YOU TAKE THE SOLITUDE OUT OF POETRY
You take the solitude out of poetry.
You rob nobility of its grief.
You pursue an earthly excellence
like a posse, you hang poetry
like a horse thief with wings on its
heels.
The nightbird no longer sings
about the way it feels to lose its
voice
in an aviary of half-hearted appeals
begging bird seed like begging bowls
from the dawn. Something’s gone
from the light, when you deny
a moonrise its black pearl. It’s true
that orchids bloom in the shadows
of outhouses, and waterlilies in
swamps,
but if you only want the star and not
the mud its rooted in like a brain,
the shining’s tinfoil, and it never
rains,
all your Chanticleers are bronchial
weathervanes.
The highest, most difficult path
isn’t for petty people. The trail
isn’t well worn or warm to the touch
of your bare feet firewalking the ashes
that bite like thorns of the reflexive
wavelengths
of the red shifting snakes in the
aftermath
of greater spirits. Even horned
reptiles
can’t fledge an arrow with scales
without first turning them into
feathers.
The snake’s got to achieve its wings
if it wants to fly with oxymoronic
dragon sages.
If you suffer your dismemberments
like a picket fence losing its palings,
it doesn’t say much for the lion
gate.
Maybe your sacred grove
with its toxic unicorn is nothing more
than a twig of kindling and a bundle
of firewood for a homeless oil drum
cooking stolen barnyard birds
stuck in their own throats like
wishbones.
It’s well known Apaches don’t pluck
chickens
to make war bonnets, and it’s hard
to convince paper lifeboats on the moon
they can still float, after the
captain’s
jumped ship like a plague rat in 1348
and the defection’s beginning to
catch on
like a popular meme of what it really
means
for a flea circus to act great and
black and tragic.
Celebrity bubbles keep rising like
weather balloons
until they burst with a big bang
of narcissistic mythic inflation,
parachutes tangled like Medusan
jellyfish
in their own powerlines, come back down
to earth,
candling like condoms, wind socks
and withered daylilies off the charts
of their heart throbs on life support
that never got over the analeptic shock
of you letting them down like a
dandelion
that roared as if it had a mane and
teeth
to back it up when all else failed in
diaspora.
Poets into gleemen, gleemen into
entertainers,
entertainers into court jesters, court
jesters,
into fools, fools into idiots, idiots
into morons, morons into experts, and
experts
beating on a pinata of paper wasps
like Chinese lanterns and burning box
kites
that don’t yield honey or wield their
tiny stingers
to tilt quixotically at windmills and
real dragons.
And then come the donkeys to the well
to see the well looking back at the
donkeys
like the shameless celebrities who are
famous
among crows and nightingales alike
for not being able to sing even so much
as a riff of an honest lullaby to
themselves,
late at night, and they’re alone, and
nobody
applauds the braying of a jackass at
the moon
in front of a make-up mirror in the
green room.
You can go to a Grateful Dead concert
and huff laughing gas like a muse.
You can moshpit your way to the front
of the crowd elbowing other people
out of the way to a seat on the
celestial omnibus
that isn’t leaving for anywhere in
particular
for a couple of thousand light-years
yet.
You can piss on everyone’s parade
like the golden showers of Zeus
tinkling like a horse-haired
glockenspiel
on their watercolours of starmaps in
the rain.
You can act as if you’re mad when
you’re sane.
A nasty being with a beautiful soul.
But you take the black hole out of
poetry
you’re Orphically afraid of
descending into
and try to fake it like a tunnel of
love,
you rob the river of the sea, the road
of its homelessness, the bloodstream of
its heart,
the galaxy of the sense of direction
it’s had
from the very start like a prayer-wheel
turning into the wind like a jinxed
Sufi
at the crossroads of where it all
begins and ends.
You take the ore away from the gold.
You take the coal away from the
diamond.
You liberate the star from its
dendritic chains
of black matter in the darkness, the
mystery
from the occult, the history from the
bloodshed,
the eyes behind the mask you wear
like a fancy poultice at a costume
ball,
the arsonist from the mouth of the fire
swallowers
you surround with emergency exits and
alarms
and stumpy fire hydrants waiting in
attendance
like an ambulance upon a fire engine,
the poison in one fang for the sake
of the antidote in the other, you’re
only
milking the crescents of the moon like
a snake trainer
with a bird bone flute to bite other
people
without taking a risk of dying of the
spit
you drink out of everyone else’s
mouths
like house wells you’ve been fracking
for snake oil.
You want to die a trivial death, a
volcano
buried in the caldera of a firefly,
flaunt
your sex appeal in front of a jealous
muse sometime
and try to convince her you’re as
real
as the falsies in your padded bra
you’re palming off as poems. Or cod
pieces
in the dancing leotards of prosthetic
anacondas.
And she’ll show you soon enough
she’s not an inflatable doll on a
long shipwreck
and you’re not the swan she’s going
to stick
the copulative sibilant of her neck out
for, when
the the double-bladed axe comes down
like the crone phase of the moon
on a chopping block of a real fox
inside the razorwire of a chicken coup
born running from the shadows of hawks.
PATRICK WHITE