THE LITTLE NOISE I'VE MADE OVER FIFTY YEARS OF WRITING

THE LITTLE NOISE I’VE MADE OVER FIFTY YEARS OF WRITING

The little noise I’ve made over fifty years of writing,

a star that roars in the silence on a clear winter night

as if I were trying to keep something warm from dying.

A nightbird in a grove, that sings, with nothing left to long for.

A solitary wolf that howls at the moon like a train in the distance

for the pain, for the madness, for the long drawn out sorrows

of passing, for the sadness in the eyes of the wise who know.

No food in the house, tv, heat, father, young,

I ate books in the bottom of a garbage can, in the company

of suffering women who hated men. I went

dumpster-diving at the Salvation Army for a copy

of Dante’s Inferno with a hard cover embossed

like an old man’s hands at prayer. What a strange life,

zip-guns, foodstalls, and Scientific American.

Stars, Egypt, and Keats. Dangerous freaks on the back porch

late at night, and worse, terrorized by social workers

and Sunday school teachers, fathers for a day,

who couldn’t imagine a kid who didn’t like baseball

or the eldest son of a welfare mother who needed the hamper

at Christmas, who wasn’t secretly crying out

to be severely disciplined, stern but virtuous,

by a thought-strapped surrogate for a dad

I was glad I didn’t have. One’ man’s sin of omission

can be the blessing of a son devoted to his mother.

My mother was the soul of compassion, strong and vulnerable,

and feared everyone. Open-hearted, wary-minded,

she read a book at night. I’ve been writing them ever since.

To write something so true and beautiful about

love and suffering, the lifelong gratitude I’ve felt

for the immensities of the abyss, the mysterium tremendum

et fascinans that got me out of the neighbourhood

without a criminal record waiting to fill in the blanks.

What don’t I owe to the stars? To the tongue

of the antiseptic solitude that licked my wounds

with sacred syllables and mended my heartbreak with gold?

The pursuit of an earthly excellence to make up

for the shabby and dull by looking into it so deeply

you bleed for the mystic specificity that makes it all

so unbearably beautiful and inevitably an intimate reflection

of you, the starmud of your awareness, the duff

of old nightmares, imprinted on the mind long after

their substance is gone, like the face on the shroud of Turin

or leaves on the forlorn sidewalks where terrible young girls

with the emotional life of the Medusa, once played

jacks and hopscotch and the Cyclops lost its eye

in a streetfight over nothing like a belligerent telescope

trying to bully the stars into gangs that marked their territory

like black shepherds of the zodiac they terrorized

with Braille and bling. I can sing about it now at this remove

like a snakepit of guitar strings that used to sting

like a fishook in the eye you had to push all the way through

to keep from uprooting the way you saw things

like a flower you were trying to keep alive on the porch

of a burning house, or the rose-bushes my mother

used to plant in the slums. Like mother, like son, I suppose.

If you eat enough ashes of other people’s thoughts,

it’s not true you’ll eventually breathe fire of your own.

You have to eat their hearts, assuming they have one,

not their words, to qualify for dragonhood.

Don’t put your steel through someone else’s forge

or you’ll start psychobabbling like the frauds and dabblers

about the taste of life in poetry with the flavour

of cold lettuce soup. You want to be real, gorge on life

like a famished angel come down to earth

that hasn’t eaten anything for lightyears, or a noble enemy

that doesn’t glut your appetite for blood and fire

with award-winning junkfood when you honour him

like an organ donor for the dark abundance of his art

that doesn’t blunt your desire to devour his heart like an owl

whose wisdom hasn’t lost touch with its saurian roots,

until he’s flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood, bone of your bone.

Winged heels, winged horses, prayerwheels for spurs,

stars under the saddle, bareback burrs, easy enough to ride,

acephalically high on the severed blood of the moon

but that’s only the measure of someone inspired to write

by what they can see in the light, sunny and Apollonian

as dolphins splashing your bow, but feather your poems

in scales, a snake that flies, a wilder wavelength

on the dark side of the muse slumming in her origins

and the songbirds turn into stone at the low end

or shatter like wineglasses on the fly, given the range

of the picture-music that flashes like black lightning

from a wivern’s eyes just before it rains like mercy

and the moon begins to cry. In this supersymmetrical life

of dark matter and energy no one’s ever seen,

there’s no destiny in chaos, but the deepest loveletters

are written to the muses of annihilation who consume you

like black widow queens with ghostly hourglasses on their backs

like crone phases of the moon so full of the dark harvests

they reap with fangs and sickles, time stops, and creation

reverts to maternity and your passions are bled like poppies

and the lyres of your sentiments are empowered

by the matrices of mandalic spiderwebs between

the horns of the moon you must pass through like a poet

through a dangerous gateway or a poem through the larnyx

of a voice older than night that pierces the dark

like a spear of light through a wounded heart,

like a howl from the grave in praise of an art

that kills you into a life that isn’t disciplined by birth or death.

PATRICK WHITE