THE NIGHT IS NOT A FRIEND

THE NIGHT IS NOT A FRIEND

The night is not a friend. The stars

are far too fierce. The clarity of the air,

the absence in a small room where someone died

in a cold tone of voice reflected in the mirror.

Even the snow is mean. Things are crushed

and broken that yesterday were supple.

The river reeds have stiffened their wavelengths

that used to go with the flow into hippies

that want to stab you to death with a tuning fork.

Ice scalds my face. A deathmask of glacial acids.

All the close-knit intimacies have migrated south

and there are bearfuls of berries sleeping it off

like body fat blacked out in sensory deprivation tanks

in the grottoes and crevasses of the hills nearby,

waiting for spring to wake up in a recovery room

as the raccoons plunder gap-toothed cattle corn,

semi-hibernating to keep things cheap and low profile.

Life rationed. The earth on food stamps.

The pike idling like paramilitary razor wire

under ghostly encampments of the snow

closing its iron locks like jaws on the river,

eyelids of depression glass ice placking

one of the main arteries of the mindstream

that’s lost heart for awhile with its own resurgence.

Wood chips and burlap on the roots of the roses

brutalized by the permafrost. I cup my hands

around a small poppy of blood I’m keeping alive

in a lantern of goose-down feathers

like a petty theft of Promethean fire

more existentially pragmatic, considering the hour,

than the eternal flame the occasional drunk

huddles around in front of the Parliament Buildings.

Hunger unmarrows my fingertips

like an amputated candelabra gnawed on

by the ghostly feeling I still possess my digits

and they’re not lying on the ground

like the skeletal twigs of a leftover scarecrow

that’s lost the use of its excruciating hands.

Bush wolves and muskrat abound. The blue jays

still turn upside down upon the hour

to peck out the skunk-striped eyes

of the humbled cuckoo clocks of the sunflowers

at their prayers like old ladies bowing

their desiccated heads in a reign of terror

looking toward the earth for sanctuary

in the tomb barrows of the star-nosed moles

among the chthonic gods of their ice-age ancestors.

Juniper shrieks like a bird in a flash freeze

of its evergreen plumage in the snow

and the deer mice thwart the fox

under its prickly wings. The frozen swamp

thatched by abandoned herons’ nests,

is trying on dead trees like the peg legs

and crooked crutches of a piratical age

of prosthetic miracles. My breath steams

out of my mouth like shelter for the night

over the heating grates on the sidewalks

of Old Montreal, mother of many homeless men.

And the stars, the stars so viciously clear

I can feel their abysmal impersonality

even light years away, growing nearer and nearer to me

from the inside out like a crystal chandelier

in an ice-storm I wasn’t invited to

though I firewalk on the enlightened splinters

and glass thorns of their shattered plinths

like a one-legged man learning to dance

the pain away as I shadow waltz with myself

in the void bound snow palaces of the shining.

How cold the dead must be tonight

under their blue-lipped gravestones.

The severity of the wind toys with my jugular

like the switchblade my father tested me with

to see if I were as inhuman as his fearless genes

to be worthy of them when I was three.

The willows scourge themselves with knotted whips.

The anti-rabid hawthorn lacerates the mind

with psychotic antidotes crusading against

the contagion of mad skunks and bats,

the improprieties of blind drunk foxes

that don’t observe the subtle protocols

of paranoid slyness and nuanced cunning

and approach you like the writing on the wall.

Subliminally guilty as long as I can remember,

for reasons too abstrusely adult for me to recall,

asking for forgiveness from an indifferent intelligence

I don’t believe exists for having been born without it

like a question without an answer looking

for a graceful exit without culpability or repentance

from this labyrinth of cul de sacs my heart’s

been twisted into like an emotional escape artist,

playing kick the can with the grails

the ladies of the night offer up to the moon on meds,

as they weep like dew on the webs of the relationships

they’ve woven out of their straitjackets and chains.

I’ve taken grim chances and subjective risks in life

that made the dice themselves close their eyes

and not want to look. I ventured everything,

and I saw it all. The losing was always more intriguing

than the boredom of anything I ever won.

