for the look in their eyes,
their voices shattered
bird cages plundered
by the cunning and savagery of ideological fangs;
the lifeboat of my heart
swells like an ark
caulked
and pitched by thick nights of sorrow
when
I consider these swept from the table like crumbs
and open my mouth like the
borders of an outraged country
to scream undiplomatic
obscenities
at their virulent persecutors frothing like breakers of
rabies.
Even drowning in a
snake-pit of oilslicks,
I want to throw the world
a strong rope
like the umbilical cord
of another planet
braving the ferocity of
the storm, a lighthouse, to haul it ashore,
or lift it like a fly
from a toilet-bowl.
And if you were to ask
me why,
when I can’t even save
myself, I’d have to say
there’s a cruel folly
in the wisdom of the word once,
the sum of all
knowledge, all compassion,
a fountain and a tree of
blood beyond reason
that drives me to cherish
even
the slightest crack in
the cup by which life leaks out
as if it were a wound of
my own. Born a lost cause,
how could I not squander
myself
on the beauty and truth
and suffering of others
who are not? Poetry looks
at the stars, at the world
through the eyes of a
blind messiah
led out of the desert
sun by a childless eclipse,
and every saint owes his
salvation to a sinner somewhere.
Invited to the feast of
life,
whether above or below
the salt,
who doesn’t offer
themselves,
their blood, their heart,
their mind
like swaddled bread and
wine
or a grateful guitar to
the host at the door?
Who, so devoid of grace,
they wouldn’t honour the gate
they came and went by,
every footstep
an exit and an entrance to
themselves? And something deeper,
I don’t know what it
is, that draws me down into it like a woman,
a curvature of space
that yearns to be filled
with the honey and sugars
of bees and apples
that have ripened their
gold and silver dreams
in the light of the sun,
the moon, the stars
and taste of the earth and
the rain, and the shadows
of birds and butterflies,
of sheltering leaves;
of pilgrim orchards that
passed their way
only a moment ago as long
as the lifespan of water
with
festal cities of love and peace on their mind.
When
I lie down beside her to make love
it’s like returning to
an ancient, native language
that’s been forgotten
in the literalism of the day,
an elemental tongue that
everyone once spoke
spontaneously enthralled
by the eloquent mystery of her beauty,
urgently moved to praise
the world into being again and again
like the falling of
light and rain
on the softening eyelids
of seed-words
that have lain dormant in
their visions for years
in the scorched gardens
of a volcanic brain
that doesn’t know what
any of it means
when every whisper and
kiss
is an embossed grammar of blackberry dreams
and the decrescent wake of
her nails on my back,
a way of ploughing the
moon with a ship,
an analeptic shudder of
delphic bridges off the bow.
Never two flowers the same
in her garden,
and even the thorns of
her black roses,
an enigma of panthers, I
never know
what germinates like
oracles in her caves;
but more absolving than
the youngest of dawns,
I have always believed
because
I can taste her sacred
mountains in my blood,
that there is in the
deltas of the language that she seeks,
the alluvial silk and
gold of a way of seeing
that helps us recall
ourselves as we were and are,
prophecy and
recollection, an ancient future
like the light of a
healing star,
the face we wore like an
orchard
in
the dreamtime of learning to be,
something
crucial and redemptive
about our essential human
nature
that
is only forgotten,
like the ability to play, terminally.
Of all the freedoms I have
ever endorsed
she is the one I live;
chicken wieners
and beans in tomato
sauce, night after night, let it be
this bedlam of money and
thin-skinned heels,
the swarming humiliations
that orbit my distracted skull
like deerflies and
invigilating satellites,
the dark thoughts that
buff the wine with bleach
and boil my morning doves
in battery acid
to turn their ashen
quills into asps and arrows.
What mountain ever rose
higher
than its valley was deep,
what victory
if there was never a
chance of defeat, and if
in the eyes of men crazed
with forgetting themselves
they think they recognize
in me some kind of bad joke,
my pillow stuffed with
nettles, let it be;
because even in the
lipstick on the cigarette-butt
I pick up out of the
gutter
I can be a wild poppy
in a field of August wheat.
PATRICK WHITE
