WATERLILIES SOON AND A PLEIKU OF
DRAGONFLIES
Waterlilies soon and a Pleiku of
dragonflies.
Shipwrecked fleets of the naked limbs
of the trees
gone long in the teeth, buried at sea
wrapped
in a starmap of the sky they’re
anchored in
like the remains of old bridges that
made the crossing alive.
I’ll read the runes of the
watersnakes
like an indecipherable language that
uncoils
like a sacred syllable rolling off the
alphabet blocks
and mute rocks of the tongue lying
dormant in the sun.
I will thrive on the beauty of life
awhile
as a spontaneous counterpoint to its
quantum entanglement
with the death stars in the steeples of
the white hyacinth
entrancing the bees with honey in the
hives of shepherd moons.
These are the killing fields of life
empowering
its own annihilation at the expense of
its own creations.
I will walk warily around the bones of
the muskrat
and the fox, and the feathers of the
wild swan
scattered like moonlight by snapping
turtles
entrenched in their starmud like World
War 1 helmets.
I won’t think about all the Orphic
dismemberments
that taught the birds to sing as if
there were prophecy in their words.
I’ll follow the same trails I did
last year but
they won’t know me as the same man
who wandered here off the beaten path
with a maple branch for a divining rod
looking for something deeper than a
watershed,
or the dusty stars kicked up on the
Road of Ghosts
gravelled with gravestones. I’ve
changed since then
like a mirage of rain in the deserts of
an hourglass
that bloomed in a flashflood of
unsummoned tears
as if its cup runnneth over like the
full moon at sea
longing for its lost atmosphere and its
genius for making waves.
I’ll marvel at the windfall of
scorched planets
rooting under the leafing boughs of the
black walnut trees
and I’ll set up my French easel like
a fawn
getting up on its legs and paint the
evanescent patinas
on the wings of the starlings in the
willows
as if the northern lights were mirrored
in chips of anthracite
like the mysterious veils of a woman
with black eyes
that shine like occluded sea stars at
the bottom
of a widowed housewell bemused by the
sunlight,
nocturnal silk on the looms of the
mulberry moons that weave it.
I won’t feel precious and aesthetic,
radiantly exquisite
in an abattoir of pleading flowers
whose petals
have been splashed with the blood of
children
like fingerpaintings smeared like
poppies on the wall
of an enclosed garden trying to keep
the world out
like an embassy of one when a junta’s
out hunting.
Just as soon be initiated into the
corporate cults
of mystical pharmaceuticals handing out
drugs
like the angelic heirarchies of
prescriptive states of grace
available to the neo-feudal dimensions
of medieval futures
yet to come. I’ll be a post
revolutionary in a world
that made a bad start and if my art’s
a weapon
I’ll tilt at windmills like jinxed
prayer wheels
and swing from bells like Quasimodo
playing to the crowd
like a carillon of columbine before the
heat grows too intense.
I’ll pretend I’m in Eden again and
I won’t
put my winged heel to the snake without
making it
my dragon familiar, my spiritual
vehicle, not large or small,
who knows the road like a rat snake
knows a farmer on a tractor
and reminds me from heartbeat to
heartbeat
like a friendly oxymoron that those who
like to fly
as high as I do, sometimes find things
get so vertiginous
their only recourse is to get down in
the dirt and crawl
as if high and low were two wheels of
birth and death
on a death cart pulled by dragons
plumed with flowers
that only bloom in fire every seven
thousand years or so
though the pine cones pray for
conflagrations that will come
much sooner than the rejected stones of
the pagodas could disseminate.
I’ll trample down a deerbed behind
the pale of the cattails
and I’ll rejoice in peace for awhile
as a natural birthright
to celebrate a world I’m
surrealistically adapted to
like a mother tongue I haven’t
addressed myself in
since childhood stopped delighting in
its own renewal,
incoherent with wonder at the silence
of the stars in its voice.
I will forget I am aging. I will be a
medicine bag
of healing metaphors and powerful
occult charms
with oracular effects on the crazy
wisdom of the inconceivable
and lie down upon the earth in the
unassuming grass
after I’ve finished painting,
fascinated by the prodigality
of the stranger I’ve become to myself
listening deeply
to the picture music of the life of the
mind like a kid
with forty-eight crayons and the whole
of the sky to draw on
as I wait for the stars to make
themselves apparent
in the sweet, sweet darkness that
envelopes me
in the green flames and violet shadows
of another
vernal martyr to the cause of keeping
their fires alive within me,
a dragonfly in a chrysalis, a hermit
thrush in ecstasy,
a sulphur butterfly with antennae like
burnt match sticks
looking for a light from the lanterns
of the nightwatch
reigniting the passions of old poems
like fireflies
inspiring the ashes in the urns of the
stars to enlighten their afterlife
with incomparable myths of origin that
have yet to be written
by the root fires in our starmud
breaking out like lightning
fracturing koans like diamond insights
into
a labyrinthine gallery of mirrors that
see me
with the same eyes by which I see signs
of the disastrous happiness of life in
them.
PATRICK WHITE
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