BURNING WORLD, TAKE ME

BURNING WORLD, TAKE ME

Burning world, take me, fold me in your flaming arms

and let me disappear into the unforgiving night.

Among these blind, here, in their black eggs,

eyeless birds who nest in their own ignorance,

I am the leper of light they drive out

with the stone of the moon, the wolf

with the mystic wound that will not heal until the last star

is born of the bleeding. Return me to the cold, brutal beauty

of your mineral wilderness, my bones on Venus

and my skull an abandoned planet circling the sun at midnight.

Let my eyes be the last of my tears to fall

and my blood be strewn like a gypsy scarf across the darkness.

Erase all trace of me as you do the path of the water-stars

who walk here among the dead like spirits from another world

intrigued by our passing. Pygmies in a circus,

cannibals and emperors all, leaping from thought to thought

rock to rock in the lifestream

to the applause of future funerals, o let them fade

like the idiot savants of last night’s dream, meaning nothing

but what they meant to themselves,

trying to jump their own distorted shadows.

What difference between the venom of the bee and its luminous honey

to these whose flaring in the vastness

was the kingdom of a match? At most

lightning on a water droplet shaken from a blade of grass.

Did they think the great fires of being flowed like blood

around their carbon hearts? Sweet world,

bestow your flowerless garden upon me and let me forget

the holy wars of their tiny gods against my solitude.

Didn’t they see, so full of themselves,

there was never any room in their arks and shrines and coffins

moored like lifeboats to the rotting dock

they built like a bridge to nowhere?

I never meant to be unkind or rise from the depths

in waves of light and blood that wiped them out

like the mythical monster of a shore-bound sailor

too far out deep down to be confirmed by their disbelief

or worse, their shallow faith. Leave them, undisturbed

to the shadows of things they trade in

like spiritual money. I wish them no worse, no better

than who they think they are, little prophets

inveighing against the purity of my absence.

The dark mirror is better, brighter, more abundant

than the poverty of their trembling reflections,

mere nothingness more tender than their lies.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING AT THE RAIN. ARE YOU LOOKING AT THE RAIN

LOOKING AT THE RAIN. ARE YOU LOOKING AT THE RAIN

Looking at the rain. Are you looking at the rain,

alone in an upstairs window of a small town

deserted except for the salt trucks sowing the road,

watching it freeze in the tarpits and stretch marks

of asphalt smeared by storefront colours

that try too hard like circuses and brothels?

And the people dreaming behind the makeshift veils

they can see out of into the dark, but no one ever in,

should the lights be on, and they’re not. Are you

embracing yourself like a stranger in your solitude

by acclamation, no one to challenge who you must be?

And the sky glowing as if there were a fire

in the distance, you cannot see beyond

the looming rooftops, subliminally infernal,

marginally dispersed auras of infra-red

that fell off the flat earth of a pre-mixed palette?

I imagine you keeping your pain to yourself

like the secret name of a god you disclose to no one

for fear of them having power over you.

I imagine you trying to embody the whole mystery

of life within yourself like the improbable avatar

of all that’s invisible within you like a ladder of thresholds

the light has yet to cross. Not a god or goddess

but a mystically specific human being who doubts

the divinity of her own uniqueness. Once for everything

means no two alike, but the air is saturate

with comparative metaphors in the absence of stars.

I imagine you remembering sporadic lovers

you were hurt by, children who abandoned you,

parents who tried but could never really understand.

Doors you slammed in anger as if you were

turning your back on yourself like a red sportscar

that kept breaking down by the side of the road.

And how you decided to go the rest of the way

like an indeterminate leaf on your own mindstream

once you decided you weren’t a map to anywhere

that wasn’t as evanescent as you were at cartography.

Three hours from dawn and you’re still a seance of one.

You summon lonely trains like mourners

hired for a funeral. Who’s dying? Whose

deathmask are you paying homage to

by obeying the protocols of artificial respect?

I can intuit the sundial and the sanctuary

of the walled garden your heart keeps trying

to bloom in like a poppy in winter but you neglect it

like a small fire that’s pleading with you to tend it

instead of letting it bleed out like a hare in the snow.

I want to console you. I want to undo the daisy chain

of razor wire you’ve wrapped yourself up in

like a gift to someone you think deserves it

as a mockery of everything you once cherished

but if I were to slowly emerge out of the void

into the room like an enchanted island you could be

the Circe of, you’d change like a chameleon on the spot.

You wouldn’t be yourself in the confines of your loneliness.

You’d keep chanting the prophylactic mantra

of a Greek chorus in a satyr play as if

you’d just seen a hungry ghost rise up,

a deux ex machina through the creaking floorboards:

I am not. I am not. I am not. When, of course, you are.

So let me ease your fear by appearing

like a star you can’t identify by its shining alone

through a clearing in the clouds at your window.

Let me empower you like a firefly

of the first magnitude, a mandalic insight

that inspires you, because you’re weary and bored

of your colouring books, into making up

an original constellation of your own

that doesn’t show up on anybody else’s starmaps

but vastly improves your disaffection

with the the outlook of the ashes of the zodiac

you keep in the urn of a see-through telescope

like so many burning bridges you’ve crossed

like an albatross with an arrow in its heart

arcing across the sky, martyred by a curse

on the long, cold, barren beach of your windowsill.

Be Circe awhile and throw your pearls like a full moon

before swine that used to be men you couldn’t turn to

for nautical advice when they were shipwrecked

on the same shore you walk in isolation now.

Believe in the power of your own madness

to work wondrous transformations at either end

of your modes of seeing that are the lore

of blind poets, and the legends of your shining

more creatively intriguing than the war stories of Helen.

If all is lost, you don’t need to compete

with winning anymore. Paris throws the apple away

and says to the three goddesses, you choose

among yourselves. This is not a creation myth.

PATRICK WHITE