I STILL BELIEVE THE PURSUIT OF AN
EARTHLY EXCELLENCE
I still believe the pursuit of an
earthly excellence,
not in name alone, but in the act of
elucidating
even so much as a firefly’s insight
into the darkness
to add your experience and confusion to
the abyss
like a myth of origins in progress, is
a noble calling,
a privilege accorded by the moon to
wear the hide
and head of a wolf when the spirit
howls in longing
to lift the agony of humans up to the
stars as if
there were no greater sacrifice we had
to give than this
that makes us peers of those fires, eye
to eye, mirror to mirror
as above so below, the jewel of
compassion in the slag
of our suffering, the beauty of the
rose in the midst of its thorns
weeping holy blood on the skulls of her
prophetic children.
A poet among people, a voice, a hermit
thrush or an owl,
a red-winged blackbird on a dead branch
or a crow
on the cabled bridge of the green
blackberry,
or an indigo grackle, the eclipse of
the mourning dove,
regardless of who or who isn’t
listening to the wind
rasp over this desert of stars in an
hourglass
like the wavelength of a serpent of
fire as a sign of intelligence:
Say what is uniquely human about you so
that
others might recognize themselves in
the music.
Mourn as you must as if it were your
funeral
you were going to as one day it will
be,
your ashes in the locket around a loved
one’s neck,
and break trail along the way as you
explore
the wilderness of your loss so that
others might follow,
assured by the dolmen of your presence
in their solitude
the dangers of the journey are humanly
surmountable.
A poet among people, that’s what you
can say to yourself
on your deathbed and mean it in
gratitude with a smile
at whatever shape of chaos you’re
worshipping at the time,
you had a summons to suffer, praise,
rejoice, mean and go mad
on behalf of other people, you, a self
portrait of them.
Your love of them voluntarily going
into exile,
or driven into it by the very ignorance
you’re dying to overcome,
to know their homelessness as if it
were a threshold your own,
to sow the available dimensions of the
future
with metaphoric weeds and wildflowers
in the starfields
so we don’t forget what all the fuss
about enlightenment
means to a species rooted like a
waterlily in its starmud
as if that were the dark genius behind
all that shining,
the apex, the acumen, the anthos, not
the denouement
of our flowering, and no future
habitable that isn’t freely human
to express its awe and wonder at being
imaginatively alive
like a purpureal crocus under an eyelid
of opalescent snow.
Poetry is the discipline of a crazy
person
who walks wisely among people
half-fearful
of how fiercely vulnerable you must
become to love them
as if there’d never be anything in it
for you,
the most indefensibly human of them all
o so much more substantial than your
dream figures
once you wake up, stubbing your heart
on the rock of the world,
a razor blade to the artery of the rose
that bleeds
just a profusely as you do when death
cuts obliquely
into the stem and presents it like the
ear of a bull
to the moon in a sacred brothel around
the corner
opposite the Iseum where they make the
partial whole again.
Incited by life to be demonically
playful in the darkness,
angelically withdrawn like the stars
and shadows at noon,
cherish the inconceivable nights that
are not rewards
for anything you could have done or
earned, as love
and inspiration aren’t, and marvel
the more
at the strangeness of the miracle that
things are this way.
Exhausted mid stride between the noon
and dusk of your life,
don’t underestimate the mysticism of
action
in the mundane labours of the day
responding like bees
to the floral opportunities of tending
the larkspur
like a voice coach pinging a tuning
fork on their stamens.
Work at nothing that isn’t a form of
worship
that demands your passion. Not to be
fascinated by your life
is a child labour sweat factory of
human enslavement.
The petty won’t brave their own
happiness
nor that of anyone else, but the
generous will
who understand that happiness is a
grace of the heart
that happens to you from the inside out
like a fortune cookie
not a law of causality misery is
endlessly trying to repeal
beyond a reasonable doubt of ever
coming true.
But seldom a joy without a bruise for a
poet
whose bell of sorrows depends like most
humans
as much upon the rain as the light to
ripen
into the warm sugars of life like wild
apples at sunset.
The eyes that look the deepest are
usually the saddest
like housewells anyone’s free to draw
from
but god, what poignancy of light smiles
favourably
upon the faces of the tragically
fulfilled
who lived out their singular prophecies
to purge everyone’s terror with
empathy for their fate.
Arete, excellence. Aristos of merit.
Beauty of soul, mind, body, heart,
the quality of your awareness, the
largesse of your experience,
the natural humility of the bow you
return to the mystery
of a tree in bloom, and the wisdom of
an old stump,
not in the way of perfection, but the
brilliance and courage
of your failure to attain the
unattainable, enlightenment
the ultimate defeat for the benefit of
all because it’s never complete
even when the Buddha goes straight to
hell like an arrow.
Not void bound, bless the intuitive
disobedience of the poet
who burns in the flames of her most
sacred heresy,
savagely curse with compassion the
erosive injustice
of the greedy legislating impoverished
standards of living,
raise your voice when you see murder
being done
so your silence isn’t complicit and
the power of your rage
mollified by the slag of association
that blunts
the edge of your sword when the only
mercy is a quick kill
with a sharp blade and you go to it
like your own execution.
I don’t care if you’re a junkie
sleeping on a car seat
on the back porch of a crack house in
the summer,
wondering in a moment to yourself if
the stars ever weep for us,
or an associate professor of English at
the University of Victoria,
cherishing a pair of thin leather
gloves some raving beauty
left in your office and though she
never returned
to reclaim them and you as for years
you hoped and hoped
still rot like black banana skins on
your windowsill,
a divorced housewife doing
investigative forensics
on what happened to her life at the
kitchen table,
share whatever starfields you’ve sown
with tares or wheat
as if there were always enough bread to
break with everyone.
Take the gold coin you call a career
from under your tongue
like a false moonrise and washing your
corpse
in your own grave, take the edges off
your sphericity,
average the crucials out like a pebble
or a planet
in the great tides of life you’re
immersed in
like a human panning their own starmud
for a little more light
to be shed in the depths of their
oceanic awareness
than there was before you showed up
like one bright fish
and lit your cells up like votive
candles dedicated to the dark
and started seeing things by the light
of your own life,
not the Rosetta stone of three dead
languages
that never spoke from the heart about
the ruses
of being human that get us through the
darkest nights of ourselves,
so when someone takes a greasy volume
of poems
down from the shelf, the cover worn
off, the glue
of the perfect binding crumbling like
dreams
in the corners of their eyes as they
wake up,
and they’re shuffling loose pages as
if they were
paginating a deck of cards, or trying
to keep
the leaves of an autumn tree together,
though you’re dead,
though your tongue is a leaf on the
wind
and your eyes are clouds, your breath
gone proto-nebular,
and it’s three in the morning, and
the solitude is withering,
and insanity is grinning in their face
as if to say
you always knew this is what it would
come to,
and they reach for you like a home-brew
of magic syllables,
yarrow sticks and tea leaves, liver
spots and fossils
in a bonebox at the bottom of your
skull cup,
write in such a way they don’t just
read what you’ve said
but sit down on the ground with a
friend they can share things with
and break your book open like a loaf of
bread
spiritually cooling on an open
windowsill as fragrant
as white sweet clover growing along the
roadsides of paradise,
but as substantially nurturing to life
as compassion for the flesh.
PATRICK WHITE
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