I was disciplined by a strict code of disobedience

and though I could wear an eyeless life mask of albino marble

long before the paint wore off the lower Apollonic orders,

sooner or later the wild irises of my moondogs

began to give me away like the dark haloes

of my heretical upbringing and everyone saw

I didn’t wear rose-tinted contact lenses like those

they took out like phases of the moon at night

only when they wanted to close their third eyes.

The reptilian shutter of my orbiting telescope

blinked like a lizard with interchangeable mirrors

at the dancing stars that came into focus

like radiant wildflowers rooted in my field of view.

Came the rain and the fire, the tears and the desire

of the dragons of dark energy that looked at the world

for what it is and what it seems, the vertiginous precipice

of dangerous raptures where lovers throw themselves

like fledglings on the rocks below, and the unassailable valleys

that slashed through the mountains as deeply as they were high

like a razor mutilating a young beauty’s thighs,

trying to cut the pain out like a sacred syllable of lies

embedded in her flesh like a starmap without any eyes.

May the changing life themes of your own mindstreams

stitch them up in time for you to follow the scars and the stars

of your own contiguous narrative back

to the lost innocence of your efflorescent moonbeams.

Sweet dreams in the madhouse, ladies, sweet dreams.

PATRICK WHITE

HOW TO SPEAK WHEN NO WORD CAN BE SPOKEN

HOW TO SPEAK WHEN NO WORD CAN BE SPOKEN

for Newtown

How to speak when no word can be spoken.

How to grieve when even the bells are broken.

How to shriek one note so high and pure

at the implacable heavens, even space cracks

the wine-goblet of the silence with a flash

of black lightning like a tuning fork where the roads

unravel like strong ropes, and the rivers

that were joined like one journey on the same bloodstream

at their sacred meeting place, put out their fires

and mourn the murdered children like an apple

the death of its seeds in late autumn. And the six doors

of the teachers and parents they were meant

to walk through without any locks on their thresholds.

How to comfort the inconsolable. How to heal

the expanding darkness of the eyeless starless abyss

of an open wound in the tangible absence of the flesh within

no scar of the moon will ever close. No candle

will ever cry hard enough to catch up to,

its single feather of a flame beating against

the impervious windows veiled in black drapery

for the fall of so many sparrows. Does God know?

Does God keep up with her songbirds so intimately

she knows them like an elementary school teacher

knows them like the lullabies and stories of her own childhood

she can sing in a closet to keep the horrors at bay?

Knows them by their smiles and the pink shrimp

of their fingers, knows them like the myriad centers

of the magic circles she draws around them

like rain and haloes on the ground she embraces

within the boundless folds of herself to protect them

like a lapwing from the snake that strikes at the nest.

Treachery come to the blessed. Blood

on the broken Easter eggs the sun

doesn’t rise from anymore like gold

from the albino ore of our highest hopes

fallen like fledglings from the dead boughs

of a false dawn the children sang to nevertheless

not caring whether it was true or not, knowing

that their praise was the only way to prove it otherwise.

Twenty buddhas and six enlightenment paths.

Six planets and twenty shepherd moons

smashed like lightbulbs and streetlamps

by a madman on a delinquent joy ride with death

shooting out the stars with a semi-automatic Bushmaster

when the pilot light went out on the furnace of his brain

and the cold crept in to a vacant space

where no fire burned in the ice-age of his blood

and the waterclocks of his tears stopped dead like glaciers.

We know the holiness of our children by the sanctity

we pour into them like homegrown wine distilled

from the vineyards of our own hearts, and we know it, too,

by the desecrations of the pariahs cloaked in darkness

like an eclipse had been pulled over their eyes like a stone

rolled over a tomb, come in the night to poison them

like housewells, to destroy all signs of the innocence

they weren’t brave enough to let master everything

they were afraid of bringing into the light like spiders

hanging rosaries of flies like trophy lines from the webs

of the ruptured safety nets of their neuronic constellations.

