NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

Not sitting here trying to flint knap the splinters of a mirror

into Clovis points for pygmies to go hunting mammoths with.

Maybe if I can make them small enough to go on Twitter

or Facebook, two minutes with a hook in the imagination

and I might be able to make of a little stardust, a big constellation

of gaping fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake.

I might make a big splash, like Basho’s frog,

for the lifespan of a haiku in prime time for nitwits.

I want to lay my vision out like a surrealistic starmap,

I don’t want some lazy idiot laying its egg on my forehead

like a carnelian, or worse, a contact lens on my third eye

to cure my astigmatism by eating little peep holes in my vision.

I don’t want a news feed for an intravenous muse

spoon feeding me whatever she wants me to hear

like a distant rumour of inspiration running like an opioid

at the end of a morphine drip with fangs.

Beauty’s not an ephemerid, nor the truth

a media fashionista on a catwalk, or an anchor’s desk,

that doesn’t so much as illuminate and deepen

the darkness and the light, but distract the heart with agiprop

and show off its lipstick as if Van Gogh just ate his paint again.

God bless the insane glorious souls dying alone in vain

as the old order changeth and giveth way to the new

and the language of the spirit that expressed itself

in a grammar of wildflowers breaking into a purple passage

of New England asters, is all thorns but no roses

on a bouquet of razorwire that was born without leaves

but still fits the brow of some silly poetling like Apollonic laurel

for having enough money to buy a good book review

if you don’t have the breasts or the chest or the talent

to get it for free.

Why make a mockery of the lie poetry used to be

when yours is so trivial and petty your pretty snowflake

is going to piss in its pants if it ever encounters

an emotional blizzard or a spiritual avalanche?

And that little night light of yours you keep on

like a dream journal beside the bed, isn’t going

to seed the darkness with stars when all you’ve got to sow

is artificial sugar and organic sea salt. And even then,

you’re not Carthage, though you share the same impotence.

What does the candle know of the calling

of a lighthouse on the moon, waiting for light years

or why the foghorns are always in mourning

for the ghost ships it exorcises with a warning

not to come near, or its all downhill from here to the bottom

of a housewell with the literary ambitions of a black hole

the fireflies won’t come to sip from without going out

because they won’t drink from any fountain mouth the stars don’t

and you haven’t even gotten drunk on the blood

of your own skull yet, singing by a river to a moonrise.

Let the strong rope unravel as it will into a million weak threads

clinging like a mountain to a spider web, or a spinal cord

that’s never been frayed like the delta of a river or a mindstream

that can smell the great nightsea of awareness up ahead,

or even a shoelace passing like a needle through an eyelet.

The planet’s on fire, this is Dresden, this is Hamburg,

this is Gaza in a squall of white phosphorus, this is the inferno

that sweeps you off your feet like a whirlwind of igneous Sufis

and evaporates your eyes like dew off the grass in a flash

of inflammable insight that not even your guru or your shrink

are fireproof enough to live through this astronomical catastrophe.

And you, you want to write and tell me, in poems

that make me want to ask them to come over and do my hair as well

how domestically troubled you are by the pebble in your shoe.

You blindfold yourself with a no smoking sign

in front of a firing squad that thinks it might be a good career move

to make a literary martyr out of you like James Joyce

going blind in Trieste while Ezra Pound

sends him cabbages and shoes to survive on.

Bathetic, trivial, irrelevant and effete, you think

it’s radical not to explore the roots of things

like an underground fire in a valley of cedars,

or immolate yourself like the sumac in the fall

hoping to ignite an Arab spring in the middle of your perishing.

Two parachutes on your back, and one in the trunk of the car,

and still you won’t jump, even when the stars

are underneath you expecting you to join in the firewalk

and Icarus hands you a fire-extinguisher

and says, here, put them out if things get too hot.

PATRICK WHITE

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

No lightning from my cloud of unknowing,

now that this season of storms has passed.

Occasionally tears, but a harvest of stars

shining like Spica in the hand of Virgo

and all these dazzling insights into nothing

I hang like wild grapes and chandeliers

above the dance floor where I press the wine.

Not meditative, but darkly absorbed, who knows,

maybe even void bound, drowned or lost,

I’m not trying to seek a way out of the abyss.

Whatever it is, I accept it as it is. Most of the time.

And when I don’t and I’m stuck like a wishbone

in the throat of a nightbird, even my dissonance

is included in the background cosmic hiss.

So I say you don’t have to be attuned to it

to be in harmony with it, and if you’ve gone astray

or been misdirected, maybe that’s a course correction

you didn’t have to make, because all rivers

are flowing the right way to the sea, and as

for the picture-music you hear like a hidden mindstream

talking in a dream in a dark wood, you don’t

always have to hit the right note to be a great singer.

Or name me a bird that sings its heart out off key.

I can feel the stillness moving under my feet

like a road, a mountain path, a rogue orbit,

or Curiosity like a wandering scholar on Mars,

a vagantes, a Druidic refugee intervening in the War of the Worlds

and a machine this time looking for the Garden of Eden

like an alien mirage in the desert, fossils of Dilmun,

the middens of Shangra La, microbes in the begging bowls

of a new myth of origin, where Nasa is God,

and a robot is the first of a whole new race of Martian nomads.

The silence speaks to me in thousands of estranged voices

like leaves on the silver Russian olives moved

by the spirit of the wind tampering with their sterling currency

to lament their passage at the approach of autumn,

though there are only a few flames beginning

to immolate the trees like heretics that had to

bring their own stakes to their auto da fe.

O how easy it would be when I’m down here alone

to slip into this river like an unobtrusive sacred syllable

into a long-running conversation, even if

it’s nothing but spiritual slang, and yet be satisfied

I’ve had my say, I’ve added my voice

like a bird in a birch grove, whether

anything alive tonight answers it or not.

As a holy book said once on a bus, sitting beside me,

when one jewel is marked they’re all marked

indelibly as stars and eyes and planets,

and there’s a Conservation of Data Principle

in this universe, even in the heart of a black hole,

that says once here, here forever

in this great spiritual lost and found

that can read the whole history of life

in the mustard seeds that yellow the fields around here,

or the stars that do much the same

in a commotion of atmospherically aberrated colours,

burning with the urgency of mystic details

being whispered into everyone’s ear

as if each were a hidden secret of God

that wished to be known and expressed itself flawlessly

like a master of mantric wavelengths

or a mute with an overbite pointing out constellations

and the last of the wildflowers, a signage of light

reciting the fathomless poetry that lives in a name,

ignoring all the fancy lanterns in the windows

of the houses of the zodiac, to follow the flame

of whatever light you’ve been given to go by,

wherever it leads, through the star fields or the cul de sac

of a satoric eclipse with no light at the end of the tunnel

as the only way of ever prodigally coming back.

PATRICK WHITE