OCCASIONALLY A VAPOUR OF SADNESS

OCCASIONALLY A VAPOUR OF SADNESS

Occasionally a vapour of sadness

condenses into the eye of a tear with a star in it

and the great consolation of the compassionate

is that they see more beauty in a wounded world

than they do the savagery of the suffering that caused it.

They don’t so much exorcise the thick fog

of the ghosts they wander in like empty lifeboats

so much as alloy it to themselves like a star

in search of its own shining. They make deeper ripples

in the darkness of the night than the shallower wavelengths

of apprentice insight, and worlds within worlds

are enlightened by the ingathering of lost harvests

so every ray of the light is someone’s direction of prayer.

The older I get, the more experience ripens into an apple.

A planet in a sunset red shifting toward the sweet end

of the spectrum. There’s still a green star at my core

with half a dozen magic seed moons like eyes of dice

hoping they might root in some kind of continuance

of my starmud and wake up shining in a dark place,

and even oblivion seems a lot kinder than it used to,

and more beautiful those cold, cold nights the moonlight

flashed like a blade of frost across my jugular

in a sword dance of love with my clumsy heart.

But even when I consider the windfall ahead

when the dead go overboard like a burial

at sea in the unsounded depths of their own awareness,

I’m beginning to understand the compassionate nature of space

as more of a receptive embrace of everything I became

trying not to be, and everything I am of what I can

and cannot be, than an impersonal reservoir of my ruin.

Or as someone who understands what I mean might say,

pouring Aquarian tea out into a cracked cup

mended with the gold scar of the last crescent moon,

as above so below, starmaps in the firmament,

water-lilies in the wetlands. At least, I hope so.

Autumn burns like a solar flare in the rain

and occasionally a vapour of sadness

is summoned like a ghost to the medium

of a pilot light of the imagination and even after death

something retains a more flammable impression of life

than the mere forms of the smouldering of smoke

or why post angels with flaming swords

at the gates of Eden if the snake is already out of the bag

like a skin it shed a sky too small to swallow the moon?

Moths and candles, even in hell, birds of a feather

flock together, and neither a true phoenix, nor

a real dragon are born every spring from a shell.

And I’ve heard of flowers that bloom

longer than light years in fire that only

the wisest of children among us know how to exhume.

What’s time to a waterclock if not the mother

of an infinite womb making sure

from one generation flowing into

the empty bucket of the next like

the bloodstream of a body through

the ventricles of a heart, it’s never too late for life

to amaze you with how inseparable you and life are

from the start, not like the reflection of the moon

on dark water, but deeper than that,

like secret jewels dissolved in a solution of light

that taste like star sapphires crystalizing out of the night,

so you can’t help but go where life goes

as it must follow you like the Pleiades from tree to tree

like the water sylphs of the mindstream

they animate into the lyrical dream grammar

of a poet who doesn’t care who’s leading who where

on a long firewalk alone in autumn among the stars.

PATRICK WHITE

ALOOFLY SUBLIME, INTIMATELY TRIVIAL

ALOOFLY SUBLIME, INTIMATELY TRIVIAL

Aloofly sublime, intimately trivial, everything

is down-sized behind the mirror that reflects it.

Telescopic awareness. Two sides to every story.

A bridge standing like a great blue heron on one leg.

It doesn’t matter if your heart’s a begging bowl

or a full silo, bright vacancy, dark abundance,

is the empty bucket not the child of the well,

does a black hole not feed on the light of the stars

reaped from the terraces of space it’s seeded

with singularities that bloom in the roots of dark matter?

One day your hunger just runs out of appetite,

and if the Zen masters are right, you realize

your cupboards have always been full.

Harvest the dark. Sow the light. Empty your skull

like a horn of plenty on the moon. Be the krill

of a Cetacean star that threatens Andromeda on the rocks

like a blue whale that strains space through a grill of baleen.

2.35$ in my pocket, six thin crusts like the end pages

of twelve grain books, still in the collapsed parachutes

of their plastic bags, foraging in the fridge

like Napoleon’s grand army retreating from Russia,

a can of tuna I’ll share with the kitten

that just knocked my penultimate roll

of one-ply toilet paper into the toilet bowl,

seven sliced mandalas of leftover tomatoes

sinking into the sunset like Mayan calendars,

100$ left on the rent, my car off the road,

and the gas bill way too high to even afford

to commit suicide, as it’s getting colder

than a libertarian’s lust outside, and by tomorrow

I’m out of smokes while I try to paint eyelashes

on a hummingbird sipping from the grails

of the hollyhocks as my hand shakes from withdrawal

with a #1 liner, and all the cornerstones

of this life in art I depended on to get to the other side

earthquake the prophetic skulls in my mindstream

into quicksand I sink deeper into the more I struggle.

