EXISTING NOCTURNALLY IN A COVERT HOLE IN THE DARK

EXISTING NOCTURNALLY IN A COVERT HOLE IN THE DARK

Existing nocturnally in a covert hole in the dark,

I eat the stars like a trap door spider taking the hood

off its telescope, a black hole ten million times

the mass of the sun, I shine from within, beading

new constellations on my trophy lines from

the corpses of the mummified remains of flying ants,

butterflies, honey bees with medicine bags of gold.

New mandalas of meaning to replace the trite zodiacs

that compile bestiaries of our eyes. I bend the light

perversely to see what lives on the underside of its leaves.

Dawn, my epilogue, I drink jewels like forbidden intimacies

from the heart of the ore, and reel like a drunk

trying to play the guitar, hammered on sapphires,

weeping in sympathy with tragic emeralds

and broken-hearted rubies expansive as red giants

imploding on themselves like bitter, black dwarfs.

I open my mouth like an aviary and let the doves go free.

In the apple-green and peacock blue of dusk

I’m the singing master of a choir of crows

roosting in a bone-box of birches that never bury their own.

I’m the undertaker at a sky-burial of the unidentified remains

that whisper in silence like ghostly nebulae at the mass graves

I gouge out of space like the eye-sockets of black swans

murdered like carbon on the coal road to diamonds

that cut like insight into the meteoric nature of things.

Nightwatchman, I beam my lighthouse through

the window of the sea and check the locks

on the chains of its tides to see if anyone’s been messing

with its dna. I tinker with the fossils of shadows

pressed like flowers between the pages of old love affairs

that read like amorous extinctions in the Burgess Shale

at orgiastic seances with the lyrical daughters of memory

engendering the echoes of muses among the holy mountains

I climbed like scars to see if God had green eyes or not.

I treat my demons with the dignity of noble heretics

and they let me howl with wolf packs on the moon

at the rising of the earth like a striated marble

of water, ice and air glowing in an aura of life

blooming in the impeccable dark of an inconceivable abyss.

I’m still trying to foster an ambivalent truce with angels

that haven’t fallen to earth yet, but give it time

and I’ll convince them of the wisdom of my starmud.

I labour like a mutant to recast the bells of our suffering

into something more radiant than the usual

cannon, nails and ploughs. I want to forge

a sword of moonlight in the burning bush of evolution

and lay it down in tribute on the waters of life

like the plumage of a white rose that didn’t bleed for nothing.

I understand that pain is a great liberator, but a statue

isn’t creative enough anymore to compensate the dead

for the loss of their eyelids, and the faces of the living

stung in squalls of killer bees and snakepits of toxic whips

as if death had a wavelength of its own without a red shift.

Humanity isn’t a consonant. It’s a vowel.

And I say it richly to the empty parsimony of hollow silos

that gape like mouths at the audacity of my dark abundance

talking back to their bright vacancy like a total eclipse

with a chip of the moon on my shoulder

it’s going to take a whole lot more than the threat

of a backward thinking apocalypse to knock off.

Defang the staple-guns of bureaucratic wars.

Put peace on a diet to starve the corporate cannibals.

Establish petting zoos of dangerous reptiles

for the distempered fools of the iron rule says

do unto others before they do unto you

what they so nemetically deserve for shrinking

from the waterstars of life as if they had

a hydrophobic fear of the light turning around

and biting them like an anti-venom in a syringe

they’re flagging with rabies like a rusty bloodstream

cloning them from the stem cells of experimental clowns.

Not to kiss hatred on the other cheek of the moon

but teach it how to wash the feet of the children it’s killed

and taste the coldness of forever in the last kiss

they place on their lunar foreheads before they’re enclosed

in the same darkness lined with nacreous satins

as its victims wear at nightfall, to initiate it solo

into the same excruciating transformations

that must be endured like a karmic sea change

of a children’s crusade of new moons scotched in the seed

by the horrendous ferocity of the creative fire

that will enlighten them eventually like pine-cones

transplanting the roots of evergreens

on a clear cut mountainside of retributive sorrows.

If what I say seems absurd, that’s probably

the right word for it, but if what’s imagined is later proved

let’s embrace our own folly and imagine it

as the crazy wisdom of people with compassionate preferences.

If it’s meaningless inside and out, let’s expand space

to accommodate a meaning of our own making

big enough to lose the whole human race in the labyrinth

of a single fingerprint that identifies with everyone

and all animals, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, insects and plants

as if the whole universe spoke through each of us

in the dream grammar of a common genome talking in its sleep.

Is it any more mad to tilt at quixotic dragons like the earth

at the sun in its helical wheeling through space

than it is to write indelibly in the invisible ink

of a left-handed eclipse in a diary of starmaps?

Let’s rack up an abacus of unified field theories

like quantum leaps out of the orbital ruts of our skulls

on occasions not at the beck and call of our photons

and firecrackers breaking our elemental tables like electrons

or if you’re less rowdy, lawn bowling with the solar system.

Let’s stop experimenting on each other

and calling it love. Let’s stop stitching up our wounds

with razorwire and trying to put a smile

on the face of the scalpels that nick our arms and thighs

and cut our hearts out on sacrificial days of the vernal equinox.

It’s not a choice of the gloriously absurd

in contradistinction to the realistically petty

to grow well beyond the dead metaphors of ourselves

like coral reefs and shipwrecks teeming with life

at the bottom of our unfathomable seas of awareness.

Let’s stop listening for the logic of water

in the conch shells of our cretaceous fortune-cookies

and put the universe up to our ears to hear

the beating our own hearts in the lockets

of our estranged children pleading in bloodbanks

for attention like poppies and field fires in the starwheat.

In limping back from the holy wars in celestial realms

that wrestled with us like angels in our own way

to this earthbound garden of paradise we abandoned

like a ghost town of Incan temples with baleful altars

to the surrealistic imagination of the jungle

it’s crucial to remember there are no weeds to be uprooted

or need to cultivate the wildflowers among

the minor miracles of the morning glory

like native schools of sweetgrass to the genetic modifications

of our way of thinking about the future without a past

we can return to more prodigal than when we left.

PATRICK WHITE