Thursday, February 23, 2012

THE SWAN FLIES OVER THE LACE CORALS OF THE TREES


THE SWAN FLIES OVER THE LACE CORALS OF THE TREES

The swan flies over the lace corals of the trees.
Albireo in Cygnus homing west.
The boa of the moon unfeathered
by the brittle eclipse of broken shale
that shatters its vase upon the waters
like a high note cracks an hour glass
or a snapping turtle rises
from the bottom of a lake
to pull the full moon down by the leg.
My path is strewn
by lunar peony petals,
by the twilight of a blue rose,
by the silk parachutes of the milkweed pods
by the ghosts of the medicine men
among the wild poppies
shaking their dry rattles at the moon
long after the fire’s gone out
at a ghost dance for rain.
And I’m sad like smoke
for reasons I can’t discern.
A peaceful sorrow among
the bells in my blood as if
we all mourned for the same thing.
Tears falling from the departing wing
of a waterbird rising out of the shadows
like a startling revelation of things to come.
Late autumn and the work
of fulfilment and loss is done.
The winged samara of the maples
lie all over the ground
in a no fly zone of cancelled flight plans.
And there’s a silence
that isn’t the afterlife of sound
deeper than the night
that’s closing in upon me
and there’s the skull of a snake
like a crown without jewels
on the top of a ladder of ribs
laid out on a rock like wampum
it wants to trade for my eyes.
And looking up at the stars
who can say the word eternity
even to themselves
without making the world
and everything in it feel like a smaller place?
And who can say the word love
even as a master of metaphors
and not feel they’re apprenticed
to a work in progress
like Great Barrier Reefs
and Gothic cathedrals on the moon
painted like caves in the New Stone Age?
The last of the asters
exchange similitudes with the stars
as tokens of what they have in common
like diamond and carbon
without really knowing what they are.
Whether one is the estranged avatar
of the other in exile
or merely intimate familiars
with good spiritual manners
on a first name basis
with what they feel they see
of their afterlives in each other’s eyes.
As it is with everything here
speaking in an unknown language
as old as the hills,
older than the moon
like a Rosetta stone
buried in a desert of stars.
The living word, the cursive script
of the original wavelengths
of a snake with wings,
circumpolar Draco,
now a pictograph of bones.
I’ve been reading the constellations
all my life, the mother-tongue
of an alphabet that said everything
into existence like braille I can see
through my fingertips
and read under my feet
like the footprints of a long journey
I’ve undertaken to everywhere,
dead twigs in the Book of Changes
trying to decipher themselves like yarrow sticks
and withered leaves, gnostic gospels
burnt in the Bedouin fires of fall,
all Mayan glyphs of a clockwork catastrophe,
Cretan linear B that talks to itself
like the dream of a sleepwalking Greek
gibbering among the dead?
Polyglot grammars in the tree of life
trying to make an aviary of words
without tongue-tying the roosting birds
to any one branch of the mystery,
any one note of their infinite vocabulary.
Aren’t we all trying to express
the inexpressible through words,
through the sacred syllables
of trees, stars, stones, the black swans
of our occult history, pine-cones,
caterpillars in cocoons
foggy as smudged moons.
Or dragonflies who make
a chrysalis of our throats,
this little house of dead things
we keep trying to give a voice to
like an echo of ourselves,
these hovels and palaces of starmud
we glue together like perfectly bound books
patched from the rags of our tents
torn like wild irises
in this time-swept desert of stars
abandoning our ancestral campfires
for a distant mirage in a wanderlust of smoke
to undergo our transformations,
snakes that have grown wings and sing
three octaves higher than they used to crawl
like an ambush on its belly
through the silence of the river reeds,
a shuttle through a loom,
the loose thread
of an earthbound flying carpet
unravelling like the moon,
shedding its skin like a myth of origin
generation after generation.
Here the spirits of the dead
are not summoned to answer
their names in the mouth of a medium
as if a tree in winter
were to call its birds back
to the abandoned nests,
the empty hearts it holds up
like begging bowls to the sky.
This is not the bone-box
of anything’s final resting place.
This is not the paleolithic tomb
of a retreating glacier carving
