MUSING IN THE AFTERMATH

MUSING IN THE AFTERMATH

Everything sings, the shadows of the winter branches against the streetlamp

laced on the windowpane ribboned by dirt, back doors and rooftops

and yet I am enveloped in this silence without wings, this voice

that valleys the universe like a drop of water down the spine of a leaf

to the root of no flower, no heart, no simple mystery of the night

maturing into stars. I’m in a room with books, paintings, lamps,

plants, computers, easels and cats. Things are neither right nor wrong

though I flatter myself that I have grown from mistake to mistake,

defeat to defeat and cloak the sum of all my failures

in the unconvincing authority of experience.

It’s rude to take your masks off in the light.

I try to see myself in the darkness like a star

with too much to say that loves to give its hiding place away. Forgive

this indiscretion of my solitude, but my name has obligations

and there’s nothing in the house to eat but swans.

Soon enough there’ll be a term to all these spectral visions

that add their shadows to the lead migrations of my thought

and traverse the motionless deserts of the skull-faced moon.

And what can I say to the pilgrims who come to visit my heart,

all these lean feelings without deceit or art

who crowd around the miracle like damaged mystics and moths

hoping their agony will be immolated in the serene ferocity of the void?

Space is only the rough draft of my emptiness

and ghosts confer in the wings like uninspired actors 

or lie detectors trying to interpret the crimes of my last passion play. 

Before I was born to cross the sky in a blue coffin with a black rose

among all these islands of light, I was the ashes of a bird

in the cold furnace of my life, a jest of the indifferent wind

that toys with the lamp and candle of my seeing.

Now, in every word, among a hundred million burning stars,

it’s enough to watch a vagrant firefly, a constellation of one

blind the universe in a single flash with marvel

as I slide down the helical bannisters of every descending starwell

toward the dark by which the dark is known.

Together with everyone I heed the mystery alone

and I don’t know how I got this way

or if I’m a shadow or a wing, the gesture of anything,

but when the moon is in my window, the night arrayed,

musing in the aftermath of life’s homely escapade,

a little afraid, I feel someone dying, and I sing.

PATRICK WHITE

IT’S NOT ENOUGH

It’s not enough to hinge a new door to your heart

when the house is built on flowerless quicksand

and the chimneys have acquired a taste for books;

poems are the birthmarks of stairwells climbing themselves,

of hawks and serpents boring into the corks of wine

to get at the heart, the passions, the dreams, the rage

of the vine that set out like a road that got carried away

and fell in love with the intimate strangers who took it home

and danced all night among the swords as if they were thresholds.

Born in the shadows of unbearable bells, early I found

they were bound to the cord of my spine, like the moon

among the kelp that oils its tides with the black sperms of creation,

and I learned to pull on their iron parachutes to ease

my harsh, hot descents into wingless, mute oblivions;

I discovered there was a voice beyond mine

that could gather and disperse, celebrate and divine

the secret weddings and deaths of the bridal ghosts that came

like castaway bouquets to the refugee altars of their torn veils.

And there’s an indelible secret as old as the eyes of the wind

that can whisper sand into pyramids, that won’t receive

the vows of the petty and clever who traffic in the shadows

of the great, wild dead who wore their battered crowns like fire.

Let them crib their poems on the back of another man’s eyelids,

real constellations don’t shine like this and the wells are mute

whose waters taste of fireflies; and there isn’t a river on the moon

that knows how to plead with the sea for a widow that mourns,

that knows whose prodigy of blood unravels on autumn’s horns,

or how the waterlily in the mouth of the dragon

is more dangerous than a shrine full of blind snakes.

Behind every name, behind every door with a brass threshold

is a man who was forgotten by his own violated treaties

with the indentured mirrors he consulted to cheat the lakes,

who comes up over his horizons like the solemnities of the moon,

looking for the pillar of his lost reflection in chunks of coal,

in the underfed crematoria of his sacrificial backyard fire-pits

in the lifelines of the empty hands he misread like maps of smoke.