And what am I doing, and what have I done,

in between the feasts and famines

of these last fifty years, between the fat kind

and the lean, but sit here like a tenant farmer

writing poetry in a lunar landscape

that might bring the coldest windows to tears

of how little there is to show for the labour

of all these light years of waiting for the weather

in a non-existent atmosphere to change for the better?

How many times have I gone down into the underworld

like Orpheus where the dead lap jewels from the hand

of the dark lord of death to sing some muse

back up into the light only to discover in my absence

my bed as empty as it ever was, and I was made

King of the Waxing Year to be nailed to an oak in July

by a corporate fertility ritual that insisted my dismemberment

would not only ensure the future yields of their profit margins,

my body parts providing food for thought and mood in the arts,

but vastly improve the singing voice

of my chorus of prophetic skulls as well.

Anxiety used to turn my waterbed into a snake pit

of self-flagellating wavelengths and me into a hamster

and for years I couldn’t sleep, my ears trying

like radio telescopes not to hear the background cosmic hiss

of mystic glains breaking into baby rattlesnakes

with black lightning in their fangs that illuminated nothing

when they struck like the sign of a madhouse

in some default zodiac I wasn’t aware I was in arrears to.

The moon threw acid in my eyes everytime I tried

to learn to dream again about overcoming

my fear of happiness eating me alive to sustain itself.

I was keel-hauled on the pontoon of my own sea plane

like some noble clown going down like the captain

of a log boom I was trying to dock like a houseboat

deep in the woods like an ark scuttled on field stones

that held only one of my kind in a room

as vast and empty as an aerodrome reserved

for hermit thrushes and mocking-birds alone.

I could hear people listening in like a party-line

on my spinal cord when I hummed

and spit electricity like a snapped guitar string

as the amps and the staves of my hydro towers

went down in a sheet lightning storm

trying to write the music down in quarter-notes of rain

before my band of punk birds got fried on stage

getting on the nerves of the wishbones they broke

like the power harps in the black voice boxes of their rage.

I’d like to say I’ve come of age since then

and maybe I have, but just the same,

there’s a Martian retrograde motion of time

that’s always trying to double back on itself

to resurrect some emotion like a deathmask

that once helped you save face in a hard place

when the black rose bud of the new moon

went into a total eclipse of your eyelids.

Your rainbow body chalked by artistic forensics

like a local hit painted in blood on the sidewalk

in a neighbourhood you grew up in and thought

you’d left as far behind you as education could

without forgetting who or where you came from.

But let it come, let it come, let it come,

if the whole universe is looping eternally

with its tail in its teeth in a periodic orbit

like an ellipse, a noose, a bow on a gift,

or a shoelace that’s come undone

like an unmoored lifeboat drifting through the fog

like a wasted salvation putting words in its mouth

that would have been better spent on an inflatable lighthouse.

Daring says feathers and falling takes flight

some of the time. Sometimes not. But I’ve lived

on such slim hopes for such a long time

I’ve jumped out of a plane more than once

with nothing more than a dandelion seed for a parachute.

And once I almost managed suicide

by putting a clown in a cannon to my temple

and blowing my brains out without a safety net

to make a circus act of Sitting Bull in a rodeo.

And it comes to me as more of a shock than a surprise

that I’m still a ghost dancer with laugh lines around my eyes

for all the shapeshifting I’ve been through

to be true to all these labours I’ve inflicted on myself

to pursue my poetic vision like a muse

that speaks to me like the Virgoan starfields of Spica

with a stalk of wheat in her hand fletched

like the arrow of a hawk with a snake in her talons

to see if I’m still poet enough to enjoin

the highest to the lowest in a unitive symbol

that can shriek like a dragon in pain without being heard

to utter a word of false prophecy to the tail wind

that doesn’t waste its time trying to maintain

the cruising altitude of a weathervane

that never learned to fly straight in the face

of its aristocratic poverty in an elevated space

in this dumpy, four room, over-priced,

under-wired, creatively radioactive asylum

where I spend my nights and days

diverting my tears like funereal rivers

to bury myself like the secret death of a khan

deep in my mindstream as the tributary return

of the sword the moon laid out for me upon enlightened waters

to pick up so I’d have something worthy of surrendering

should I ever grow wise enough to fall upon it like a poet.

PATRICK WHITE