NO GRAVEGOODS IN MY SOLITUDE

NO GRAVEGOODS IN MY SOLITUDE

No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets

from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.

The totem belongs to the dream that’s buried with it

as the flower’s engendered by the root it’s taken from.

Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn’t as if

one is blind to the other because one shore

isn’t parted from the other by the flowing

of the mindstream in between. Try to separate

the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.

The moon is a characteristic of water as the water

is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate

until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge

to get to the other side of a life you’re already standing on,

that’s ok as long as it’s burning. Otherwise it’s just going

to obstruct your path when you’re shooting the rapids

of the Milky Way like your own spring run off

trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft

and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird

with wings of your own, but what a thrill

to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon

among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,

in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin

testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see

if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.

It’s getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town

unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles

practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing

like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.

More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows

in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell

the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes

in a lover’s hair, trying to turn her into a constellation

to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes

of the starmaps the shining sets afire

and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart

on a wind that carries away the passions of this art

of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,

I can still burn in the dark like the ore

of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light

on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.

Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose

and blew that candle out in the open window

of an abandoned house and ever since I’ve been

drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.

I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.

To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night

I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice

to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics

to the picture-music that’s haunted me all my life

like the song of someone who loved me once

before I was born and began to forget. But my heart

that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,

or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,

I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.

Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems

of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards

of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet

at the autumn equinox of the New England asters

and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes

for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.

You can’t keep what you won’t give away

and it’s no good to you in a grave when it comes time

to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat

and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness

like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog

calling out to anyone who’ll listen on the coast

of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis

to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage

back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.

Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.

Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.

And you weren’t asked at the door for any i.d.

And no one’s going to stop you from lowering the fire escape

to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask

the mirrors of your own awareness, they’d stop staring at you

as if they’d never seen a new world savage before.

Everyone’s going to leave an empty chair at the table

sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon

you’ve got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth

if you want to give your abundance another chance.

You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars

or you can abandon them to the spiders

in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,

but if you want to shine of your own accord,

albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,

you’ve got to see the sun flowering at midnight,

you’ve got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.

You’ve got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper

until you disappear like a bird in the house of life

through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg

to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends

the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness

in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,

you’ve got to give it all up like your shining reflection

if you want to stay here for your own protection.

PATRICK WHITE

I WAKE UP LATE AGAIN. 3 PM

I WAKE UP LATE AGAIN. 3 PM

I wake up late again. 3 pm. More afraid

of what the world can do to me in the light

than in the dark of the night. Depressing grey

of the clouds smeared on the windows

like the salt and dirt of last winter

still clinging to my third eye where the rain

can’t reach to wash it off. Why is dread

always the alloy of the pain I feel

as soon as I open my eyes to the devastation

I have made of my life, to write something real

in fire and roses and ashes and blood, to pursue

an earthly excellence from world to world

well beyond the bounds of an ugly life

out of the suicidal folly of staying true to an art

that’s keel-hauling me like the moon

over the hull of my own heart encrusted

by the corals and worms of my worries and griefs,

the gnawing anxieties knotting nooses

in the frayed shoelace of my spinal cord?

And the only ray of light at the end of the tunnel,

this stoic sword that’s always tempting me

like an exclamation mark, to fall upon it like a man

and put an end to this long apprenticeship

in a guild of sacred clowns. Put the pen down.

Leave the page blank. Take my hands off the wheel

of this apocalyptic moonboat in a pyschic storm

of stars arising in the desert every hundred years

like the lost imam of a long-awaited mahdi

surrounding Khartoum like a galaxy of dust and doom

being swept up into the black hole of a vacuum

nature abhors. I steel my will like the sabre of the moon

and imagine I’m anti-heroically carrying on

this long-standing, counter-intuitive aesthetic tradition

of winning every battle and still losing the war.