Poetry isn’t an orphanage or asylum for the disenchanted,

though there is a deranged abyss under its relentless solitude;

not a showcase Colosseum for famished lions at a petting zoo,

though mauled minds and bodies litter the unwitnessed field;

there are no paths through its unanswerable distances

strewn with petals or thorns, no bridges or waystations,

no branches of hospitable trees to perch in for the night,

no dawns that can erase what’s been written on your forehead,

nothing that can blind you to what you were born to see,

no rain that can douse the squandered fire of the poppy,

though the messenger is smashed like a bottle between

the tide and the rock; the star, the candle, the nightflower

snuffed by the morning, the last breath of the deathless moon.

And you must die enough to not be there

when the world picks up a pen like an axis

to spin in the direction of its wounded inclinations,

you must not walk into the house wearing a face,

your breath on the glacial windows of the furious stars

full of secret fingerprints, love-notes, names,

you must be more conversant than a ghost on a bridge

or a rose, or an empty mailbox, or a road that followed you

to where the river turns, with shapeshifting,

with pearling a body around a syllable of sand,

with showing a galaxy its shadow in eyelids and eclipses,

with standing like a scarecrow in the cornfield

that shucked the cob of a smile to batter you with birds,

with lying beside the dead like a lantern in a morgue

as if your blood crossed the threshold for them,

with waiting in the earth a long time, a root

that conceals orchards in the furrows of its dirty hands,

a buried boat that unfurls the blossoms of its sails,

the starcharts of the blind moles that shine underground,

like a voyage in search of the rudder of your tongue

to pilot it safely out of the ports of the moon,

a flame, a breath, a feather you’ve cradled for years,

the small measures of belief in an oceanic grave

that enrobes the flowing in the wake of severed waves.

Be stone, or be space; the emptiness is the same,

silver ore, or the motherlode of a black hole,

let your heart pan the long rivers of the night

for what the stars value, jewels of life in the light

that can be grown like a menagerie of blood and tears,

the eyes of the blackberries, eyes of the radiant bee

on the flutes of the wind that plays for a handful of seeds.

PATRICK WHITE

PRIMA NOCTIS

PRIMA NOCTIS

Of human misery what’s left to tell

the single bead of the moon

that makes a lonely rosary of revolutions,

one face always turned away

as if it refused to look upon

its own imploring features

in the brutal, breathless, garish light of day,

or those of the earth

reviewed in the turning below?

I am nothing, a man, a microbe on a skull

picked clean by immaculate cannibals

whose hands are greased with brains,

my much vaunted, cultivated consciousness

and sterling will, free, or spontaneously

predetermined, the leaf of an afterthought

enhancing my passion for light

and periodic sentences.

Look where you will

and tell me this is evolution; tell me

this is that continuum of used mutations

that bricked the river clay of ancient Sumer

into these ascending asylums of the absurd

to burn our children in the fires of the stars

as surely as Carthage ate hers,

poor kids first, then the rich, as always,

civilization nothing but musical chairs

in the food chain, a game

of I eat you; now you eat me, who

shall be the grass, and who, the proudest of cows,

the grazer. And the grass may turn into the grazer

and the grazer into grass in transformative cycles

that ripple out wonderfully like rain

to rationalize this caste of food and feeder

and make it holy, harmonious,

and scientifically insane enough

to appeal to the average reader,

the red letter ‘A’ at the top of every genetic cliche

that’s still convinced of angels in the abattoir,

growth on this planet

nothing but the pace of murder, government

a blood-bank run by vampires intent

on the deregulation

and sanctification of their fangs, the sanguine order,

the cherished symmetries of our bacterial histories

nothing but the victory bells

calibrating the advance of slaughter. And paintings

of the gouty apes and their bedizened concubines,

and poems that only the affluent can write,

and all the cathedrals, mausoleums, and pillars that enhance

the hills of blood-soaked soil we build on,

all the refinements of culture, all

the opiates of erudition, the ineffectually coherent overviews

of the chaos of bones we throw before us

like men and women and children

to allay the superstitions of the future

that demands of us now nothing less

than the last born of our own unrequited extinction,

will not do to decorate the birthday jest

and excuse with elaborate rococo icing

nuclear candles all over the blood-cake of the planet.

