I LIVE IN OBSCURITY WITH THE NIGHTBIRDS AND NO ONE SIGNS THE AIR

I LIVE IN OBSCURITY WITH THE NIGHTBIRDS AND NO ONE SIGNS THE AIR

I live in obscurity with the nightbirds and no one signs the air.

I listen to the click languages of pebbles on the riptarian shore

as one thought washes over another, hand over hand,

as if they were making a pact with one another they meant to keep

this time, one corpse washing the back of the other,

a flowering of hands on the heft of a sword-dancing vow.

It’s difficult to take your silence seriously in a crowd

and not be estranged by it. So many voices looking for a home,

so many gleeman to the king of the oildrum booming

like a bullfrog under the overpass of a careless city

where the poets are more venal than the middle class they castigate

like the sins of their parents visited upon them. Scare someone

meaningfully enough and they’ll atavistically return

to what they know best. Boo! But take it in jest.

Maybe never to have been born is best after all

has been said and said and said and said as Sophocles did

and so little done to make a difference to the tragi-comical

starfish drowning in the tidal pools of their own eyes

depending on the prescription they’re wearing at the time,

oceans in the rose, puddles of turbulent starmud,

or the Hubble wowing us like the rainbow body

of a one-eyed guru born without lachrymal glands,

visions of life lining the highway like roadkill

or moon-toothed muskie dying of thirst in a freshwater lake.

May the anguished eyes of starving children eat your poems

like the junkfood you went bobbing for in the dumpsters

of literary tradition. Gag them on the mouthy paint rags

of your genetically modified masterpieces. Too outlaw

by nature, not inclination, to feel at home in the 4-H Club

poetry’s become, where the cutest piglet wins a blue ribbon,

and a quarter hind of bullshit has its horns manicured

like the fingernails of the moon, so the roses

aren’t gored on their thorns, and everyone clarifies

the creosote clinging like polyps to the strings

of their cardboard voice-box guitars to sing like starlings

caught in the throat of a cold chimney in spring,

I live out here like a hermit thrush untroubled

by the peripheral visions of co-habitable women

who make no bones, like muses, of what they do

and do not want. It’s good to give as good as you get

and a bit beside if you’re trying to make a spiritual point

to somebody’s lies, but, in private, in savage solitude,

I howl at the moonrise on my own terms like a bush wolf

and the hills reiterate the forms my longing takes

when something deeply wounded inside, opens my mouth

like a waterlily in a nunnery of muses when the pain of what

it’s gangrenously rooted in breaks its vow of silence

like the oracular fortune-cookie of a madwoman

losing her virginity to the godhead of a koan

that possesses her faculties like the oxymoron of a unitive life

reconciling opposites in a coincidence of trivial profundities

and the Longinean lacunae in the anonymous lives of the sublimely absurd

as if she were trying to put the pagan back in the cult and coven of the word.

I look up at the night, sometimes, in a wanderlust of wonder

among the willows down by the river, and I name

the constellations I remember like bubble-gum space cards

from my childhood, and I swear I can read the occult tattoos

on the flesh of a blue Pictish witch jumping naked

through fire of the Pleiades as if there were no urns to be afraid of

but the ones that choke on the ashes and smoke

of the expiry date of their smouldering desires

trying to smudge their ghosts with sweetgrass

like astroturf above the flower arrangements

of their matchbook pyres, like undertakers

at a careerist impasse for words synonymous with love

as they have, like the Inuit vocabulary for snow,

read backward in the breathless mirrors

that pronounce them enigmatically dead

as the paradigmatic da Vinci code deciphered

like a loveletter they were afraid to throw into the flames

for fear of depriving literary culture of twenty six ways

of avoiding a word for their fear of death, as fluently

as the sacred seed syllables that can be derived

from the alpha and omega at the beginning and end

of a work of love, not self enhancement, deep in the woods,

in the vernal shadows of the moon, under the catkins of the aspens

because long before the leaves started publishing

their spring and autumnal memoirs, poetry, like the love of life

depended upon nothing, not even the occasional hermit thrush

in a black walnut tree, pouring its solitary heart out to the Pleiades.

PATRICK WHITE