TIRED OF SUPPLYING THE STARS THEIR SKELETONS

TIRED OF SUPPLYING THE STARS THEIR SKELETONS

Tired of supplying the stars their skeletons,

or webbing them into constellations

like love-letters written in prison,

or dusting the hieroglyphics of their fossils

pressed between the pages of nocturnal shales,

looking for signs of original life,

this brevity of perilous confusion

that sits on a throne of fog,

its quicksand foundations

the filth of fanatics and fools, my skull

a paperweight in a laurel of razorwire,

and every gesture of purity, every

symbol, emblem and image of light,

every effort to labour for greener domains

heart by heart, just

another mode of murderous betrayal,

lipstick on toilet paper,

a bullet hole in a swan, I long

for the clarity of mornings that don’t exist

to assure me I haven’t wasted my life

trying to feather a human out of coal.

I want a future that isn’t already a ghost,

I want to know at nightfall, bloodfall, eyefall,

that the available dimension of tomorrow

isn’t just another stalling tactic of today, isn’t

just more vinegar

bruising its eyelids with wine,

the slash of a thin smile greased with cherries.

I want to know that I haven’t been planting

apple trees on the moon,

that somewhere in September on earth,

a bough bends under the weight

of a windfall of planets

wrapped in thin-skinned sunsets

ripe with sugars and seeds

ready to fall to the living root

of their own beginnings

like cupfuls of water and light

returned to the river I took them from,

but sweetened by the spirit

that cherished them like gifts

I made of the gift that was given to me,

this diamond devotion to orchards and oceans

and the wounded humans that walk beside them,

their hearts unharnessed like ploughs.

Tired of having my jaw wired before I’m dead

to the remnants of myself,

these reconstructions of teeth and vertebrae

in the puppet-master museums

that put the future on display

before it’s born, my heart

a black embryo in formaldehyde, a ghoul

in a circus of interrogative clowns

that conjecture on what I might have been

had I devoted myself like rain

to different bloodstreams, had I

not disavowed the old, cracked creekbeds

to make a river of my own flowing.

I want to sit down like a lottery

with a choirmaster in a cemetery,

with a gravedigger on the moon who longs

for the probable impossibility

of knowing how many legs are on a snake

as he tries to reinvent himself from scratch.

I want to sit down on the hilarious ground

at the end of a long apprenticeship

and laugh until I’m sick with certainty

at the accomplished absurdity

of recognizing my best work

in the last phase of a lifelong eclipse,

set like a jewel of coal in the corona of a diamond ring.

PATRICK WHITE

AS IF I HAD JUST LET GO OF SOMETHING HUGE

As if I had just let go of something huge,

the glacier of stars

that has been driving me

like an enlightened ox all these years

to grind bread from my darkness,

as if a planet fell out of a dragon’s mouth,

as if turning the mountain around

I were no longer the cornerstone

of a temple I were being slowly crushed under

in the name of an unknown purity

that clung to me like the last of a species.

I’ve been consulting oilslicks

and eclipses as if they were starmaps,

I’ve been downloading constellations

onto a heretical hard-drive

to upgrade my fate, trying,

though it’s like trying to spawn upstream

when it isn’t easier than rain

to detach from my subjective imaginings,

the billboards and the midways

and the golden chains I look so good in,

all the Venus fly-traps of my creative idealism,

the gambler’s pride I took

in witching for water in hell

with a seasoned branch of lightning.

I’ve been pouring myself out on the ground

like nightblood from a wounded dream for years,

like a rare wine that had the elan to squander itself,

to transcend its own visionary delirium

this side of the river

where the fires bloom and spread wildly downstream

like supple bells of paint,

tender intrusions of beauty,

and even love bleats like a judas-goat

roped to a stake smeared with fat,

and it’s no one’s fault

when two masks stop crying for each other,

trying to irrigate a desert on the moon

with a glass tear

or predict the orbit of a firefly with a mirror.

And it’s cold and alone

and profoundly insignificant

when you realize

that there is no ultimacy at the gate

that will greet you,

looking up from your weeding,

with a smile, no clarity

that can wash your eyes away like ice,

and no one to give a bouquet to

that isn’t already a flower.

Intelligence isn’t enough,

imagination falters.

The spirit constantly denuded of itself

like spring from the wind

eventually sees itself reflected

everywhere in matter like time

and comes to rest

like a waterbird on the moon,

the shadow of a door that always opens onto itself,

like a valley, or a god, or a pair of wings,

the next breath.

Those who don’t know

look for a meaning to existence;

those who do

gather the bruised fruit with compassion,

and tamp their eyelashes

around the impoverished root like tea leaves

steeped in the cool bliss of their tears.

The stars look down in wonder over them,

as if a rose could be a bloodstream,

and marvel that there should be such hearts in the world,

where the lighthouses

are stubbed out like cigarettes

in the eye of the approaching storm

and the pyramids turn to quicksand.

And the wonderful absurdity of it all is

it doesn’t matter who you are,

a river or a highway,

a spider in a poppy,

or the iron daffodil

of a parking meter in bud,

until you let go of yourself like a scarred bell

that isn’t a phase of the moon,

and open the eyelid of your stone coffin

and breathe yourself out like a dream

into the shadows of your afterlife,

until the pulse of your whole being

is a tide and a threshold

that sweeps over you

like a sky over an uninhabited island

you’re still a rumour in the darkness

trying to reverse the disgrace

of an infamous legend of light.

PATRICK WHITE