FIVE
DOLPHINS SWIMMING OFF THE BOW OF MY FOREHEAD
Five
dolphins swimming off the bow of my forehead,
glancing
encounters with the moon that lacquers their skin.
I’m
in a lifeboat under the full sail of a blank page
just
to keep up with them, though I know I’m moving
into
deeper night seas of awareness, too far out
to
make it back to shore in time to make the curfews
of
the lighthouses trying to keep the shore-huggers apart
from
the salvagers who run down to the shores in a storm
taking
over from the mermaids like a nightshift of scavengers,
who
want to run you up on the rocks just as surely
by
holding their lanterns out like the tinfoil constellations
of
false hopes on the event horizons of precipitous cliff walls.
I
revel in the glee, the ecstasy, the rapture
that
doesn’t mean anyone’s coming to save me
of
running free with my imagination for the pure joy
of
living with it as the only known antidote
to
the decrescent moon that had its fangs pulled.
I
give my flightfeathers up to the wind off the sea at night
like
a seagull to a sky burial that sheds them like apple bloom.
Mediocrity
thinks that words are the sounds you make
like
the names of things when you’re beating
on
a hollow log of a muse. Amplified echoes
of
a weak pulse. Thunder without lightning. Life
without
water and blood. Sex without lust.
But
words are living creatures with an integrity
and
mystic specificity of their own that don’t need
anyone’s
voice to animate them, because
long
before anyone was born to stick them like fingers
and
things of the world into their mouths,
words
were speaking for themselves
like
nightbirds in the woods, the shriek of the hawk
as
it whistles by like an arrow between the talons
of
its parentheses, the hermit thrush and the mockingbird
that
speak in the tongues of words they’ve cloned from sound.
How
else do you think the fox in winter,
following
the pheasants tracks learned to print,
and
then later the leafless trees taught it cursive script?
Sweesh-ka-ka
in Kwakiutl means robin.
You
can almost hear it on a green bough
outside
your window in the spring when the crows
from
their island rookeries are squabbling for squatter’s rights
with
hopeful migrants from the south of winter.
You
can hear it in the way a star splinters on a moonless night
like
a chandelier in an ice storm. I don’t write
as
if I’ve been talking to foreign ministers all my life
with
urgent messages from an abandoned embassy in Babylon
that
shredded all its clay tablets like papers
for
my eyes only to keep them out of the hands of my enemies.
Words
aren’t memos to feel something you didn’t yesterday.
Or
the gravestones of dead metaphors to help you recollect
things
you’ve buried in your past like a bone box of loveletters.
Abracadabra.
Grammar is magic. Words cast spells on the stars
that
turn them into bulls and fish. Black and white magicians,
witches,
sylphs, sibyls, incubi and sorceresses
that
can curse or bless the dancing ballerina on top
of
that music box you keep like a secret aviary in your larynx
to
jinx the silence of a false dawn with the sound of rain.
Can’t
you hear the mirrors crying to be liberated
from
the same old reflections on love you bare before them?
Words
aren’t a collection of old shoes you’ve shed in a closet
full
of skeletons like flesh and snakeskins
you’re
never going to wear again. However long
the
firewalk you’ve got to go barefoot if you ever want
to
wear wings on your heels whose flightplans
don’t
need to be measured by the width of your feet.
Words
are demons. Words are wounded angels. Words
are
drunks slumped three stairs up on the fire-escapes of hell.
Words
are dragons that swallow the cosmic eggs
of
sacred syllables trying to break out of their shells
like
fledglings. They’re not the vicars of your moral life.
They’re
not forensic evidence of how wonderful you were.
They’re
not the yarrow sticks that wrote the Book of Changes.
They’re
not a memory system for the absently-minded
collective
unconscious talking in its sleep
elliptically
to archetypes of the definite article. Isn’t The . . .
enough
of a biography to factualize the fictions
and
fictionalize the facts of anyone over the course
of
a lifetime drilling wells into a watershed of mirages
to
get to the bottom of things like a shipwreck in a desert
when
it rains? Everybody gets wordy about things
they
know nothing about. In the beginning was the word
and
so on and so on sound begat sound, but what gets lost
in
translation like the prequel of the lightning flash
before
the rolling thunder, is the genesis
of
the imagination playing by itself in the dark
like
a blind child listening to the rain on the roof
crying
its eyes out for things that can’t be seen in the light.
Comb,
coma, comet, comma. Ball, ballet, ballistic, symbol.
The
dead word in the living voice of the undertaker
as
he combs the hair of your corpse, isn’t poetry.
It’s
just another night light on in a morgue
without
a midnight or a dawn to know what hour it is.
Don’t
be fooled by the luster of the polished stone.
Or
the transparency of the crystal skull. The dark ore
conjures
more stars to the window than the candle lures moths.
You
miss the point of your seeing altogether like a black dwarf
if
you go out to look at Orion on a winter night
and
come back in singing the praises of your lenses.
The
gold of the rainbow pours from the ore of the storm.
You
don’t need to bury yourself alive to mine it
or
make a sluice of your tongue, a forge of your heart
to
refine it. Or open your mouth like Crassus
among
the Parthians to wear the corona of your eclipse
like
a sun that shines at midnight, coal in a wedding ring.
Five
dolphins swimming off the bow of my forehead like Delphinus
nudging
a poetic sailor who jumped over board from Job’s Coffin,
or
the Black Turtle of the North to the Chinese astronomers
on
a nightwatch without an astrolabe ashore
as
Nicolaus Venator from Palermo repeats
his
Latin name infernally backwards in the dark mirror
of
the nightsky like the alpha and beta of its two brightest stars.
PATRICK
WHITE
Note: The poetic
sailor referred to is Arion, the poet reputed to have been saved from
drowning by a dolphin. Nicolaus Venator is the Latin name of the
astronomer, Niccolo Cacciatore, which, spelled backwards, was given
to the two brightest stars of the constellation, Sualocin and
Rotanev, though, modestly, only of the fourth magnitude.
