THE
BIRTH OF RAIN
Drifting
on a drab Sunday in Perth among the ashtrays and leftover sublimities
of the church bells. My studio window above the rooftops a smear of
willow and wet pine undulating gently in the stillness that followed
the rain. Wolves on the easel, waiting to pay the rent. May of the
fifth year into the twenty-first century, fifty-six, I sit in a
blizzard of tobacco crumbs because I’m too poor to buy
tailor-mades, coughing at the computer, wiping small drops of water
like pygmy tears from the Cyclopean eye of the screen that glows with
the same effulgence as the dirty sheet of the sky. The main
migrations are over, but maybe these words are rosaries of
late-returning birds. Two anthracite, boat-tailed grackles on a
branch just beyond the grimy glass and a gust of sparrows chirrup
like squeaky alternator-belts, manically elated in the wake of the
storm that has just passed. My freedoms are more sober, my
resurgencies probably less profound than the gray roses I give birth
to here at my desk, waiting for one of these terminal urgencies of
insight to sway me like a bell.
Maybe
Louise later today with her Cola and cassettes, and her rough,
voluptuous, laughing humanity scorning the random acids of the vulgar
world that schools her, a muse who doesn’t take requests, a
generous longing that’s been through a lot. So I sublimate the
root-fires of my leafless batons into an auto-de-fe of white canes
tired of trying to tap their way through a maze of sexual creeds,
blind. The result? A novel and dozens of poems apples above the
worms. And I keep her cats, Morgan and Rain, mother and kitten almost
fully grown. There are no humans Louise loves more.
The
kitten was born beside me on the couch at one-thirty in the morning
while Louise was in the hospital and I read La Mettrie, d’Holbach,
Diderot, d’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau and Helvetius, eighteenth
century French les philosophes. Two days ago, remembering, she asked
me to write a poem to celebrate the birth. And it’s two hundred and
fifteen years since the French revolution went into convulsions and
mothered daggers out of its wounds, and we are neither free, nor
equal, nor brothers, and the birth of Rain, by association, is only
the smallest of iota subscripts below the voluminous pretext of that
slaughter, hardly, if at all, a mote that matters; but in a way she
was born while the peasants stormed the Bastille, and time sent
corpses and ideas floating facedown on one of its more famous rivers
of blood all the way to the embryonic comma of this tender, contrary
event. And there was honour in being a witness when Morgan jumped up
beside me
and
lay her head upon my right arm as a pillow, the great red text
with
ivory pages open to the public like the Vatican before me
as
the soft, gray satchel of her body shuddered with the natal lightning
of
a different storm, the quickening eruptions of a different riddle
than
the one that dropped its answer like a blade
on
the necks of the cropped carnations as I kept on reading, thinking
to
run for a towel before deciding not to disturb her,
that
a little blood on the couch wouldn’t hurt anything
compared
to the streams of gore that caked the pages of my book.
And
there was a humility in the act of watching, and a trust,
as
if a great secret were demanding something of her
she
was willing to go through hell to give. And my heart
laboured
with her like a sympathetic strawberry, convinced of a miracle,
and
even the colder lizards of my mind were awed
by
the conception of the material immortality achieved
by
the platitudinous genius of replicating genomes,
and
who among temples and havens and research labs
could
hold a candle to that, and what have I written, or felt, or thought,
that
even comes close? And there wasn’t a manger,
but
the whole of the vast, star trailing night
crowded
in behind the adoration of the angel-winged lamps to observe
genesis
in the portent of its light
as Morgan rose like a violent squall
and
squatting let slip with a howl of wounded passage
a
black, sleek pickle of life wrapped in pink ribbons
tied
to the tongue-sized kite of a pink placenta
with
nothing left to say
while
the French Revolution lay open on the table,
crazed
with vertical caesarians. Two minutes more
and
the afterbirth was eaten, Rain, because she’s rippled, blind
because
her eyes were queered by the living room light,
groomed
and heading for the tit the way
a
baby turtle waddles out of its cosmic egg with the world on its back
to the sea,
her
three-toed paws not yet the heavy seals of tigers,
and
stumped by the impasse of continental plates
between
the cushions, her first obstruction, tried, but insurmountable, I
appointed
myself a force of nature as good as any
and
gave her a boost to the bottle, Morgan,
a
cat that seldom purrs, purring like dough
at
having the cleat of her nipple kneaded into milk.
Two
and a half hours I walked and waited to see if she would live;
window
to window, through doors and back again, two and a half hours
to
ascertain if the uncertain droplet of her heart
that
reflected the hidden glory of the living
pulsed
to a martial strain or the beat of a funeral drum,
or
better yet, fell like music from the eaves. Everything
was
given, as black cherries are given
and
fingertips and stars and saffron orchids under eel-skin leaves
and
drunken voices in the street proclaiming imperious ecstasies
and
names and gods and dragonflies
or
the silence coiled in the throats of overgrown wells
like
the psalms of sleeping serpents older than the rocks is given.
