UNDER THE BRIDGE

Under the bridge

with the rest of the homeless

there is a large, rusty oildrum

that a raging orchid of fire blooms in:

my heart.

Anywhere is now my only address

and everywhere the world crosses my threshold.

I know my own spirit

as the eye of the water

knows the moon’s reflection;

a mystic firewalk of luminous petals,

a shattered urn, the shards

of an ancient mirror

that’s never featured anyone,

sharp enough to cut space.

Under the bridge

where the lost keychains

gather to enlighten the night

with stories of the things they could not open,

my spirit is a hot, black rose

on a witching wand

with the crescents of the moon for thorns.

And I have never understood the loss

the heavy bell of my pulse calls me to

like a sorrow that hauls me around tidally

in a dans macabre

or lily-laden funeral procession

to mourn the lethal beauty

of our passage and separation,

the extirpation of the mystery.

Under the bridge

my spirit is free

and no one can evict the wind,

and though the lies and the truths

eventually mingle in a confluence of waters,

and the dead are

as often the shadowmasters of the living,

as the living are lighthouses to them,

I am still robed like a trembling king

in the oilslicks of my delusions

when the guest of my awareness

mistakes the host for a servant,

and the shining seems blighted with sunspots

that struggle pointlessly like flies

on the helical gusts

of my flypaper mind

and the windowsills are thick with the dust

of unattainable aspirations.

So much of what I was taught was wrong.

Under the bridge

the dead gather like leaves at the gate

for hand-outs from the living

who have even less than they do

and the lovers don’t dare remember

what it was like not to crave and despise each other

like the next fix.

Here is where

the sages of the street,

lost and found in the tao of concrete,

linger like ants in empty brandy bottles

whose labels have slipped from them like skin,

slurring their prophecies

in a demotic of scars.

Should you come here,

bring your own totem pole of eras and masks,

the stele of your subjective imaginings

you erected in the circus of your heart

like the axis of an amputated clock

to witness the running of your passions

yoked to golden chariots,

the single pillar of the temple

that houses your most cherished afflictions.

This is where the curses come to die

a natural death

and the blessings

are the enhanced shadows of whatever’s left.

Here even the barnacles

that make toy villages

and give the tiny molars of their dead volcanoes root canals,

have tasted the dark ecstasy

of a moment that spewed them out of their fezs

like the lonely feather of an astounded bird escaping.

Under the bridge

no one knows what the skeletons are pointing at.

I want a compass with a clean needle.

Under the bridge

the ashes and shadows

of hearts that were once certain

argue over what they are the lees of,

what lights and fires

have cast them into perdition

as they swallow their liquor like hourglasses.

Under the bridge I am spared all these meanings

looking for life.

Here meaning itself is meaningless

and I want a life so immediate

I don’t need to grind a mortar out of the stars

to assign myself a place

in what cannot be located.

I don’t want to know who I am all the time

and if there’s any need of a temple,

sanctuary in the quicksand,

let it be the wind.

Love is a coil of flypaper

hung out in the hope

of catching a star;

better to be the wind

and learn to let things go

like seeds and birds and the leaves

of a tree that burnt its own holy book,

tired of flames and feathers.

Under the bridge

where everyone is the missing link

in a chain of tears,

I don’t need to master everything I see

or tighten my spinal cord like a guitar key

to jam with the blind music of the spheres.

I attune myself to space
and sing back-up in the darkness.

Under the bridge

all human knowledge, all art
is graffiti expressed in passing
to make the emptiness homey.

I’ve been weaving my blood like fire

on a loom of bone

into flying carpets and curtains;

I’ve been painting dreamscapes

on the lunar sails in a bottle of wine

and sending them off

on every wave of a delivered heart

with a warning to leave me alone.

I cry along with the rain

to adorn a palace of water

and follow every river

back to the fountain-mouth of a woman.

I plough the nightsilts in the mysterious deltas

of forbidden civilizations,

knowing the pyramids are dust

and that everyone’s afterlife is now.


Under the bridge
the lonely and luckless thresh the oracles

of the candles guttering out in their skulls,
believing love can win a war with a blade of grass

against the serpent-fire of black lightning

that doesn’t need the witness of a nightwatchman
or the fury of a junkyard dog

to keep an eye on things.

One flash of its lucid eclipse
and the work is done.

