NOT AGAIN, TONIGHT, THESE FIN DE SIECLE BLUES

NOT AGAIN, TONIGHT, THESE FIN DE SIECLE BLUES

Not again, tonight, these fin de siecle blues

that subsume all my blossoming overviews

into the mystic specificity of concrete things

I stub my heart against as if I’d just had

a head on collision with the moon. Impact.

Emotional meteor showers, the Virginids, perhaps,

I’m being stoned by my own congenital radiants

as if I were being driven out of somewhere

like an extinct species. Bad memories, lifeboats

that didn’t make it back to shore, things I’ve tried

to mythologize like a shipwreck in coral on the moon.

Subtle childhood fears that run my tongue along

the shadows of their blades, when I was scared and young,

and the words would come out like drops of blood

sliding down the length of the stargrass I grazed upon

alone as now in my high wide starfields.

The same ones that are seeking me out tonight

like a rogue planet that’s never quite known

where it’s belonged, or with whom, if anyone

or where at all. Looking for an exit sign

in the infinite labyrinth of the nightmare

that’s walked me like a shadow through all these years.

Most of the past, a waste of good innocence,

and the people and things I loved about it

I cherish more now than I did back then,

usually wounded irreparably in a way

I would have suffered for them if I could have

in order to have my love of them hurt me less,

given I always thought I was more worthy of the pain,

because more deserving of what they endured

than they were. Maledictions of draconian experience.

Miracle of miracles, I transcended everything so savagely,

it’s hard to forgive myself now for ever being a child,

but I try. I put my arms around people when they cry

even frivolously, and offer them a few blue ribbons of wisdom

in exchange for their butter-fingered nooses

and the occasional smile at the antics of a sacred clown

who left his tears painted on a dressing room mirror

as if it had been raining for years without anyone

but himself, a circus of one on tour, getting wet.

I’ve fallen through more cracks in the earth

than most earthquake zones, whenever the continental plates

of my tectonic skull put their hands together in despair

but couldn’t manage prayer as I jumped in on horseback

to save someone’s cornerstone, like Rome, whether

I was delusional or not. A few people lit candles in remembrance,

but just as often as the fireflies light their lamps

they blow them out to return to the darkness

as the closest thing to home. I’m inured to the intemperance

of selfishness as well as gratitude. People approach me

with their secret charade, and I cancel myself out

like a circus parade I’m sure is never going to come,

a kid kicked to the curb who’s been waiting too long,

and we’re both a little estranged by our mutual equilibrium.

Wild parsnip in the drainage ditch boils the flesh and leaves

permanent scars. And when I don’t see them as arsonists

and flammable gypsies, I see the poppies as

the blood-soaked rags of solar flares that have staunched

and cauterized the bleeding awhile. Hot knives

applied to the heart’s excruciations like a brutal code of mercy

to distract me from the agony of my indifference

to the end of an era of unacknowledged supremacy

as the occult master of mirages on the nightshifts

of intensive care, the terminal ward, desolation row,

a fencing master of scalpels who knew more ways

of cutting the heart out of himself and offering it up

to someone who needed it more for the moment,

thinking they had a better use for it than I ever did.

A poultice of water applied like an oasis to a desert’s forehead

until even a corpse could rise up out of the glass-blowing heat

like the inexhaustible amphora of an Aquarian among the stars.

One of the dark jewels of my childhood

in the ashes of a dragon that left me its eyes

by eclipsing mine so I could see

where the black holes were ahead of time

and warn the well-meaning lighthouses that clung to the coast

not to trust their starmaps to get their bearings

or ask for directions from the mentors of the lost and the blind,

but to turn the wheel of life and death loose in a storm

of demonically dispassionate clarities intense enough

to weld diamonds by staring through them

with the ironic compassion of an empty lifeboat

lowered from the deck of an enlightened shipwreck

on the lunar bottom of the Sea of Tranquility

I can weave like a flying carpet of real water

out of the wavelengths of high frequency mirages

like a homoeopathic wolf shaman in shepherd’s clothing.

PATRICK WHITE

SO LIFETIME AFTER LIFETIME

SO LIFETIME AFTER LIFETIME

So lifetime after lifetime, sorceress of shadows and dreams

you step out of the dark wood of yourself,

a shy doe, a mournful lighthouse and a warning off the coast

of your infinite solitude, you, the singing bird

on the green bough of your flute pouring yourself

like sorrow over the eye of the sea, your tears,

the ancient wells of an eternal longing unanswered by the secret stars

that have entrusted their radiance to you, fireflies

drowning their light in your black candles,

the blind music of your lonely flowing. Is your flute, a bone, then,

and this rose I bring you, this heart, this blood

that has turned into a goblet of luminous wine,

drunk on the wonder and the missing in your phantom music,

is this rose nothing but a wound, a coffin-flower,

the unmarked grave of a mystic embryo?

Do you fear the tenderness, the meeting? Does the moon

strike at her own reflection in the mirror of her midnight waters

to wander like an orphan along her lifeless shores?

Boy and man, you murder me on the steps of your serpent shrine,

your eyes, cold glass, eclipses of crystal, your spirit

that once drew in the light like breath,

now a slow glacier, an age of ice

pushing your heart before it like a boulder,

like a temple-stone that one night flew out of the abyss

and buried itself like a meteor, a charred jewel, the demon seed

of a religion without saviours, your implacable creed

scriptures of blood in a mouthless book

that only love can open. Once there were swallows in the tree of life,

asylums of celebrants greeting the morning in their madness,

in the garden, in Eden, hurled through that first dawn

like a young girl’s heart trembling like a drop of light on a blade of grass.

Now your voice is a gypsy-crow on a dead branch,

your music, confession without atonement, your flute

without leaves, without orchards, an eyeless spring,

buried in its manger-cloth for years, nothing

but a crib-death, a broken wand, a phoenix

that has lost its faith in fire under the weight of its own ashes.

Beloved, again and again you kill me

in this dance of slayer and slain, tear out

this page of love like a like a child’s tongue, like a mute heresy

you are doomed to rewrite forever

in the indelible inks of your seeing.

Do you dip your pen like a water-bird drinking

from its own image, putting out your eyes

to deepen the darkness, the scars of your sin

the lightless letters of a hidden language

pricked out on your skin, black stars and braille tattoos?

The pages and the years may turn like wings and hinges,

and a thousand deaths, all your own,

tome the field with gravestones,

breathless flutes and hollow bones, ancient futures;

and you the only mistress of those solitary realms; still,

your legend will remain moonless and sunless,

the story of a night sky, the eyelid of a black rose,

that couldn’t break into light. Until

love stands beside the heartwell of another

as if it were its own sacred fountain,

one blood, one wind-mingled music

playing the waves like plectra, and raises the rim

of the single goblet to its lips and tastes,

only silence answers the terrible vastness,

only death graces the obscenity of these loveless wastes.

PATRICK WHITE