Monday, June 18, 2012

MATTER IS MUSIC. THE ATOMS SING.


MATTER IS MUSIC. THE ATOMS SING.

Matter is music. The atoms sing. A frog
leaps into the water and strings a guitar.
Tree rings like odes in the heartwood of the apple.
The rain breaks like tears into tiny harps.
A gust of stars, a lyric of dust wheeling
into galaxies like symphonies in hydrogen alpha.
And the light, too, playing the flowers
like the stops of a flute, and the leaves
like semi-quavers, and their fruit, like whole notes.

Adagios of colour, bass runs of taste,
and sound the echo of a shape shifting mirror
that touches the light like a lake
touches the moon inseparably playing
on the plectra of its waves like an encore
among lovers mastering each other’s bodies
like first violins. Or red-winged blackbirds,
the woodwinds, or the wavelengths of disparate stars
resonating with the eye into lyres, and eagles, and swans.

And me? I’m this voice that’s been scored
by time and space to reveal the contours
of a theme interweaving like a melodic river
through the mindscape of a dream in counterpoint.
And I can hear tides in the rush of the wind
breaking in the leaves of the silver Russian olives
and the great sorrows of children who died young
playing in the rain on the syrinx of the columbine.
And strange and eerie from a distant window
I can hear the muted suffering of a song
whose words I know all too well by heart.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES THE HEART BURIES ITS SORROW


SOMETIMES THE HEART BURIES ITS SORROW

Sometimes the heart buries its sorrow
like a bell or an hourglass beside the road
as if it came upon a dead bird it couldn’t name
and returned it to the earth like unread mail.
There’s no gate where I’m going, the air
will tremble a bit and that’ll be it. Maybe
a firefly or two, to liven things up,
but no sign of lightning tearing its hair out.

I shall evaporate like a dream someone
couldn’t remember having, and what seems
so crucially significant now shall disappear,
disperse, dissipate like smoke from of a fire
and all that will remain of this passionate burning
will be an odd fragrance among the stars
that doesn’t arrest the attention of the bees.

And these things of my mother that she gave to me,
Blood, flesh, bone, breath and my love of poetry
and compassion for the world you need to write it,
deeply involved in an unrestricted love affair,
will be scattered like urns on the wind as if
my ashes had no respect for their individuality.
The waterclock ended in a desert of mirages,
not the afterlife of an embryo off to a good start.

The death of an art, the extinction of a species,
not the fall of a sparrow anyone notices,
and I’m not even saying they should if they don’t
anymore than they feel the loss of a skin cell.
Some people prefer umbrellas to wild flowers.
Icons of the moon without the dragon.
A mouthful of fire to the taste of water.
Tigers in a zoo, to the dangers of an open door.
It’s wrong to make love, music, poetry, colour,
compulsory, anymore than you can demand a friend.
Got to give time and space to the black swan
of a nugget of coal to realize it’s a motherlode
of diamonds born out of its progressive dissolution.

Translucent effusions of insight into
a speculative nothing, a flying carpet of wavelengths
unravelling on the loom of the moon,
just because the stars have left their genes
on a helical stairwell of flypaper like a chromosome,
doesn’t mean you’re a replicant of eternity,
or to see the onceness of life in everything
it’s becoming without consulting you
is some kind of exemption you can seek for yourself.
Enlightenment isn’t a ticket to pass, it’s
not to see the beauty of the chains in the bliss of delusion.
Not to make choirs out of your Maenadic desires.
When have you ever not done this, when
have you ever not realized you were the summum bonum
of your own conspicuous consumption?
But who asks you to die before you’re dead
to sabotage your artistic pursuit of happiness
whether you achieve it or not? The absurdity
of the search is enough in itself to make it profound.
Enlightenment ploughs you back into the ground
you came from like grass on the moon
and as a bigger fool that I could ever hope to be
once said: if the cold doesn’t go through your bones once
how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?

