EVEN SISYPHUS STANDS BACK AMAZED

EVEN SISYPHUS STANDS BACK AMAZED

Even Sisyphus stands back amazed

and tries to explain how absurd it is

to protest your lot in life by making poetry

out of your pain, to refuse to roll the planet up the hill

and reconcile yourself to the fact

it’s going to roll down again upon you

like an avalanche or a meteor shower

or a fate-shaped asteroid out of the blue.

Water-lilies withering in the lagoons of late August.

O how easy and sleazy, snakeoil for axle-grease

and regal anointments in the cathedral of Reims

it would be to stick a flower in my jester’s cap,

paint a large, plump tear under my eye

and bray all day like a bicycle horn on a donkey

loaded down with books like a silo of cordwood

on its way to a learned auto de fe where you

smoulder to death like a wandering scholar

with a preternatural fear of fire consuming your magnum opus

in a conflagration of apocalyptic daylilies.

Death’s a star-nosed mole in a tunnel of light

looking for another way out of bringing the mighty low

as even a dragon must sometimes fold up its wings

like a black umbrella in the rain it brings, just to see,

out of narcissitic curiosity whether it’s forgotten

how to crawl on its belly when it was just another snake

like everyone else trying to leave a sign of intelligence

by making wavelengths of themselves

in these desert sands of an hourglass always pouring

another shot for the road, weeping for the mirage

of another mermaid naked as water that got away

like a wishing well that wasn’t interested

in fulfilling anyone’s desires but her own. Good for her.

She wasn’t singing to be understood like an answer

to anyone’s prayers. You don’t need a voice coach

to drown in your own tears. Aren’t there workhorses

already broken in like mirrors on the wall for that?

Fame’s too late to be of any use, and ask any wolf

you don’t need a name to seduce the moon lyrically

as long as you’re howling like a barrow tomb from the crest

of a hill of prophetic skulls shafted by the spring equinox

that didn’t shine upon your bone box. You’ve got to

roll the eclipse away from the entrance to your own tomb,

without claiming you did it for anyone else, as if

the gateway to enlightenment were an emergency exit from death

and you were trapped in the burning theatre of life on fire.

I can immediately tell by reading your folklore

like a native tracker fluently multilingual in Babylonian Braille,

there’s no agony in your sorrow, in your desire,

no hot genie in the lamp that keeps burning your fingertips

with disappointment you didn’t get what you want,

which is poetry, and prose, to only get what you need.

Or are you fond of calling it a rose when it’s a nosebleed?

Do you know how many lies have been squandered

on good reasons to live the mind you were born into

like an old prototype of a kite that had to be improved upon

by striking a balance between the highest and the lowest

like the feathers and scales of a dragon with a flightpath

of its own like the contrail of a comet extinguishing

the nuclear winter in its heart in the Gulf of Mexico

at the expense of its own kind in a renaissance of rats?

When the solid becomes real it’s much easier

to swim through your own translucency than get

bogged down like a fly in a gob of Baltic amber

like a sunset that doesn’t know when to get off stage.

When you stop trying to define and divine yourself

as if you were witching for water in hell it’s more

eloquently silver-tongued than light and rain to express yourself,

and what else have you got left to echo that isn’t fouled

by a shriek of cynical laughter, if it isn’t the leaves and apple bloom

of a Druidic tree alphabet that’s known by the fruits it bears

like jugs of water drawn from a sacred spring

where the river sylphs let down their hair like willows?

Look. There’s truth. There’s beauty. Why else

would we have words in common with them

to suggest their insubstantiality like this demotic dream grammar

of everything else in the world with a patina or a patois

of the meanings we ascribe to life like the slang of a tourist book

we’re mostly likely to overhear, shopping for souvenirs

in a black market of smuggled grave goods that have yet

to be deciphered like the key to the iris identification

of an insight into a whole other way of life

passing like the shadow of a mushroom cloud of civilization

over the shapeshifting, morphic mindscape of an Etruscan funeral?

There’s wisdom. There’s compassion. There are legends

of magnificent failures standing in the winner’s circles

like the laurels of Greece, the taste of rain on the lips of Daphne,

and there are horrors that befoul the mutant alloys of our genes

as if, as Sophocles said, it would have been best to never have been.

Flood myths in the sea of awareness without a lifeboat

or even so much as the lost hope of a dove or a crow

sighting land before nightfall finds you eyeless and alone

in a cistern of circling sundials that can smell blood in the water

like a rose from a lover on a rainy day lingering in your doorway

like a perfume she distilled from the drunken vomit of the night before.

The Canada geese have barely arrived on their side

of the goose blinds on the Saguenay, and already

they’re thinking of returning the way they came

like a loveletter that went to the wrong address

like the Koran Gabriel gave to Muhammad instead of Ali.

How could revelation ever get it as wrong as that?

Sooner a strong rope than the million weak threads

we hang each other with like a no fly zone for shuttlecocks

unravelling the aniconic magic of our flying carpets

on the loom of the moon undoing by day what she weaves

like a spider on the strings of an electric guitar by night,

water music of the morning hanging like the whole notes

of her tears from the dreamcatchers and powerlines

littered with trophies and houseflies like the cover story

of the monastic lies she took to uphold the vows

she mouthed like sacred alibis singing karaoake on the Temple Mount.

Nix, nix, say the nightbirds, long past their curfews

luring the demented serpents with stone ears

to the agony of their tormented joys fingerpainting

the lifemasks of the stars with the ultramarine ashes

of sapphires that run screaming down out of the hills

like a studio gallery of the blue-blooded warrior women of the Picts.

You hear that? asks Sisyphus. Sisyphus says it’s absurd

as if there were some hidden purpose behind

the most meaningful word in command of his vocabulary.

Hill, planet, stone, star, woman, apple trees,

aren’t these the graves and shrines the light of the mind

bends in such a way they were meant for our eyes only?

Not to deny the bees the Nazca lines of their approach to flowers,

or demand absolute clarity from our mottled starmud

like Parsifal, the sacred clown, drinking from the grail

at a ghost dance trying to green the ailing kingdoms

of the reservations they’ve been corralled into

like wild mustangs in the badlands of eohippus in a zoo.

Just express yourself, as you are, as you do, unwitnessed

when you’re convinced, not even the surveillance cameras

are watching or listening to the crazy wisdom of a medium

that summons the living back from the dead at a seance

that isn’t channeling anyone to open their mouths

and speak for everyone like a flashflood in a dry creekbed

or the taste of the rain that falls from your cloudy eyes

onto the tongues of the pressed flowers dessicated by a book.

Don’t tweet what you shriek. Don’t try to roar for effect

when you’re bleating for tigers like a judas-goat in a choir.

Do even the chainsaws know the sound of a tree

that falls in a clear cut old growth forest when there’s

no one there to hear it? Do the crows weep

indelible ink like tarpits and Icarian doves

still play with the muses of fire using their beaks

for guitar picks like Jimi Hendrix cremating a national anthem,

the flags of his semiquavers at half mast for unknown arsonists

with the voices of burnt out angels huffing lighter fluid in a parking lot?

PATRICK WHITE