spiritual moats around sacred moraines
to elevate the middens of its remains
keeping its fingers crossed
like the ecliptic and the celestial equator
at the spring equinox it will
be reborn again like the sun
hatching out of its cosmic egg
like a phoenix at the winter solstice.
Here, if you listen, if you see,
if you’re a windwatcher like me,
or the crows in the tops of the aspens,
you can read what the dead are writing
in waves shuddering on the waters of life
like the lines of a poem
that has just touched your startled heart
with a feather of breath so poignant,
everything you see before you,
from the hidden wisdom
in the bones of encrypted snakes,
to the runic striations
on the prophetic skulls of the rocks,
is the lyrical masterpiece of the dead
to the living that it’s dedicated to
like a genius to an unknown muse
that whispers something in the crowns
of the leafless birch that feels as if
even as winter approaches like a new moon
everything here in this cradle
of life, light and insight
can hear the ancient lullabies and requiems
of the hidden nightbirds of the dead
blossoming in their roots long before
they’re published on the wind
like tomorrow’s waterbirds returning
to the dead seas and mindstreams
of the harvest moon that inspires them.
Not the coffin, not the trilithon altars
and gates of red-winged sky burials,
not the pyres of the sumac
cremating a phoenix with a flight plan,
but this crucible and cradle of earth
is where it all happens like honey
pouring out of the dark ore of death
indelibly as gold, and water, and breath.
This holiest house of transformation
where the dead hold the new moon
in the arms of the old, not
to teach them how to exit hell
like a bell of light out of the darkness
but how to enter heaven
like a thread of insight
through a needle in the dark
with your eyes wide open
like the seedbed of the dead
to a clearing by the side of a river
they know as well as the names of the stars
that bloomed here last year
like the constellations
of the New England asters
who didn’t wear a black halo of comets
this far off the beaten path,
or a crown of thorns like splintered glass
chipped from the lens of a telescope
but handed out new zodiacs
like superannuated tree rings
in the heartwood of an early spring
like fish jumping
through their own ripples
to add a little bling and flash
like starstruck earrings
to hang like vital signs
from the lobes of the new moon in Pisces.
Here in this place
where the arrow hits the target
like the wavelength of a hawk
sparing the morning dove
with a sprig of peace in its beak,
isn’t the end of the journey,
isn’t the acquisition of anything we seek
but precisely where the bulls-eye
of the expanding universe begins
under these eyelids of water and light
living us all like shapeshifters
in a dream of transformation
where the preludes of our beginnings
are already nudging their way
like a crocus of thought,
a moonrise of emotion,
out of the earth, out of
the spring thaw in our hearts
even before the first snow flake falls
like a distant star on the eyelids
of the darkening hills
or this nugget of a snake’s skull
exchanging wardrobes with the moon
swallows it whole like a cosmic egg
that has swapped the bright vacancy
of the first and last crescents of its fangs
for the dark abundance of the new
as if death and life were
the particle and wavelength phase
snowflakes and stars, waterbirds
and the serpent fire of red-shifted dragons,
were the life and death masks of the same face,
the same breath, the same bone, blood, flesh,
the scrolls and gnostic gospels of skin
we abandon like the myths of origin
of our last avatars, our last incarnations
as if the same size of life and death fits all
even as our skeletons are raised up
like hot dice in the throw of a winning hand,
snake-eyes, or seven come eleven the same
up into the stars like circumpolar constellations
as if they were nothing but thresholds
and event horizons shining radiantly
in all directions at once with no fixed place
that lets anyone stand in the doorway for long,
whether you’re exiting your coffin like a seed,
or making a grand entrance among the stars
of your vast, palatial homelessness
as if you’d just returned
to this prodigal house of life
a moment ago, and hadn’t gone far.
No further than the front and back doors
of your next life, your next death, pulse, breath,
radiance of bright vacancy,
eclipse of dark abundance,
like the new moon in the arms of the old.
Mortal ore with a lifespan of imperishable gold.

