Thursday, August 30, 2012

PAINTING NATIVE MASKS ALL DAY


PAINTING NATIVE MASKS ALL DAY

Painting native masks all day. Concrete.
Poured into a mould, their supple souls set
into the permafrost like a mammoth’s skull.
I don’t know what they were the gods of,
two of them. Could be a life or a deathmask.
Possibly Nootka, Salish, Kwakuitl, Chinook, Cowichan
Fossils, their faces, ferocious and threatening
though I doubt I’ve got the good sense to be scared.
Red for blood. Green for always. Black
for the night they were absorbed back into
like crows a moment in the moonrise, then gone
to some grove where they’ve driven the squirrels out
of their rookery. There but anyone’s guess where.

Terrorist hyperbole, or totems from darker realms,
one, perhaps, more human than the other,
an eagle shaman with a salmon moon in its talons
and the other, bucktoothed, like a nasty beaver,
but almost sacred clowns, as if they were designed
to scare the children like grandfathers
making monstrous faces without meaning
to make anyone cry. And I take it as a sign,
given the inconceivable atrocities of human obscenity
tearing at its own flesh in a high-minded rage of hatred
that threatened our own childhoods since these were made
to protect the innocent from their own nightmares.
Do ut abeas. I give so that you go away. A sign
that the nightmares have grown astronomically catastrophic,
and even though a hundred million people died
in the twentieth century, that’s still not enough
to satisfy the hearts of the generals, evicting
entire peoples and nations from the house
they were born into before they were driven
into an exile of violated thresholds and broken taboos.

I imagine them carved in rainproof cedar, red or yellow,
and just as a medicine wheel has to be blessed
by a real healer, so I wonder if the hands of those
who shaped these out of the uncarved block
of their heartwood ringed by halos of rain
were invisibly sanctified by the medium they worked in
as sometimes mine seem when a poem
circles overhead like an osprey for the pure joy of it,
or a painting suddenly breaks into life
in a limestone cave of hunting magic
that enchanted its prey in a trance
of holistic identification with the mystery,
not of how life takes life to survive,
but how life gives itself to itself like a gift
that thrives in the hands of those who do the giving
and multiplies the grazing herds of the stars
and rivers you can walk across like a messiah
on the backs of fish, without overextending
your supply line the way Napoleon and the Nazis did
when they tried to live off the land
by treating the people like retreating buffalo
or realizing, a nemesis too late, you can only keep,
conqueror or not, what you’re willing to give away
with an open hand. And the rest is just a map of smoke
on the Road of Ghosts, beaten armies
dragging their weapons behind them
like their mythically-deflated ambitions,
wishing they’d defended their pre-emptive ideas
with tools instead of rifles, a paintbrush or a knife
to fashion their own unlikeness into the divinity
of a lifemask you could wear among the gods
without losing face as a human that you haven’t learned by now
when you reach Moscow, this way, self-destruction,
that way the pathless path, the gateless gate
to the old growth totem poles of creation
collaborating imaginatively in their own interpretation.

PATRICK WHITE

YOUR FACE WAS A MOON I HAUNTED


YOUR FACE WAS A MOON I HAUNTED

Your face was a moon I haunted, and your body
twisted me into agonies of sexual driftwood
that wanted to burn at midnight under the stars
like the last signal fire of an isolated survivor
high up on your affluent shores.
I wanted to do dark things with you
in the shadow of eclipses that put their hands over
the eyes of the flowers and sent the birds to bed.
With you, I would have asked for closure
from the spring constellations swarming overhead
like free radicals paroled to the wind
tuning up the larnyx of the birch-trees,
I would have lain down with you in the bedlam
of a thousand cares and zirconium delusions
and lived beside you like an island and a telescope
drunk on the wine of your circus mirrors
that crash before they talk; all night, all night,
wave after wave, I would have caressed
the famous reflection of you in black carnation panties,
and lavished the wealth of the sea on your ears.
And we could have built a little shelter among the shipwrecks
or lived rent free with the swallows
in the silo of an aging lighthouse,
listening to the foghorns bellow like slaughtered cattle.

And it’s sad and lonely and fearful
watching the sky fall on the swords of its own horizons every night
and no one to mourn the sunset
that unspools from the wound like a bewildered snake,
and it’s dangerous the way I go erect as a symphony
around the hives of killer bees
still swinging from the old steeples believing
they’re just a misunderstood form of fruit.
And I’ve tried to master the dictionary of razorwire
that’s propping up the blase window, but I don’t like the way
I’m always a rose short of blood at the end of the day,
and the bouquet of startled flashlights
you placed on the nightstand keeps blacking out
like the eyes of dying bees in pollinated coffee-cans
and you keep looking at my balls
as if they were always nesting pelicans with something to eat,
and I haven’t talked to you about
dismemberments and Orphic skulls
in a good all-night asylum for years. What a shame
I won’t get a chance to toke with your firing squads,
or be secretly committed to one of the volunteer rehab centres
you’ve franchised like a brain selling straitjackets to lightbulbs
suffering the opprobrium of their maladjusted shades.
There aren’t more pages in the book of sorrows
or ghosts on the moon compared to the cults of the silver tide
I would have filled you with
like dolphins swimming ashore
to get their landlegs back. And think of the horns we’ve missed
charging through the labyrinths of our blood enraged
by the stungun behind the cape of the corrupt matador
gored and trampled like a bat in a blaze of honesty; how
some conversations would have hung in the air for years
like the get-well elegies of postcard suicides.
And maybe worse, because sooner or later,
I would have been compelled to confess
three mountains I didn’t name after you
to honour your breasts on the last lunar landing I made
to read the fine print between the lines
of the pre-nuptial tatoo of the anniversary spider
I signed on your chest
when you took your bra off like an hourglass
and there were questions just too momentous to ask.


PATRICK WHITE