LIKE A STAR WHEN YOU WRITE

LIKE A STAR WHEN YOU WRITE

Like a star when you write, you never

really know what happens to the light,

how it gets bent by somebody else’s

gravitational eye, or if, somewhere

on a nearby planet flowers open like loveletters

from an anonymous admirer. Maybe

there’s a mother in the summer of life

teaching her daughter to make a wish upon you

and keep it like a secret to herself, or

fireflies in a valley after a thunderstorm

aspiring to the heights you shine down from,

knowing there’s no up or down in the space

you emanate out of in all directions at once

like arrows on the circular Sufi bow of light

that embraced Muhammad in the cave of Hira

when he was told by Allah to recite

and he didn’t know how. Sometimes

there’s a nightbird caught in your throat

like a canary in a mine and the gold

just comes pouring out like honey from a hive.

Like the dawn no one ever knows until they open

the aviary of their mouth whether they’re releasing

doves or crows, great blue herons, or wrens, or a comet

streaking across the sky like a shrieking phoenix,

whether you’re attending a seance of dead friends

or an exorcism of yourself. Poetry isn’t

morality, politics, prayer, social altruism,

a raffle ticket in the genius lottery run

by corruptions of the original text, therapy,

the cure for a broken heart, or the meaning

of life. Not a curse, or a blessing you’d wish

upon your children. Not a mirror for magistrates

or shapeshifters, nor yet a reflection of nature

in the bloodless abstraction of a blank stare

trying to fix things in place like a thumb tack

on a starmap of seastars guiding the drowned

to ground like an island universe they can be

washed up on by an ocean that doesn’t hold a grudge.

You get the point? Poetry’s more of a wavelength

than a god-particle, a dangerous river, not

a highway that’s had the hazards conditioned

out of it by the well-meaning who deplore

the road kill all along it like the collateral damage

of a will intent on making things better and better

by ignoring the extreme chaos of their refinements,

handing out parachutes to eagles and crosswalks

to frogs and turtles. Hymns to the dragonflies

who died in the balleen grills and bumpers of cars

the sparrows will pick clean in shopping mall parking lots.

If you’re a poet, when you write, you’re always

whistling in the dark to a star in the corner

of your eye that’s been following you for miles

down a long dirt road that ascends to the moment

like a hill you can walk right off into the nightsky

ahead of you like a moonrise confiding in its own shadows.

And don’t get fooled into thinking

you’re the undertaker of a dying art

embalming your vital organs in Canopic jars

like alabaster wombs doomed to go

gummy and post mature in the dark

without ever breaking like water into

an afterlife of literary immortality

that can’t breathe on its own without

artificial life support, here, or at

the stargates of Orion, you may be

read forever but you only get to sing it once

acapella and that on the fly, like a grave robber

or a thief of fire that’s burning with life

to put the dead to better use than just

leaving them where they lie in their toyboxes.

Embalmed in the mummy cloth of the dying fall

of your dactylics, what could you be but the echo

of an afterlife that’s always a step or two behind you

like the shadow of a star that can’t catch up to itself?

Your poems will die right along with you

if you insist upon it, like slender cup-bearers

who used to serve you wine like willow-trees

down by the river when everything poured

out of itself like stars and fireflies from your long hair

and Ophelias of waterflowers tried so hard

to please you well. They’ll drink the poison

and lie down at your feet without dreaming

anything anymore. In the dark. In the silence.

In the stillness of all those lifeless images

that keep their secrets to themselves because

you stopped the waterclock on an empty bucket

as if you knew what hour it was on the nightwatch

and you struck the bell like the skull of time

that prophesied soon you would have been fulfilled

like a new moon if you’d only opened your eyes

a crack in the dark, left the door ajar, come

with a crowbar to let the light in and out like a pulsar.

Wasn’t it Keats who said that of all God’s creatures

a poet is the one with no identity so as to know

the whole of existence as intimately as

that little white square of emptiness centred in the heart

with no one standing there that wasn’t

a stranger from the start? Little wonder then,

nothing but the forged passports of our poems for papers

to show the border guards in the doorway

of our homecomings that we’re who we say we are,

we clamour to be recognized like the names

of flowers and stars, metaphors with inky fingerprints,

the labyrinthine shadows of ghosts that have been here before us.