PATRICK WHITE

I DID THE KIND OF GOOD A STORM DOES


I DID THE KIND OF GOOD A STORM DOES

I did the kind of good a storm does.
I may have broken some tree limbs
and downed some powerlines along the way
but I cleared the air of its festering
and from top to bottom
we got down to the roots of things
like lightning and rain
like real radicals
free-basing the ideological ions
addicted to their brains
like razorblades.
O ya
I remember now
we were going to save the world from itself.
I gave up trying
when I realized
that if we did that
there would be no one left
to save the world from us.
Trying to justify yourself in retrospect
is like trying to exonerate a big hairdo
you wore back in the early seventies.
It can’t be done
except as a kind of dangerous chess
you play with yourself
and cheat.
It’s fun to play
with the lethal intensities
and swaggering immensities of yesterday
as if all those great sublimities that moved us
like fixed stars
had come down to earth
like the ashs of fireflies
in a snakepit of thought
poured out of tiny urns
the size of a human heart.
When I’ve got nothing else to do
and the moon bores me late at night with its looking
I run my tongue along the edge of your words
like old knives
I’ve kept like a collection of my favourite smiles
to see if they still know how to draw blood
and what that might still mean to my heart.
Maybe I should have fallen on them like swords
as you wanted me to
instead of reading them
like a delinquent boy
in front of a no trespassing sign.
Back in those days
my heart was a rock
and my mind
was a broken windowpane.
But I’m not one of those people
who long for the past
as if you could step into the same river twice.
Everyone forgets
memory
Mnemosyne
is the mother of the muses.
Everyday the past
comes up with a new song
that surpasses the last like the future.
The ghost of tomorrow returns to its grave at dawn.
The past is just as spontaneously inspired
as the present
and makes it up as it goes along
thinking this is what it must be like
to live on and on and on
with your cosmic elbows
leaning on earthly windowsills
wondering what it might be like to die
and come back
reincarnated as a horizon
or a threshold.
But I don’t go back to the past
for the view
like a tourist passing through
his old neighbourhood
to see where he was born and died.
I don’t want a brass plague
for a birth certificate
and a postcard
from the edge of nowhere
for a passport
that lies about my record
for telling
what I mistake for the truth
to anyone who’ll listen.
I don’t want to fake my way into reality
the way they do in Zen.
I don’t want to begin again
like tomorrow’s has-been.
I’m not trying to convert the faithless
to my disbelief
like a tree preaching to a leaf
like a cross to a crucifixion.
I’m not trying to pump my latest work of fiction
up into a universally inflatable religion
you can take on camping trips to the holy land.
I’m not sure
I’m even really trying to understand
the way things were way back then
when we didn’t need to.
Just something to do
when I’m watching the moon
float downstream
like the prophetic skull of Orpheus
all the way from Thrace to Mytilene in Lesbos.
If I look at it long enough
even through a dirty window
I can see a footloose waterlily
preening its feathers
like the swan of a loveletter
late in the autumn
to someone
who will pick it up out of the water
and wonder who it’s from
for the rest of their life
like I do
remembering you
as you are to me
now that all these lunar calendars
have shed their blossoms and leaves
and stand naked as the tree of knowledge
adding zeros to everything
like tree-rings in the heartwood
of my personal history.
I’ve never made a cliche
out of any muse of mine
whether she took me to bed or not.
If she infused me with inspiration
I didn’t abuse her
with a parting shot
like the afterthought
of an ignoble mind
or a paper phoenix
that couldn’t take the heat
when things got sweet and hot.
I come back
like an old wind to a funeral pyre
that blazed its way up to the stars
to see if anything
was left unburnt or unanswered
in the ashes of the scorched earth.
I rock the cradle awhile
like a manger in hell
that once gave birth
to a childless messiah.
I transcend my own innocence
and fall toward paradise
without asking to be forgiven.
Love hangs stars above us all
that take the fall
for the way our scars
demonize our open wounds for living.
I drink from my skull
to your memory
and then I drink to you
whoever you are now.
In a desert on the moon
in a sea of shadows
I drink in the darkness alone
like an open window
to let the birds out
as if they were the only words
I had left to say
about the passing years
to hide my crazy tears
like an atheist on a grailquest
who knows that life
is a mirage
of burning muse water
that tastes like broken mirrors.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU WERE THE INTIMACY