Just once I’d like to surrender before

shooting out the stars, raise this white flag of a page

and say here, take my sword, give it back to the lake

I found it at the bottom of beside the herb of immortality

the snake stole from Gilgamesh, bursting his bubble

as soon as he came up and fell asleep on the beach,

exhausted by the trouble he’d gone to to underwhelm death.

As I do, night after night, in a living coffin

of a smoke-filled room, shedding my life

like the scales and skin of an old circumpolar dragon

trying to keep the horns and stars of its constellation,

dry as powder above the uneventful horizon

of the false dawns in the whites of their albino eyes.

I play with my kitten. I talk to my goldfish.

The walls are lined with a thousand books

I never want to read again, including my own. I attend

to the voices in my head by the third summons

and wait for the mercy of nightfall to put an end

to my relentless beginning. I never wanted

to suffer the humiliation of another art martyr,

still too angry at what happened to the solitude of Van Gogh

for the cheap consolation of a guilt-ridden reputation

he doesn’t even know he has. I live and work in protest

of all the good reasons I have not to paint and write.

I know I’m diving for pearls on the moon.

I’m saying a mantra of sacred syllables over and over

again to myself, like a rosary of eclipses I made

to remember the names of God in the echoless valleys

of an eyeless abyss. But she doesn’t care

if I can’t bring myself to paint another panicked wolf

to make up what I owe on the rent. Or feel like the farce

of another domestic morality play of my uncommon sense

in overcoming my biological imperative to live

by writing another poem in my own breath

diminishing on the cold window

in this neglected orphanage of literature

where I’ve grown too old to be discovered,

and too accurate about my darkest prophecies

to believe that Venus is ever going to cast my shadow again

like the lyric of another heartwarming loveletter

on this blanched page of snow on a moonless night

at twenty below the worst case scenario

of the frozen thermometer that’s become of my bloodstream.

O, yes, I still dream of some random fluke of circumstance,

some crumb of luck in the corners of my eyes when I awake

every day to the same recurring nightmare of white magic

sounding the depths to find Moby Dick and remove

some of these harpoons like tacks from a starmap,

needles from the eyes of a voodoo doll, axial pins

through the thorax of transfixed butterflies

like the critically acclaimed collected works

of a posthumous die hard with a rock solid alibi

for what I’ve done to myself in the name of poetry.

If it weren’t for the indignity of the past fifty years

of my prolific life in art, I wouldn’t have

any self-respect left to live up to the aristocratic penury

of the birthmark on my heart that singled me out

to wear this laurel of stinging nettles to the grave.

Three bucks for a loaf of genetically modified

twelve grain bread, two cans of tuna, 1.07$ each,

ranch dressing, 1.57$, and a buck for three lighters

because I haven’t got matches to light a candle

to smoke a cigarette-butt from the midden of the ashtray

at three in the morning, when nothing’s open

but Mac’s Milk and the wound of a penniless poet,

contemplating maggots in place of commas

to keep it as clean as a run-on sentence

as he searches the lean windows for a star

like a blue jay gleaning a leftover sunflower

over the blockade of tar paper rooftops

starving the eyes until one window asks another

for news of the sky out of sight of the heritage lamp posts.

The silence sings like a stave of hydro lines in the rain

this dark hour of the morning dogpaddling toward dawn

when the ghouls will fill my mailbox

with discounts on a funeral I still can’t afford,

as a way of thinking ahead on behalf of a family

that doesn’t belong to me anymore if it ever did.

And God forbid I importune my loved ones with death.

And the longer you live, the less your suicide means

to anyone interested in the arts. I’m intrigued

like a landlocked sailor in the desolate music

of irreconcilable extremes as the furnace pipe

knocks and taps and snaps its untimely rimshots

like someone practising the drums like the pulse

of a damaged heart, or ice cracking like my lifelines

under the next step I take toward the blowholes

of the mermaids who don’t sing to me as well as they used to

clubbed to death like baby seals shrieking in e minor

the moment they come up for air and open their mouths.

PATRICK WHITE