PATRICK WHITE

NEVER WANTED TO WORK THAT HARD TO BE BEAUTIFUL


NEVER WANTED TO WORK THAT HARD TO BE BEAUTIFUL

Never wanted to work that hard to be beautiful
inside or out, be the rare fossil of a mirror
in the red velvet drawer of a jewellery tower
that slides out like a tiny coffin in a morgue.
Not out to prove that waterlilies have the bones
of astral hummingbirds. Love flowers,
but not in cults. Love the moon enough
not to make a religion of it, life enough
not to resist what it’s trying to put me through
whether I’m howling in pain, set afire,
or mystically exalted by vital bliss
or about to scatter my ashes from any of the bridges
that arc like grey rainbows of partially kept truces
with the lies of the lines in between.

Sometimes I’m mining mini black holes
inside the solar system looking for
new motherlodes of metaphor inside
the eye sockets of a skull crawling with Aztecs
like red army ants attending to their gods,
or go panning for stars well beyond the heliosphere
the way I used to catch fireflies as a boy
just to watch them glow a moment and let them go
like an intimate insight into what I still don’t know
but never failed to be enlightened by upon their release.

People outside my open window, laughing, talking,
setting up giddy long shots like sexual moves
on a hot summer night with a beer in its hand,
and the drunk demotic of a little English on the cue,
and alarmed car horns throbbing like ear aches in park,
and it’s all so intriguingly silly it’s got to be human
and I wonder if a thousand years from now will think
this is what we had to be like. And as soon as I
glimpse that, the whole scene is deepened by time
in the eyes behind a veil of eternity I lifted
while I was alive to see that everything here is indelible.
There’s a perpetuity in our apparent randomness
in the passing of the moment, that spontaneously
preserves us for greater things than we can imagine
like the Conservation of Data Principle
that holds good even in the singular depths
of a black hole listening like a poet through an open window.

A smudge of life on my poem, but I don’t mind
the fingerprints at all. What’s a star without planets?
What’s a shepherd ushering moons toward
the high blue grasslands without a black sheep
that wanders off by itself once and awhile
to check out other things along the way?
My poems pick things up in their flowing
like rivers pick up leaves and tributaries
and small flotillas of blossoms in the spring,
the occult alphabets of calligraphic oil snakes,
and mingles them all into the picture-music
of the mindstream, the motifs of a symphony,
or the themes of a play, that picks things up
and puts them down again like the moonrise
of a rock on a beach. Few of life’s harmonies
are symmetrically balanced crystallographers.
Nights when I look into the eyes of the stars
and even the lenses of my telescope break into tears.

You can take life out of it like a fly in the toilet bowl,
a bumble bee in a jar, a star out of your eye
a spider on a long-handled broom, or the crumb
of a leftover dream from the night before,
or you can leave it in if it wants to come along for the ride.
I’ve heard for so long from people who say they know
that everything is one, I don’t worry about disconnections.
It’s the fallible continuity of life that sings
like a nightbird from the dead branch and green alike
most beautifully to me, the way the light and the rain
and love when it’s real, make unions of disparate things
that depend upon each other for life like metaphors.
I revel in the crazy wisdom of the oxymoronic contradictions
that bond me to the universe like the small volcanoes
of the ground wasps that erupt between the fault lines
along the continental plates of the sidewalks
and apprentice me to landscaping with lava on the moon.

The circle’s wounded deeper into its roundness
once it’s broken by a branch, the stillness more profound
for the stone that’s dropped into it. Love, when it’s new,
trued by separation. The earth itself, an alloy
of the elemental table. To be truly original creatively
is to seek the low place like the sea and let
everything run down into you like myriad streams
that are neither many nor one, pure nor polluted,
and out of that mingling which is the whole of you,
raise them like weather from the bells of the flowers
to the robes of snow on the mountain tops
and know that with every cloud, every raindrop, storm,
every bolt of lightning, and all the life thereby engendered
is you returning like a shape shifter to your own depths
and everything comes along for the ride as if
they were always on your side, like your eyes are.

PATRICK WHITE