THE BRIEF HISTORY OF NOW

THE BRIEF HISTORY OF NOW

They cancelled the foundation stone

like quicksand, a god, or a bad cheque; finally

after thousands of years of watching her change in a window,

her lingerie spread softly on the clouds,

they seized the moon and raped her

and chained her to a bedpost by the neck. Science

denounced the sloppy dynasty of flesh and bone

and standing in the power circle of its denuded magic

disappeared in a delirium of mystical bosons

that added gravity to the argument that life

was neither divinely humorous nor infernally tragic,

but the astronomical defect of agitated genes.

No one really knows what that means,

but everyone took them at their word

and sacrificed their first-born like obsolete cell-phones

on the altars of the absurd. And in the leafless tree no birds sang

exalted by the morning, and without a warning

that it had had enough of sweeping up the mess,

the wind walked out with seeds in its hair and everywhere

the doctors listened for a pulse, a gust, a breath, a breeze,

nothing was heard but the silence of ancient vacancies

sphinxing the unmoved deserts with time.

There was nothing left to celebrate, nothing sublime

that could lift the human spirit

out of the post-diluvian slime of random selection

to commemorate its myth of origin

with a shrine or an obelisk, or, at the very least,

the good beginning of a spiritual erection.

Bread didn’t rise, and the sun in the east

was a mess of uncertainty and sad yeast.

Even the darkness lost its charisma and taste

and the night was no longer an act of grace

but a junkie turned out with the battered face of the moon.

Hard, hard, hard, the obscenity of human lovelessness

that sipped its sacrament from a coke-spoon

and stripped of its creeds, when down on its knees

to confess the infallibility of its helplessness. The worst

grew bolder than porn and celebrity children

that no one missed on the back of milk cartons

cursed the day they were born. The experts and the wise

pondered the weight of their proof like gold

and alloys of the tempered lies they once foretold,

calculated the infinite odds against the recovery of the truth,

and breaking into a sweat of febrile fears

distinguished the tenure of their correct careers

by calling in a bomb-threat from a telephone-booth in arrears.

Baghdad nosed among its ruins like a missile.

Rwanda cropped its people with machetes;

the gangrene of the Sudan reeked and ran

and everywhere that Jesus walked the Promised Land,

apocalypse was wired to a parked van

as the U.N. and the Vatican proof-read Paul’s epistle,

whistling in the dark about a veto and a thistle

thorning the heart of charity with reservations

that calmed the queasy conscience of the brave and sleazy nations

with press conferences and funeral orations

that talced the rabies of the demonically depraved.

So that in the end, with heartfelt regrets, no one was saved

from anything, not the butchers in the boardrooms

compounding third-world debts, not

the designer generals in their new-age epaulets, not

the testaments of never again that everyone forgets,

not even the babies in their prams and bassinets

waiting to have their asses wiped like bayonets.

And then the bottom fell out. Greed spoke like a nuclear tumour.

And all that was left of civilization

raised on the ethics of deprivation

from the ziggurats of ancient Sumer

to the stock-markets of New York

died like a vicious rumour.

PATRICK WHITE

LEES

LEES

What a mess I’ve made of it in the name of an earthly excellence,

my life, in the pursuit of poetry, the afterbirth

of the stars that step out of the veils of the creative mystery

into the new legends of their shining. I’m the leftover hydrogen

the placental remainder, the outcast element,

the excess lifeline of an incumbent umbilical cord

that’s eventually eaten by their radiance or blown away,

the ashes of the moth that committed its kite to the flame.

It’s a foolish host that starves at his own feast

and I’ve been generous serving up the earth and sky

and all the things that water can be in these reveries of flowing

when the intimate strangers knock at my door in the night

seeking shelter from the storm; my heart’s on the table

and the slender goblet of the moon is always full

of the blood that I’ve aged into wine. And there’s a guest bed

with clean dreams and fresh paintings on the wall, and I keep

a nightingale on in the hall for the dead and wounded,

and sometimes I’m more of a hospital than a hostel,

but no one’s ever been turned away from what they seek, ever

been denied effusive accommodation on the other side

of my indiscriminate threshold.

What horror, sorrow, joy, rage, longing, lament, love, laughter,

petition, prayer, curse or insight ever arrived,

a pilgrim out of the void, dressed in rags or robes,

beggar and braggart alike, a whisper of waterlilies

or the igneous proclamations of prophetic stone,

to find I wasn’t there to greet their expectations?

What refugee from the boneyards of the butchered nations

ever found a gate, a guard, a border, a passport in their path

or that I was less than a tent and an ocean of wheat

without a shore, when they slumped their distress at my door?

Over the last forty years I’ve embraced them all

without judgment or deceit, ushered them all in

thief, lover, assassin, and sage, to be what they must be

as they take form in the abundant dark

and vacant light of me. Like the sea

in the lowest place of all, greeting its lost rivers, come in, I’ve said,

sit, eat, here’s a stage, a page, a heart and mind and fingertips,

take my seat and borrow my eyes if you’re blind,

my mouth and my ears if your mute and deaf, my soul

if you’re horned and cleft, my body if you’re passionate;

take and make of yourself what you will

until there’s nothing left of me but scrapings off a plate,

bread crumbs in the cupboard, the emaciate ore

of a depleted mine, tailings in the creek

or a crematorium of ashes under the iron fire-dogs of a cold grate.

And I have accepted it all with the grace of a leaf in the fall

and the dignity of a star as it pales in the morning light

to voice their entrance out of the open into being through me,

this eloquence of avatars born of the living word

that upholds the singing bird on the green bough

of an ancient apple-tree. And though time alone will winnow the stars

from the tares and eerie eclipses that blight the field,

even in the falling of the gifts I sought to yield

this is a noble calling that grafts the best to the real. I’ve accepted it

and accept it gratefully now with the humility

of the chrysalis and cocoon cast off

like tiny houses of transformation redressed by the sun and moon

as the dragons and the monarchs, and the lunatic pharaohs

dreaming in their pupae of wide-eyed moths

with feathered feelers. Or sometimes I’m an empty lifeboat

as big as the world, abandoned by the survivors and revivors

after rescue, full of night, without regret, cut loose, and drifting.

PATRICK WHITE