YOU WERE THE INTIMACY

You were the intimacy
of the things I loved
that were so impossibly far away
I could never reach out and touch them
except by touching you.
In the long silence of these past thirty-seven years
I have never been able to look at people again
the way I used to see them before I met you.
There’s a fear in the way I love them
that I learned
from living your absence.
A deep black wounded space within
that has sadly outgrown the stars
like October outlives its fireflies.
And every threshold I’ve crossed ever since
has turned into a long road
with a precipice at the end of my spinal cord
swaying like the first night I met you
on the Capilano Suspension Bridge
and you said
the only way
to overcome your fear of falling
is to have the courage to jump.
And I laughed and said
staring into the gorge
and the thin silver water down below
what’s to fear
if you know how to fall toward paradise?
And you knew right away
I was your kind of challenge.
And I knew you wanted
to sword-dance with razorblades
you laid out like the Tarot
later back at your place
as if you wanted to convince yourself
you were still silly enough to believe in tomorrow.
The candle beside the cards on the floor
didn’t turn out to be
enough of a lighthouse
to warn us of the approaching storm.
We were sincere in the darkness
for a little while
astounded by the expert innocence
of our mindless flesh.
You shone like the sun at midnight
and I came undone like Icarus
to prove I was falling
without regrets
like a spent star
into the singularity
of a whole new universe
where everything that didn’t happen in this one
came uncannily true in the next
for both of us
as if we were at last worthy
in each others’ arms
of our own happiness.
When happiness is brave
it’s bliss.
And when it’s afraid
there’s nothing sadder
than a gift that was never opened.
Joy is a warrior that risked hoping
there was nothing left dying for.
Sorrow comes up with a million reasons.
The only way of life
is not making a way of life.
Nor making
not making a way of life
a way.
One day you just get off the road
and start taking the long way home through the starfields.
You stop looking in the mirror
to see if you still have eyes.
For years after your death
no matter what I looked at
I always saw the same thing.
The black clarity
of your existential absence
staring me in the face
without turning me into stone
because that would have been mercy.
Try how I might
I could never quite
shut the lid on your coffin
or accept
that you were buried in me for good
or that my blood burned
like the infernal red
of an emergency exit
to show me the way out
of heaven and hell
by falling on them both
like a two-edged sword
that killed me deeper into life
than your death ever did.
Either life’s unfair
or I’m not man enough
to live up to your suicide
but I remember how I used to love
feeling the weight
of the nightstream of your hair
as it poured through my hand
like a landscape that could feel
for the first time in a long time
water running in the dry creekbeds of its lifelines.
Things woke up.
And I saw the flowers
among the thorns
that had been guarding them
like the secret names of God
you had to know
to get past the burning angels
through the gates
of your sad return to Eden alone.
The eloquence of your flesh
when you walked on the earth
as if your heart danced to your blood
like an old song we both knew
now a broken harp of bone,
a wounded guitar,
someone laid down for good.
A prophetic skull
without a future
anyone can foretell.
The full moon going down
like a spare penny
into a dry wishing well.
Me looking at the dark hills
like the contours of your corpse laid out
under a collapsed tent
as they wheeled you into the ambulance
to spend your first vast impossibly long night in the morgue
among the dead
who don’t catch their breath
or break their bodies like bread
alone in the stillness
that can’t distinguish one death from another.
However I wept for you
all the hard bitter baffled tears
all the sweet radiant wellsprings
that washed the dust like stars
off the wings of the birds
that had laboured to carry the souls of the dead
far to the west
when I remembered
