CONSTELLATION

CONSTELLATION

Even in spring, the night is old, and the rising moon, fool’s gold.

Maybe I’ll go on believing this darkness is the harbinger of light,

and even if life be proven random and absurd

there is still beauty and significance in the word that says so. These days, aging,

love is elusive

as the abandoned heart grows crude and abusive

and mistakes that were made and never mastered

return like the last word of a parting sleight that chilled the stars.

Within me the wines of being still dream of becoming blood,

and there are still angels in the mud trying to fashion a man

whose life is more than a passion of decay. Forsaken as folly

the dark clarity of the holy, I am yet a candle and a planet

that runs before the sun. More time behind me than ahead,

and the silence sadder for all the things that were said,

tonight I remember friends and lovers who once burned

with all the insatiable fury of life to be wonderful, wild, and free,

extraordinary in the turmoil of eternity,

and I bless the light by which they lived

through blossom, leaf, and fruit back to the deep root

that makes apples of the rain. Human, they were worth their fate in pain

now that none of us can live those days again. And though

it’s hard to dispute that life is a house on fire where you can’t stay long,

there are harps of night and voices and soft winds

that even the stars have not fingered to commemorate

the faces and places where we lingered awhile

to explore the immensity of a vagrant smile

that opened like a gate and a garden

or fell through the bars of our mortality like a file. From those

who were wounded by the furious rose of my youth, who were lashed

by the sudden squalls of an afflicted heart, I ask pardon

for the nights their eyelids closed like scars and offer

this silver herb of the moon they watered with their tears

until something grew in the salted soil of those punishing years.

Though late, I lay it gently on the stairs I’ve descended ever since

like a star reflected on water or a face in the black mirror

that never lost its innocence. It was the light that fell,

not the darkness that everyone is convinced is hell, the dove, not the crow

that plummeted below. But that’s a sail for another horizon

to keep its eyes on. The moon takes refuge in the window,

a stone swan rippling the dirty winter glass, the eyes of an old man,

the ruses of time, thawing to let it pass. More mercy

in the righteous fire of the forgiving liar

that tells himself that he is still young

than in all the grime of proven facts

vented from the chimney-mouth into the night

like refugees or fingers of smoke reaching for something they’ll never grasp.

And are my enemies satisfied, and the women who came and went,

ingots of hot honey poured into the mould of my bones

that formed them into roses and knives and keys to mysterious doors,

thresholds of pain and joy, dark and light, mountains and valleys

that led me like a stream down from my idealistic heights

to the great seas of being that encompass

the enchanted dream of this island seeing? I was a poor student

of the solitude they tried to teach me, but at this remove,

knowing what I know of love and agony,

I offer them my gratitude, and making a sword of the hour-hand

that once slashed at my heart

lay it gently in the wound that never healed, believing at last,

slow but thorough, I understand. They were the dark masters

of a lost art that bronzed the plaster cast of my spine

and long since all the blood and tears that were spilled have turned into wine

and all that was killed has risen again like a forest, like a green phoenix

out of this igneous delirium of time.

I was the first draft of a shadow I read to the blind.

Too early to make my peace, too late not to desire ease

and freedom from the long calling of my intensities,

the hollow of this blue guitar, this abundant emptiness

is crossed by power lines

attuned to the hidden harmony of heretical black stars

that have formed a constellation of their own on the back of my eyes,

and there is a name for it, not said by anyone,

not even the wise. And only the dead and children can see it rise.

PATRICK WHITE

AUBADE WITH AMBIGUITIES

AUBADE WITH AMBIGUITIES

Everywhere I go

I am buckled by sorrows

weeping like executioners

in hooded doorways

for the harvest of doves

they’ve bloodied

with their smiles,

for the ruined roses

that stain the hospital gowns

of soft-spoken guillotines.

And when I ask

for the address

of a rumour of joy

that might risk

a cameo appearance in my heart,

I am caught in the traffic jam

of an outdoor movie

that is just another rerun

of misunderstood butterflies

draped in spider-webs.