If liberty means I have the right to own the rain

of another country; if health and happiness depend

upon designer genocides that race

the minds and hearts of the heartless, mindless mob

with toxic logos and lethal codicils, if wisdom and art

are only the crusted, rotten, riddled pylons

on a wharf of indulgent departures

in a sea of blood and fury, the idiotic squall

of the ship’s horn as it pilots out of harbor,

the advance defection of hurricane roses

believing the false hilarity of a doomed love cruise

and there is no lifeboat in the bruise of their beauty,

then we’re only licking the eloquence out of our own wombs

and mouthing platitudes like cleavers in a butcher-shop,

masters of dismemberment;

we’re just another evil dream that no one will remember.

And no one will recall what a morning it was once

just to wake up; and all that we have cherished

will be desecrated in a conflagration of black fire

because twenty-five million children die of starvation a year

and the fact is the small fret of an obscure poem

that will turn and destroy you

in a word from the eyes of a disgusted messiah.

If the pursuit of knowledge is a regression backwards

through the hallowed slimes of evolution,

and flesh and blood and bone, the jellies of our eyes,

are now more alien than the foundation stones

of the pyramidal corporations erected by slavers and thieves

to own every square inch of the planet’s afterlife,

inflated market shares in the global necropolis

that grows in the grave like fingernails and hair, then

how can we not be refuted by our own prescience

and perish in the cyanotic blue moonrise

of our own catastrophe coming true

when we saw, we knew, we ignored

the glacial cracks in our spacious palace of mirrors

and the rips in the knees of our emaciate atmospheres

and went on chancing the planet like a week-end casino?

We’re just another inept species under the bell-jar

of the writing on the wall that no one remembers how to read

as we exterminate ourselves in radioactive ferocities of greed,

dead as yesterday’s headline in the instant that we breed.

There are nations on their knees being whipped to death

by their own umbilical cords

in the evangelic hands of missionary markets

and there are nations that vie for the lion’s place

in the imperial trend of the stable atrocities

that guarantee that children will bleed

to cleanse the wound and fatten the gland of a dividend.

The corporate wasp lays its egg on the forehead

of the living host and butterflies

are cancelled like bad cheques,

nations are gutted from the inside out,

and the experts defend the economic dialectics

of flexing their hex of hysterical democracy

over the bent necks of experimental derelicts

labouring in a labyrinth of lab rats and executive acts.

Among the swans and soirees of the prosperous assassins

the insiders trade in subtle abortions

and panicked climacterics of erotic stock

that convulse the planet with toxic shock

as their dicks erect with capital and war

violate the wind, the water, the oil, the ore

until the rapacity of their lust is satiate with scandal

and peace is mentioned, justice, human dignity

and they pull out in a hurry, limp with virtue,

and from the pulpits of the puppet press

dry clean the torn dress, the stained flag,

with the bleaches and fabric softeners

of their laundered confessions and laissez-faire digressions

on market pressures and open trade relations

with the third-world brides of the first night

that are torn from their husband’s arms

and subject to palatial abominations,

exploited like a resource, their wombs battered into sterility,

must learn to comply with capital’s amorous charms

among the ruined nuns and nations

labouring under the weight of corporate virility,

voyeuristic eunuchs in the fiscal shadows,

and skeletal children thinner than keys,

still stunted in the filthy chimneys

of the captains of commerce, the Molochs of money

quoting chapter and verse of their logo genetics

to feed another generation to their corporate creed,

a labour camp for orphaned amputees,

severities of people on their knees,

cut like a budget.

PATRICK WHITE