And
what could I do as life divined the outcome, the wyrd
of
a beginning innocent as whiskers, but live the history of everything
in
the mystery of the moment and wait with the wind and the trees
as
others had waited for me to pull the ore from the stone
and
crown my own existence? And I thought of the children
of
the French nobility, I thought of Lavoisier and Buffon
who
loved animals and plants and oxygen,
and
fifty thousand pikes forged for the Paris militia, and Goethe
who
affirmed the auspicious aspects of the sixteenth Louis’ reign,
and
the train of death carts that creaked toward the guillotine
with
their saloneries of elegant women shaved for death,
and
of all those who had been bled for centuries by the lies
of
the mitre, the robe, the sword and the crowns of luckier stars,
wasps
who laid their eggs upon a living host constrained to entertain
their
vicious myth of origins, and it seemed to me in passing
that
this simple birth of a common kitten
in
the smalltown hours of a bird-freaked morning on the verge of dawn
washed
out the blood of millions in their indistinguishable graves
at
the first sign of this feline gesture of primogenitive rain.
And
born a Leo, flame in the tinder enough, equal to her claws, a gift,
she
lived and suckled and slept in the bay of her cloudy mother
as
I went off to bed, my nightwatch ended, more enhanced
by
a single birthstain on the couch, her watermark,
than
the thousand pages of bloodshed that drenched my weary head:
And
I dreamed, a marvelous dream, a crazy blue dream
as
if Bast, the Egyptian goddess of cats slept at my feet commingling
her
visions with mine, images and symbols and the strange arcana
of
things released from time and sequence and history
to
dance freely with the dead who lived again emphatically
beyond
the clamour of their chains and violated thresholds,
and
it seemed to me their eyes, their incredible gold-flecked eyes
were
slashed by black crescent moons that waxed and waned
like
cups and flowers, like tides and the improvised hours of childhood
as
if each were the pearl and the lens and the seeing
of
a vast ocean of a living liquid light that fed
the
umbilical rivers and womb-waters of all it called back from the night
like
the words of a wounded song. And slowly as my mind
adjusted
to the subtlety of the nurturing glow, I realized
this
fathomless reservoir, deeper than any idea, wider
than
any feeling, was the watershed of my own frail knowing,
the
nacreous mother of all, older than beginnings, creatrix of all,
whole
and unbounded in every atom, star, leaf, cell, skull, tear and
firefly,
the
fountain-mouth of form and time, nights and mornings,
everything
the issue of the bell of her being, storms, bones, dreams,
suns
and their planets, starfish and leopards, heroes and snails,
the
thief in the window, and the burnt salts
of
the excruciating murderers who cut out their own tongues
everytime
they kill, spiders, fish, wheat and poppies,
and
the blackholes that are the engines of other universes,
all
the language and the lyric of her substance, the birth of time
in
every heartbeat, chaos and cosmos in every pulse that shakes the
void,
space,
her skin, intelligence, her eyes,
and
the wavelengths of her wild hair, the fragrance of ancient nights
that
ripened like apricots, everywhere curled into galaxies,
and
all, forever, without exception,
the
auroral transformation of her vital radiance, and she,
without
dimension, the broad canvas and inspiratrix of life.
And
in an instant I saw the shadows of the generations,
billions
of men, women, and children, maligned and celebrated alike,
the
cursed and the blessed, the beautiful, the wise, the athletes
and
the cripples, the criminals, the tyrants and the saints,
moving
like the sloppy surf of autumn leaves through the darkness,
dry,
used-up things, heavier than the sorrows of coal, tears of coal
and
the torn pages of banished books
ushered
by a wind that seemed the breathing of time itself
toward
her lavish shores to drink from their own reflections
and
be restored, not saved, because nothing can be lost,
like
flowers to the luminous wines of life
that
poured into their desiccated creekbeds like rain, like roots,
like
trees and the dendritic boughs of space, like bloodstreams
in
the hazardous course of tumultuous histories, each, like anyone,
like
me, like you, like Louise, Morgan, Rain and Voltaire,
because
the whole of the sky, the moon, the stars
are
mirrored in every eye, shine in every eye like being itself,
and
from every tear, every droplet at the tip of the stargrass,
from
every berry of blood that stains its own seeing,
from
the tiniest womb of water that falls into life through the night,
Egypt
and the Nile, France, kittens, dreams, insight.
PATRICK
WHITE
