STARING INTO THE FUTURE

STARING INTO THE FUTURE

Staring into the future without my hand

on the rudder of the moon. No sail, no wind

but the air in my lungs, no star to set a course by

but the Milky Way in the wake of this

leaking lifeboat I keep bailing like a waterclock

to stay afloat, drifting as if time had lost its way somehow

or Hart Crane had just jumped off the stern of the Orizaba

at high noon, waving good-bye like a conductor

in an adagio of islands in a logical archipelago

of metaphors, or the footprints of Atlantis

on the waters of life before it sank incontinently.

Grey day. Blue funk. My body washed up

like a broken log boom on a pyre of bones

on a beach somebody will set fire to sooner or later

like a drunk undertaker singing folksongs

to commemorate the ashes of cremated guitars,

but my mind’s awake, contemplating the future

like the biggest mistake I could possibly make.

Two choices in the divergent lives of poets.

You either go down with the ship at moonset,

or you jump it like a plague rat in Genoa.

I smash a bottle of Dom Perignon like a French

Benedictine monk over the prow of a shipwreck,

more seaworthy for all the things I didn’t do in life

than those I did. I can swim but I’m better

at sinking like a dolphin in a fishing net. O Carib isle,

where’s the caress of the Gulf Stream in an ice age

when you need it? I don’t have a daddy to throw me

a lifesaver once in awhile when I break through

the iced-over tears of my former translucencies

into the thriving depths of an oceanic shepherd moon

I didn’t evolve from. I will humanize the darkness

and the terror of not being able to relate to anyone

by metaphorizing it with my presence in residence

like dream figures in a total eclipse that doesn’t

make the flowers wince and close up like inverted umbrellas.

I will seed the available dimensions of the future

with the teeth of lions, les dents de leon, a galaxy

of G-7, post midlife, unmarried suns scattered

like the paratroopers of dandelions on the wind

at Market Garden, though I land on rock or good soil.

I’ll write open-eyed starmaps that can see in the dark

what everybody’s been looking at all these years

like chandeliers in the house of life after the last candle

in the lantern I’ve been given to go by has gone out.

Thumbs up, thumbs down, I’ll burn like white phosphorus,

or the torches of the dadaphors at the Roman New Year,

quantumly entangled in the umbilical cords

of my creative annihilations like an albatross in the rigging

of a ghost ship that’s been known to haunt these waters.

I’ll release my blood like the banner of a rose

and wait for the sharks to circle me like sundials

and break my body up like loaves and fishes when they come.

I’ll return my tears like water to the river of sorrows

I took them from like the crown jewels of my heartfelt abdication.

I will not unseat myself from the unforgiving stations of life

I’ve ruled over nothing from. Here in this domain of the future

I’ll endeavour to be as good a pauper-king as I was back in the world.

A prophetic skull that could look into the eyes of the abyss

and prophesy, but seldom interfered with what I saw.

Not a sin of omission, but obedience to an unacknowledged law.

And all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well.

No moon like a goat’s head polluting its own watershed.

I’ll make amends to the dark matter that took me for granted.

I’ll sit meditating in front of this wall of the future

nobody’s written on like a turf war of grafitti call signs

like A Bodhidharma doll. Seven times down. Eight times up.

Such is life. And I’ll introduce my illimitable understanding

of Pacific cowboy, lunatic fringe, seahorse Zen

for those who want to seek wisdom as far as it can be lost in.

I’ll clothe the imageless acts of what’s to come

like a retinal circus of defrocked sacred clowns

that have given up trying to make anybody laugh at themselves

as if they were an in-joke that God just got

like a numbing shock to the ulna nerve of her funny-bone.

I’ll be a trickster, a crow, a fox, a neo-gestural

expressionist gleeman or jester, I’ll be a salmon,

mare, seal or fly that bothers an elderly woman

like Loki, the shapeshifter, saying, bless me sister,

because I’m the annoyance that keeps you from dying

in this oceanic multiverse of bubbles and blisters.

I’ll paint streetsigns named after surrealistic wildflowers

I came across anonymously like a vagrant in the star fields

where every step I take is the threshold of a long, lost road

back to my homelessness that waits for me like the conjunction

of Venus and Jupiter through a western window

as if power and love weren’t the waste of a good heart

dumpster diving for the black pearls of an occluded art

that refused to be blinded by the opalescent blazing

of a false dawn like a silver lining on a locket of slag.

I’ll apprentice myself all over again like a metal worker

in moonlight to the flightfeather of a black swan

in the company of Orphic lyres and the eyes of Arabic eagles

everyone can identify with like the iris of a starmap

shining like a new myth of origins over the tarpaper rooftops

of irremediable slumlords clinging like barnacles

to the skulls of the drowned with eyes that stare

like the lachrymal glands of hourglasses and glaciers

on the move on the moon into a future with the tear ducts

of a snowman inundated on a floodplain of oceanic compassion

for the longing in the hearts of the dolmens of coal

trying to keep warm in the Arctic night like stalwart guides

to the river deltas where this mindstream of flowing diamonds ends

in a penumbral vision of life of an imperfectly flawless life.

PATRICK WHITE