I bring wheat. I bring poppies. I bring chicory and asters.

I bring the crickets and grasshoppers of the field.

I bring maple keys. I bring cedar boughs. I bring

dolorous resins of pine and lunar goblets of morning glory

buzzing with honey, to entwine in their hair like a Milky Way

you can touch to your lips like the skin of their eyelids as they sleep.

I bring human sorrow, confusion, anger, shock, horror

at the insanity of the unsymbolic inanity of the event

that enshrines the absurd in the vicious indifference of the void.

I bring a sense of empathy osmotically saturated with grief

so that a stranger’s tears can run in the same creekbeds as mine

toward the same sea that binds us like the tendrils of grapevines

on the skeletal trellises and scaffolding of our own human divinity

trying to climb up and paint roses in the wine of our creation myths.

I bring my eyes and my voice and my blood

and this encrusted paint rag of a heart that’s been

wiping mirages off my brushes for lightyears

like a bouquet of brooms in a desert, hoping

to keep it clean for deeper mirrors to see

the same stars in the dark shining after me

that I once spoke to in an interrogative language

that had to be translated into the answers of my mother-tongue

before I could understand who I was listening to.

I bring a raw apple of love that isn’t soiled by polishing

to the graves of the nascent heroes and heroines

who trusted their dreams enough to achieve great things

even within the limitless confines of such small bodies,

great victories of life in everyone of their cells,

cosmic imaginations with room for stray dogs

and wounded butterflies, grail searching light swords

among the galaxies where even the black holes

looked forward to a happy ending with a cool drink

of something garish from the watering hole of a local fridge

and vowed to show up the next day with their homework half done

to begin the dance all over again. Nothing hidden. Nothing sought.

I bring the same secrets we all know but cannot say to anyone

because our voices have not grown into them yet,

and the silence is too small to contain our most sacred syllables.

I bring wisdom in the stern of an empty lifeboat

and love in the figurehead of a dauntless maiden at the bow.

I bring the same numbness of grief that will no doubt

later thaw like frost-bit fingers into ten triggers of vengeance

when the pain begins to flow like a volcano

instead of an ice-berg nine-tenths subliminally submerged.

Off in the distance, I bring a small, tender wind-chime of a child’s voice

like a shy nightstream whispering through the woods

like a stray wavelength that fell from the stars like a ribbon

undone on a gift of light, as if she were puzzling out her wonderment

like a weathervane trying to align herself

with all directions of prayer at once as she asks me

how is it possible to hold a human accountable

for things that God can’t even explain to herself.

And I place a sheathed sword of enlightenment at her feet

and refuse to mar the waters of her mindstream

with more bloodshed, until eye for eye, we all go blind.

Sometimes the insight of a firefly is enough to astonish the stars.

Or a chimney spark from the hearth of the human heart

a whole new spontaneous order of things beginning with itself.

Let us be fire on the water. Let us make the darkness whole again

with the humility of our shining filling the empty begging bowls

of our hearts pouring even the smallest grains of our light

like a harvest of stars into the empty siloes of space and time.

Let the death of our children who have fallen from us

like the fruits of our flesh, teach us to love as they did

when the whole earth was a windfall of small miracles

and the most amazing of all, them, who saw what we did not.

Let us ask from each other the same aspirations

we request from God, and let us rejoice in the labour

of meaning as much to each other as we try to mean

to our ideas of what we’re all doing walking around on the earth,

looking up at the stars, wondering if they can hear us way down here

or see their own reflections like fireflies burning in our wishing wells.

I bring my solitude to a communal place among trees.

I bring my doubt like a stranger I befriended along the way.

I bring a lost pilgrimage of children fired up like spark plugs

to go the rest of the way on their own, as if the training wheels

had just come off their mountain bikes, and they

were flying among the contrails of the stars

with streamers flowing like comets over the whitewater mane

of the Great Square Of Pegasus running the rapids

of their creative energies heeling it bareback but unbroken

through the surf of the Milky Way as if in all ten directions

of the nightsky the universe were one horse wide,

and time were nothing but the wingspan of the ride.

