GETTING UP
Getting up on the first
legs of the morning,
waiting to remember I know
how to walk,
as my body changes shifts
and I emerge from the
dream-mist
not knowing if I’m
stepping out of a lifeboat or a cocoon,
if yesterday’s oars have
turned into wings,
or the silver blood of the
mud bone
greened like old copper
at the scene of a crime
or if my heart has finally
congealed
like a suspicious scar
on the mood ring of the
moon
as I resent the orthodoxy
of the petty rituals
I have yet to perform with
blades and foam and water
on a face that almost
scares me
it is so diminishingly
mine.
And it’s radiant, and
the sun
is reflected in every
windshield,
in every palace of ice and
hovel of glass,
and even the deepest
eclipse within me
that weeps like a dragon
is remotely enhanced by
the shining.
Today I will make money.
Today I will pay bills.
Today I will fix the car.
Today I will feed myself
intelligently and exercise,
trying to prolong my
bruising campaign against death;
I will walk in and out of
banks and stores
and greet people with as
much sincerity
as they are capable of,
careful
not to pour the ocean into
a teacup
or think a tear sufficient
to mourn the dead seas of the moon.
I will be congenial, kind,
and generous;
I will scatter tropical
trail mix
in the parking lot of
Pizza Hut for the birds
though I know it annoys
people
who worry about shit on
their cars,
and walk away feeling like
an insurgent
who bombed the marketplace
into life
with dried pineapple not
shrapnel,
though it’s a pathetic
protest to offend
the protocols of their
chronic opprobrium
by feeding a few birds
more
than made it through the
freezing night before
and excuses nothing in me
that I often fear is worse
when I consider what I
could be doing and don’t
because the picket up my
intimate ass is the universe
and everything turns on
that
like the paddlewheel of a
Mississippi showboat.
All day long I will apply
Buddhas and Zen masters like poultices
to draw the infection of
the world out of my blood
like the noxious fume of a
festering rose,
and then upbraid myself
insightfully,
confessing to a delegation
of mirrors
that it is my seeing, my
eyes
that smear the view like
slugs,
and that I am obsessively
defeated by what I condemn
because I am them, I am
them, I am them.
And that’s when I pull
the trigger on myself like a fire alarm,
knowing no one’s coming
to put me out,
because I haven’t been
tested for the right emergency
and there’s never a
pilot light on the mystic urgency
to at least be right about
the way I know I’m wrong.
But no matter how you beat
it,
you can’t beat a violin
concerto out of a gong
or labour the rime of
light on the lips of a black hole into honey.
All day I will look upon
small trees
chained like slaves to a
square meter
of lonely earth in an
asphalt parking lot
and profoundly lament
the intrusive derangement
of my species
that abomination after
abomination, shames the fly.
And the fate of a shopping
mall sapling
may be the bathetic token
of something more
profoundly unspoken,
but all day my spirit will
be unmothered
by the existential
complicity
of being here like rain on
the blood of the roadkill
my karmic imbalance tries
to unmean
as everything I cherish
turns slightly obscene.
But I know a star cluster
far away beyond my fingertips
with the body of a serpent
woman
who charms the clay she
caresses
by playing her fates and
phases on the flutes of the moon
as if every breath were
the wind in a gust of doves
she scatters like the
sheet music of a liberated choir.
And all day I will taste
the infinite constellation of her stars
unspooling the lifeline of
the mystery I follow
through the labyrinth of
the moon’s horn gates
like cool transfusions of
night through my blood
as I turn her image in my
heart
like a mysterious jewel
that once wept her crown
away
to lift a veil of water
like an eye.
And I will smile through
the day serenely within
remembering so many
things, so many lives,
so many fireflies of
tenderness that haven’t happened yet,
and the unsayable passion
of the lips that wake the dragon
like a flame to the wick
that candles the volcano
into a fury of ecstasy
that shocks
the starmaps billions of
lightyears away,
and she will be my secret
and my sail
and I will disappear over
her five horizons like a treble clef
or the whole note of a
fleeing night bird into its hidden nocturne.
All day she will flourish
within me to heal the mystic herbalist
who knows beyond flower
and frond
the dark virtue of the
black honey
that pours from her own
wounded root like time.
And I can be moved by
women who are goblets
spilling over with wine,
and women
who turn moonlight into
glass
and stand sad and empty
against the vastness of
the sky,
witching for mirrors, and
those
who were Japanese plum
tree blossoms in spring,
the dangerous wine of the
rose,
now shattered on the
ground
as if the moon had slipped
its finger from the ring.
And I have loved the
loveliest
and least attentive among
them,
and those who were mortal
and mad,
and the black peonies of
the sexually bad
who have indulged me by
shedding their eclipses
until we fell down
exhausted beside each other,
two petals in the mud.
But she has stars in her
blood
that spice the tongue of
the snake,
the grail horns of the
divining rod
and the tine of the
lightning
that tunes the ashes of
the burnt guitar
as if it were still a tree
to the tears of the
willow,
and I am addicted by a
muse
to a delirium of longing
that burns like a
loveletter
written in light and blood
and shadows
that slides me under her
door
with every breath I take
and unfolds me like a sky
or a bird,
a fossilized constellation
buried in the shale of a
starmap,
to shine deep within all
day long
beyond the light like
stars
at the bottom of a well at
noon
where she comes to drink
like the moon.
PATRICK WHITE