And the restaurants are full

of lunar refugees

confessing the names of God

on a rosary of skulls

spooled from the mass graves

of irreversible exterminations;

and on the highways,

drug-soaked children,

famous among milk-cartons,

running from rescue

all the way to Calgary

with Eldorado serial killers

in cowboy hats.

I do not think I was born

to be happier

than any other man,

nor dance with rivers all my life

under the chandeliers

of waltzing willows,

I am content

to let the autumn stars

sugar the apples

and the wines of life

that have dreamed so long

of mystic bloodstreams

wake up from their coma

of midnight suns

to flirt with the morning curtains,

but everywhere I ask for water,

the odour of dogs

rotting in stairwells,

virulent mothers

blistering coke in baby spoons

and lonely adolescents

picking at the scabs

of their showcase labels

like empty whiskey bottles

cruising for flowers

on emergency fire-escapes.

And how could I ignore

the inconsolable clowns

in convulsions of grief,

and the reptilian angel-slayers

that rise from the depths

like snapping turtles

to unfeather the stupefied swans

as if they tore

the pages out of a book,

dragging the clouds down

into the hot mud

of ambiguous bottom feeders?

Everywhere the air

grows tumescent

on the yeasts of grief

and the planet groans

like a death-cart

full of starfish, full

of fractured wish-bones,

full of the severed hands

of TV amputees.

And I want to pay the late fees

on the lightning that struck

the horns of the snail

like a war-crime, I want

to green the emeralds again

that were bleached in a flash

by the physics of food, my heart

burns to proclaim to the tribunals

that reek of thick colognes

and pounds of atrocious innocence,

that humans were born

to see and be amazed,

that there are still plants

in the scalded jungles

that will come forward

like shy cures, and golden salamanders

that will give us back our legs and arms,

that we’re not just a necropolis

of flesh-eating bacteria,

that there are truths and beauties

and ethics of water

that aren’t just triumphal marches

under the arches of our vertebrae,

that there are gods at work

like tender waterlilies

transforming the swamp,

turning the shit back

into intimate constellations

that won’t dwarf the night

with staggering distances

or runt the wonder

of our brevity

with the unattainable radiance

of reversible wedding gowns.

I want to make it all better,

breeze the pain

with blue-eyed summers

from a cedar hope chest,

appease the hungry

with mountains of bread

ored from miraculous grains,

talk the bridges down

from their keystone suicides

by showing them what’s needed

to get to the other side;

do everything I can

to grant immunity

to the bloodbank

that cries constantly

under my window at night

for braver transfusions,

give up an eye if I must

to defray the cost

of blind justice,

do whatever it takes

to prune the hazardous stars

from the razorwire crowns

of our unexempted suffering.

But everywhere I go,

roadkill redirecting traffic,

arsonists in volunteer fire brigades

pissing on a field that’s burning,

closet terrorists in uniformed bomb squads,

defusing suspect shopping-malls,

computer-generated humans

mechanizing the rights of man,

soldiers safer in the army

than children in their beds,

leaders following the followers

in climacterics of lemmings,

the rich bitching the poor

are the reason they suffer,

deviants preaching deliverance

to delinquents on their knees,

free markets enslaving nations

to brand-names on demand,

banks robbing the wretched

to give to those with more,

genocide on probation

while murder goes to jail,

excellence cowed by fools

when ignorance runs in schools,

doctors despising health

as an obstacle to wealth:

anyway, you get the picture.

When the fleas

train the tigers

to jump through fire

and the crows

coach the hawks

to look for silver,

or the avalanche

tells the mountain

where to stand

for a photo-op,

even if you feel,

even if the heart

bleeds like a blackberry

punctured by thorns,

and you’re up

to your neck

in a starless tar pit

darker than night,

and the bombs fall

like meteors like

the foundation stones

of crystal palaces,

is there a point

a pebble

an afterlife under

these quicksand pyramids,

these deserts in an hourglass,

this crack in the dawn

to build another world upon?

PATRICK WHITE