how blessed I really was
that things had been
so beautifully dangerous for awhile.
And all the dark fathomless watersheds of lucidity
I drowned in like a eye in a grail
looking for butterflies in a suicide note.
All the black pearls
the diamond skulls
the eclipsed chalices
all the precious jewels of my grieving
that death hoarded underground
nothing in the end
but nameless water
frozen between the cracks
of a gravestone as old as the moon.
I remember how I loved your ice-blue eyes
and how they burned with an Arctic clarity
you had to dress warmly for
if you didn’t want to suffer from frost-bite
but there’s more nightshade in them now
than chicory
when I look into them like tundral flowers
and the light turns hurtful and eerie
when I recall how the melting snow
washed itself clean of itself
all those years ago
when we didn’t know
what all this meant.
It’s of little relevance
that we once loved each other
the way we did
and once you’ve exhausted
the meaning of signs
like galaxies expanding
ever more deeply into space
less significance.
What does it look like from Mars?
Your death was a koan
not a fortune-cookie
and the koan broke me
like a man it couldn’t understand
rationally.
There is no scar for you.
You will always be
this open wound inside of me.
When I look at the stars
I can’t dissociate beauty from absurdity.
I cherish their clarity
as something that can’t be
contaminated by my eyes
when they’re nothing
but two black holes in space
a snake-bite of the light
in the middle of my face
like a colon without the following:
the kind of faith
that makes what little is left
so incommensurably greater than what’s been lost.
I can see the blue morning glory in the garden
as if moonlight had turned to skin
just to feel what it’s like to flower
but I can’t forget the frost
that fell like your death over all of it
when I went so numb
space turned into glass
and time pulled the blind down on the window.
I closed my eyes like a mirror
content to let the stars make sense
of their own reflections.
I gave up on directions
and burned my starmaps
and followed who I was
without caring what I became.
Absolutes of ice
spread like cataracts
over the relativities of the river
that went on flowing
as if nothing had changed
and my life was still a dream without eyelids.
A ghost would be easier to deal with
than the fact
that you don’t exist anymore
except as bare bones
denuded of the world
like yarrow sticks
thrown before the Book of Changes.
But then I expect
you’d exorcise yourself
at a suggestion of the night
that the stars would be so much brighter
if you only blew out the candleflame.
You’d do it just to see
if things got better.
You’d leave me in the dark again
staring at the stars
like white ink
on a black loveletter
you left unsigned
as you disappeared into death
like your last breath on a cold windowpane.
I’ve long since forgiven you my solitude.
I’ve long since forgiven you
the severity of the wisdom
that hardened my eyes
like diamonds in the darkness
that could cut through anything
except my attachment to you.
I have forgiven you
for the way I have grown through suffering
to realize
how much I owe your death
and the terrible eyeless abyss that followed it
like an enlightened insight
into the impersonal nature of compassion.
I have forgiven you
the way I am spontaneously compelled
to love a world that is so estranged from me
I feel like water on the moon
trying to imagine what it must be like
to fall like rain on the intimate earth
with a reasonable expectation
of coming up flowers
that weren’t destined
to be laid on your grave.
I’ve gone grey gathering them up
and bringing them to you
like bouquets of paints and brushes
that are ready at hand
should you ever wish
to pick them up again
and show me what the world looks like
without a body for a picture-frame
as you play the part of the upstart genius
who lived the black farce of creative pain
like the agony of the wick
burning at the stake like a heretic
between the flesh of the wax
and the spiritual aspirations of the candleflame
thrusting spears into space at the stars
as if the only way you could ever know God
if you ever met up
was by the scars.

PATRICK WHITE