MY VOICE REFUTES ME

to the memory of Ted Plantos and Shaunt Basmajian

My voice refutes me like the skin of an old enemy

I once honoured with scars that glowed in the dark

and there is no end of the cemetery windows

I keep hurling myself through like a planet or a rock

or a bird with a vertical horizon

stubbing its neck on the blue lazuli

of the freak sky that put its foot down

on the throat of an impossible freedom

and solidified into a mage of glass and ice,

a corpse in front of a crystal ball,

a rebel satellite defying its own ripples

trying to evolve feathers of fire

to get the voices out of its head

and fly where it wants,

probing what it will like a humming-bird,

or a mosquito with more than a taste for blood,

or a junkie tying off to shoot a movie. Never

let it be said that I didn’t go looking for myself

under every avalanche, after every deluge

as if the omega in the word hope

were a vowel that survived, not just

the last word of another expiring number,

the expansive amplitude

of an indecipherable nothing,

a kamikaze zero with explosives in the fuselage

that never hit anything

on the desperate way down to victory.

Like any human being I took my stand on quicksand

and drowned in my own foundation-stones,

dreaming of mansions fixed in cement

I churned from blood and tears and lime

in the hourglass of a deserted heart.

Abject and unabsolved

of my ferocious delinquency, my thoughts now,

as the suppositions of the years regress,

are more of the provisional nature

of moonlit tents, Saharan waterlilies,

than the time-defying antics of the pyramids.

I don’t want to last anywhere for long

where the fires aren’t a legend of stars by the morning,

or the wind isn’t the biography

of an infamous ghost-writer

who could drink an ocean dry

with just a single fountain-pen.

And I know there are those

who gargle their poetry

as if it were just another mouthwash,

a distillation of mint, pink-tongued poets

plashing in municipal bird-baths,

their haikus cleaner than fingernails

and a deodorant for every passion

that dews their pores with sweat, and others,

years after the protest, dynastic radicals

laying down dry bouquets

of predictable placards

like cardboard lilies in a graveyard

to honour the established dead.

Knights of the thumb, let them pull down their visors

like thimbles, and raising the lance of a needle

dangerously crochet the tiny exploits

of their pillowcase crusades in the stray threads of blood

they unbound like nesting birds

from the stronger rope of a wounded bell

that, night after night, lay its head down

on the hard stone of the world to die.

There are those who are born

to know the net, and those who were meant for the sea;

and then there are others,

though they made no larger waves,

sounded no greater depths,

discovered no further horizons than these others,

because their muse saw

beyond the obvious blossom of the moon

to the frenzy of life in her tides,

her true reflection,

startle the heart in their passing

like a field consumed by thousands of black poppies

on an island that rose in the night

to carry their name like marble

or a boy on the back of a dolphin

leaping like a liberated apostrophe

into the more intimate renown of a favourite constellation.

PATRICK WHITE