Under the bridge

you wake up like a rootless tree
that’s free to come and go

like any other illusion

mesmerized by its own inconceivability,

or you’re the moon

eating your own afterbirth in a sea of shadows.

Under the bridge

enlightenment walks the way of the lie

like a forged passport to liberation

to show the refugees of truth
a little known escape-route
out of the war they declared against themselves.

Under the bridge

I am aging.

I am sad.

I am alone;

and there’s a spiritual oilslick

trying to convince me it’s a nightrose

and the golden chariot my heart once was,

stinking of triumph,

is now a garbage truck

reeking of angels

and the accoutrements of an outmoded purity,

the chipped relics of a secret sanctity

that bled to death through its eyes

when the solid turned real

and the fools gathered in amazement

like footnotes

to scoff at the text of themselves.

Now I saturate my silence with compassion

and leave the weeping

to make their own creekbeds

through the precarious terrain

of their infantile schemes

to dazzle the sun

with the candle of their insignificance.

Most still stick out their thumbs

for a free ride to a wild hope and a hunch,

but under the bridge

all the true pilgrims are roadkill;

and anyone who still believes in anything

is merely donating themselves precariously

to a foodbank for cannibals.

Under the bridge

the last resort

is always the burning gate of something better

and the most ardent optimists

are those without a chance:

seven come eleven,

but their only constellation,

snake-eyes.

Every morning I lift the mirror to my lips

and drink my own reflection

like blood from my skull

to forget what I am becoming

as I age like an echo among the mountains

even as a greater translucency

slowly enraptures me

in the competence of an unexpected freedom.

One day

you say good-bye to your voice like a bird

that adorned the tree

throughout the summer of its bearing,

the last flame leaps from the fire

into the darkness like a dancer

that stole everything from you

without offense,

and from that denuding on

everything you’ve got to say

is the wind in leafless branches

trying to sweep the stars from the sky

that might have shown you a way back.

PATRICK WHITE

STARTING TO FEEL

STARTING TO FEEL

Starting to feel marginalized.

Second magnitude star

in the wrong constellation.

I make a lousy footnote, iota subscript

to the main body of the text. So does the sea

and the vast bedazzled panoply of the night sky,

or the moon in the drop of water

that hangs from the heron’s beak.

Splash, and the ripples

of the fish that made the eye

jump back through it, the second seeing

more placid than the first,

the expunged topography of the bed

excessively made to exorcise the imprimatur

of the amorous ghosts of the night before,

all the hills flattened out

like chalk on a blackboard,

and the pillows perfect sacks of equine oats.

If you’re fortunate enough to meet a lamp,

feed it, pour your oil out for the stars,

or if it’s the darkness you prefer

there are bells with black mouths to do the job,

candle-snuffer chimney sweeps who come

like the metal eyelids of overturned spoons

to smother the apricot dream of the flame.

Insecurities. Outcast doorways. The bleeding orphanage

where I grew up with the shadows of renegade castes

pleading for scraps off the plate of fatuous abundance,

the rotten shoelaces of the things that bind the heart,

the well-meaning lies that pour their gravy over the flies.

Shards of the ostrakon, the expurgation,

another invocation to exile

shatter like the petals of clay roses

lacquered and baked in blue-green honey,

enamel auroras, flowing irises, pooling into glacial fixity,

and cataract polar ice-caps blurring the star on the lens,

the sun on the eye of the blackberry, the moon

a widow under the veils of her dead seas

mirrored in the spider-tears of a torn necklace.

All I ever wanted was a moist summer star,

somewhere outside the gates of the Pleiades

where I could grow a few planets

that wouldn’t be trampled

by my neighbour’s horses

and I thought I found

that gypsy joy by the well of your eye,

morning glory binding the bucket to the winch

that spools and unspools like time, like blood,

like the coiled serpent fires of dragons in love,

and I was happy to graze alone on the stargrass

that burned in the twilight pastures

of your furthest fields,

a winged horse in the dusk born

from the blood of decapitated gorgons.

I could wait for the night

to grab the wind by the mane and ride.

I could wait like a boy with a telescope

for your sidereal transits,

feeling as I did the first time I saw Venus,

or the Andromeda galaxy,

or the tiny lilac eyelid of eloquent Mercury

glancing out from under

the roosting wing of the setting sun,

and I have been scarred enough in life

by the liquid knives of my own credulity

to know what I dared, to know

what a temptation a skinless man is

to the acidic looms of the nettles,

the hypodermic carpet-baggers

who swarm the rose like wasps and blackflies,

junkies, a healthy vein.