Child by child, life grows at its own pace

like a celebration that’s always just getting under way

like horse-drawn floats of apple bloom in a spring parade

or when winter carves crystal chandeliers out of ice

the coals in the eyes of the snowman by the mailbox

catching fire like diamonds caught in the highbeams of the stars

because some child stared at it from the living room window

to keep it from feeling all alone by itself in the front yard.

There may be universal laws that abstrusely govern here

as if one size fits all, but it’s the mystic specifics

we abide by like the fragrance of light on a child’s hair

when a mother is drying it like a comet in the rain

after a cucumber-coconut-apricot bath wash

she just had to try like a new flavour of candy on her skin.

Or a boy being brave as his father about a bruise.

The paradigms of the constellations might go out

like a candelabra in the firestorm of an apocalypse,

and the petals of the daisy chains huddle close

to one another holding their hands together like buds again

to ward off the eerie perils of a per-emptive eclipse,

but it’s the life we store like dreams in the corners of our eyes

as we glance by a child among her crayons on the floor

proud to teach her chaos to colour inside the lines,

delighted with the dawn if it should bring the sun back

like a ball in the mouth of a slobbering mongrel

that licks her face like a salt block

just to hear her squeal with delight as she

throws it over hand without expecting it

to ever come down again like a childhood

in a solar system organized by helium balloons.

Improbable concourses and course corrections of happenstance,

alarms and guards and gates and small arms licensed to kill

and what was visionary about the way we saw one another

all singing in the same lifeboat together rowing for shore,

not knowing whether we’d make it past the reefs and rocks

like salvage or salvation, now a narrowing of our field of view

into a mistrustful invigilation of our own kind as we learn

to live in the shadows of the black holes and haloes

of trap door spiders that don’t want to be recognized

like strangers in the light of our street cameras with eyes just like us.

Let the loss of our children empty our arms of the things we were

mistakenly carrying like burdens we took upon ourselves

into a wider embrace of the new moon in the old moon’s arms

like a disparate reunion of opposites in the circumpolar bear hugs

we give each other in tears around the graves of the very young

who bring us together to weep like bells in unison

for the kyrie eleisons and consolation dawns

in the swelling clarions of our clear-eyed grief.

Let us remember that it is our eyes, purged of ashes,

though constellations appear and disappear like mirages

on a starmap in an hourglass of pyramids and quicksand,

that keep the fires of the stars alight on the nightwatch

that looks in on a sleeping child, and leaves the door ajar

where the intimate mystery of life embodied in flesh and blood

goes on dreaming like growth rings we can understand

the infinite measure of by the enlargements of our heartwood

marked like a calendar of full moons rising in the doorway

like the floodwaters of love overflowing the starmud of our mindstreams

as if there were oceans of awareness ahead that only a child,

one hand after another, could guide us through together

like blind prophets and despairing oracles fearful of our own weather.

Let the house of life not be dismantled by inclement elements

or lowered into the grave like an orphanage for dead children

and even if the wolf huffs enough to blow it down

let us raise it again like the strong rafters of our children

blooming like the crocuses of pup tents all over the back lawn.

Let us follow them through a hole in a fence a child wide

that can’t keep us out of paradise for any longer than it takes

to be the last to enter like twenty six bodhisattvas

rising like the starcluster of the Pleiades in the east

to mark the trail of what they didn’t hesitate to reveal to us

like fireflies in a telescope with eyes full of wonder at both ends,

unborn, unperishing like the flight of hinges on an open gate

as if our exits and our entrances were two wings on the same bird

singing on the dead bough, singing on the green,

of things as there are, seen and unseen, like the blossom

of a moonrise in the orchards of spring, like leaves

in the autumn summoned like a choir to a seance

of inner fires that burn like distant stars without smoke

by the dancing masters and singing coaches of the wind

that knows each by the dawn they’ve come to rejoice in

and at nightfall, the unique inflections of the bells in their voice.

PATRICK WHITE