Fame’s a trap. More poets have been killed

by the adoration of a pitcher plant than by

the neglect of waterlilies in a festering swamp.

Poets can bloom like wild orchids

in the shadows of outhouses, or crack concrete

like the jackhammers of the dandelions

you can read in between the lines of the sidewalks.

There are lyrical mystics weaving bamboo pots

and sandles in the back alleys of black markets

from the ganas of Calcutta, the ghazals

of the Ruknabad, the haiku of Tokugawa Japan,

the sagas of Iceland, to the approximate sonnets

of Denver, Colorado, on out to the blue

picture-music of the Pleiades backcombing their hair

into nebular rhapsodies of inspired hydrogen.

What’s a good review compared to the depth

of the silence that follows the song of the nightbird

even the hills are moved to echo among themselves

like a voice they overheard with a longing like their own

to dignify what’s most unanswerable about life

by dancing with desire to the music of their own solitude?

Arpeggios of rain on the petals of the unseen flower

playing variations of thorns and vines like Scarlatti

alone at the harpsichord for an hour out of mind

as if someone had left the gate to the culture garden open

and the music had spread on its own like the rootfires

of purple loosestrife and wild columbine.

If I write about you while I’m alive

will you write about me after I’m dead

as if one gravestone a lifetime weren’t enough,

and every autopsy open-endedly ambiguous

in the teaching hospitals of the literati

hovering over the persona of your cadaver

naked in the surgical theatres of their dress rehearsals

flower-arranging their scalpels like bleeding hearts

in an abattoir of featherless roses turning

cyanotically blue from a lack of oxygen at those heights?

Better to befriend a dog, than literary immortality, if you want

your corpse dug up to the quality of the starmud

you’re interred in like tar sands on their way

to a refinery to be dumped like petrocoke and soot

on someone else’s funereal dreams of a best-selling book.

Better to chip all the cartouches of your regal name

like the scars of old wounds off the pillars you

rededicated to the one sun god you were the embodiment of

and wander off like an apostate poet

who preferred the desert to the promised land

because none of the stars out there were

ever compelled to wear yellow armbands

and nobody counted the plinths on an abacus of shining

because there were more needles than there were

haystacks to hide them in an infinite number of directions.

Back to eyebeams. You create the star you see,

the star you want to be, out of your own light.

The way you shine upon things is what

gets reflected back to you like a karmic message

in glass bottle bobbing along your mindstream

like the prophetic skulls of previous dismemberments

to please wake yourself up from the dream you’re having

of yourself like the thematically connected scheme

of a waterclock of purple passages on your way

to turn the water into wine at a wedding of flesh and spirit.

Sooner or later everybody gets married to the world,

and you can’t nullify that anymore than you can

seek a divorce from yourself as if you wrote nothing

but decree absolutes published in a book of bans.

You can’t unshadow the world as if you were

taking a saddle off a winged horse that had had enough

of the bit and the spurs and the burrs under the saddle

and threw you off for not knowing how to ride

your inspiration bareback. Just say to yourself

if you’re brave enough to take your own advice,

o well, there’s more poetry in walking to the stars

than there is in hitch-hiking, and give the matter a rest.

Just sing to yourself in the enormity of your solitude

and listen to the rumours of silence in the dark

that answer you in a million voices like the moon

on the undulant eyelids of a lake in deep rem sleep,

yes, we’re here, too, with you in this abyss

overhearing ourselves like hidden secrets in the bushes

gesturally expressing a wish to be known

not so much for what we say or the way we say it

for our eyes only, but as a kind of sign language,

a universal dream grammar among night birds

conversing alone with the Alone, from one conversation

to the next, without taking each other out of context

like the sacred syllables of the waterbirds disappearing

like words of farewell on the wind as we take

our leave of each other at the silver-tongued forks in our wake.

PATRICK WHITE