Or maybe you’re mad at me

for some oblique infraction,

some chromatic aberration on the rim of the mirror,

rainbow lipstick on the lips of the chalice,

some line of a poem, the track

of an animal in the snow

you couldn’t recognize among

the hushed fauna of your sacred groves,

a species in exile with unknown weapons,

because new is now and forever evil

and I’ve been ashes enough

at the foot of charred stakes

to know this bed of nails I sleep on proves it.

Or maybe you’re bait

in the traplines of a legless gesture,

or one of the unsalted crackers of common sense

crushed like a blizzard

over the soup kitchens of circumstance,

just not enough hours in the day

to spare the feast of an eyelash,

and I’m the dead battery

exposed to the cold

like a firstborn daughter,

electrochemical quicksand,

a black Kaaba of plastic and tar

no longer the direction

of your eastern prayers

when you were hoping

for a meteoritic foundation stone?

My deficits are as sulphurous

as the light of flaring matches is

to the exalted constellation

of the amorous fireflies;

my shadows are as open as my hands

and even my eclipses

have nothing to hide from the blaze

of the tiger in the snow

thawing in its own fire

to dispose of its claws and fangs

like flames and lilies

that touch without tearing

the midnight skin of your water.

Or maybe I’m deranged

by my own intensities

to feel like a cold draft shut out

by the silence of closing doors

that would rather leave this gust of leaves

playing on your stairs unsaid.

Sensitivity make you sensitive,

the tuning forks, the tender horns of the snail,

lightning rods cauterized

by the cattle prods of slaughter-house storms,

weathervanes that pivot

at the breathing of butterflies,

and eyes at the end of your fingers

that can play their revelations

up and down the wharves

and keyboards of mystic blue

that woad the nippled fez

on the breast of a warrior tattoo;

and there are shadows

that sing like the ancient scripts

beneath the voice of the bees

in the morning locust trees

and valleys that turn

their ears like begging bowls

to the stone tongues of the mountains

for the widening smiles

of tremulous faults,

avalanche warnings everywhere

like troubled birds

and even the ants recalling

their scouts to rock proof shelters.

I just want to hear from you

like the curtains of an old house

that misses your ghost at the window,

like a space probe well beyond

the black-ice shades of gibbering Pluto,

that keeps on faithfully

broadcasting these love-songs

from the edge of an expanding heart

accelerating into the engulfing mouth of the void

like the universe you detonated with a single spark

from the cricket-sticks

of a fire-wired atom exploding into bliss.

I don’t want to be this motley of shadows

bleeding in the deer park

like grapes and razors,

wondering whether those

are cherry-blossoms or eyelids

banked in the gasoline gutters

of acidic snake-showers,

this pygmy circus in the oversized

straitjackets of its carnival tents.

And I tell myself everything,

a lexicographer of reasons

to explain the absence

of your fingerprints on the wind,

the fist of your light

in the taste of the apples,

why the flowers smell like dirty laundry,

and there is a funeral stench to the stale fires

embering in their creosote like black wasps

snarling like angry drunks in harvest orchards.

I draft the curse of twenty religions a day

and rearrange the hierarchies

of the demons and the angels

to dance like the Milky Way

on the head of a pin

without anyone’s hooves

stepping on anyone’s wings,

to raise you like a lifeboat

from the bottom of my cloven heart.

And I don’t know how many nunneries

I’ve dedicated to the Coptic stars

of Mary Magdalene,

how many brotherhoods of bone

I’ve donated my igneous marrow to,

hoping to exculpate the sinner from the sin

of the abysmal kiss

of your baffling silence,

how many trivialities

I’ve followed home to your old address

listening for the opening breach

of a golden bolt

to answer the mind-seizing

koan of sartorial doorbells

emptier than the water sills that preface

these bent event horizons

of a mute unhappening

like lips that kiss the air

to supplement this crash diet

that is already eating the eyes out

of the dragon vines of space,

and dipping these famished feathers I

n the inkwells of my mouth

to divert a panicked lover

from the seabed of my face,

the burnt bough of the apple tree

still holding out for birds

and in the dry throats of the flowers,

the rumours of rain that silver

the lifelines of your words.

PATRICK WHITE