SO MANY MORNINGS

SO MANY MORNINGS

So many mornings I want to be done

with waking up as if it were always winter

and rifling through my pockets to see if

I’ve got enough cash to buy me and the cat

another day or two of life she can spend

chasing paper balls of the poems I roll up

to expend on her amusement, and for me

a microbubble of space and time I can

write and paint in without feeling hungover

from the chronic sobriety of my last encounter

with a swarm of killer bees retooled

from the dirty thirties smuggling prohibition

through the Thousand Islands. Return me to exile.

I’m the King of the Outcasts, a pure blood pariah,

a leper of the moon, a sacred clown who dances for rain

to help him recall how to cry. I’m a blue flower

in No Man’s Land someone ploughed with a cannon.

It’s a kind of protest sign I hold up

like a placard of chicory that means no surrender.

I sheathe the moon in my scabbard like a blood-stained blade.

I am the lunar trifecta of aquiline talons that grasp at nothing.

I labour at life with an effortless effort of intensity

that makes Rasputin look like a slacker among mad monks.

I have been dispossessed by more spirits I’ve never met

except as an anonymous urgency to write something

as if I were here to listen, not speak, and my voice

were merely the microphone everyone popped their p’s in

as if they were French kissing electricity, than any man I know of.

I wholly understand experientially what the Zen master meant

when he said he didn’t like poems written by poets,

cooking prepared by cooks, or paintings done by painters.

Leftover carbon in a half-hearted fire. Boulders of coal

instead of diamonds for the adamantine eyes

of an enlightened snowman wondering

what it might have been like to have been born a scarecrow,

a strawdog, on a hot summer evening in the flesh instead of

made out of stars on an immaculate winter night harder

than moonlight on the lake ice. I’ve found my way

out of this labyrinth of dead ends more than once.

The crows and the wolf gods know all the backtrails out of hell,

but it was a sadder day than I ever imagined

clarity and freedom could be. The solitude is interminable.

And even the moon doesn’t truly understand what you’re howling at.

You’ve probably never heard of Archibald Lampman

but he was the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope

a hundred and fifty years ago plus in Ottawa

at the Council of the Three Fires where the rivers join

and I smear the same kind of war paint on my face

though the feathers in my topknot I plucked from Pegasus

to see if I’d forgotten how to write with ink and quills.

Poetry is the last sanctuary of savage dignity in the Black Hills.

I’m a hold out from way back when the Chinese

taught the Haida to carve cedar totem poles like the power nodes

of the chakras in their spines. I’ve got knots and nooses in mine.

But the principle remains the same. Having tried

shattering a few celestial spheres into the crystal chandeliers

of a wine glass falling everywhere like the fine mist of an ice-storm

with my voice to see if I could make something habitable

out of this shepherd moon that might surprise everybody yet

with life forms that defy uninspired expectations, I

turned my attention to Tibetan prayer bowls

that hummed in spirals that made a mantra

out of every line of picture-music I wrote after that

placing the emphasis on the assonance of my sacred syllables

I kissed and placed in the pyx and lockets of my consonants

as if I never wanted to forget a face that had meant

something to me sometime like an eclipse of the full moon.

Now I’d never undertake a journey

that didn’t leave me homeless at the end.

That’s what I do in life. That’s how I honour

all the prophetic skulls that have brought me to this moment.

Some things I reveal like a candle in a morgue.

And when I fall like a stone bird out of the heavens

you can be sure Medusa’s been stargazing again.

Pain to me is a naturally renewable resource,

and if I were ever to write my autobiography,

it would read like the Burgess Shale.

Hail, fellow, well met in the flea markets of poetic vision.

Here you can tinker with your revisions like hex-keys and lies.

It’s difficult to know what you’re going to say next

given there’s no connection between thought and emotion

and verbal expression, and you realize they’re not sharing

the same dream grammars when one calls you to prayer

and the other to take notes at a seance of all your former selves.

All I know is whenever it was my turn to jump out of the plane

engulfed by the abyss, to test out my winged heels, it always

seemed like bad faith to reach for a parachute as if

there were something left to save. Be brave, young Icarus,

be brave. Daring said feathers and falling took flight.

Though I’m afraid I’m beginning to repeat myself

like the white noise of an old man remembering the past.

I’ve been plunging with the dolphins on the moon

in this shadowy sea of sentience since I was first conceived.

And it’s not so much that madness became a way of life

as it was a matter of sharing what I saw without asking

or expecting to be believed, if I lived it by myself for everyone.

PATRICK WHITE

SHOCK ONE BIRD INTO TAKING TO ITS WINGS

SHOCK ONE BIRD INTO TAKING TO ITS WINGS

Shock one bird into taking to its wings

and all the others will fly up out of the sacred woods

into an emergent symphony of spontaneously choreographed words

like rivers reeds dancing in unison to the music of a distant sea.

Fish do the same. And the fans of the corals before the moon

turns them into stone. Listen. Aldebaran

bellows from the heart of the bull sacrificed to creation

like the gift of a gift to itself. It’s raining blood

in some parts of the world. If I don’t look for asylum

in reality it’s because I completely trust my imagination

not to schedule any dress rehearsals for my dreams

as if you could improve the play by upgrading the stage.

And my religion can’t bring itself to believe in a god

that created the world just to let herself be victimized by it.

I don’t take the universe as a sign of intelligence

because I can’t look at a stone without feeling I’ve added

a little wisdom to my thoughts, an earthy, sage laughter

to the unworldly seriousness of my moonrocks.

Life in the universe, elaborating its redundancy

through sex and fractals into an order of complexity

that weaves every wavelength of its picture-music

into a lyrical tapestry that would otherwise

be hanging in hyperspace like a blank membrane. Life

is intelligence in action like a mystic that got up off his knees

to fix the church roof by opening it up to the stars

that keep falling like the mercy of a transcendent rain

to wash the starmud off the roots of life with light

until they shine like lightning breaking into blossom

from the bottom up. Whether things are good or bad

synchronicity reverses the spin of my atoms

like the turn and counterturn of matter and anti-matter

dancing creatively as if love could be measured

in direct proportion to its potential for annihilation.

That’s how things have always gotten done around here.

Someone manages to peel their snowblind reflection

off the mirror like the sunburn of a coronal halo

a throne too close to home, and the night begins

to cool things off with the moonlit salve of a herbal darkness.

Everything lives, animate and inanimate alike,

the lotus eaters, the condottieri of the vulture capitalists,

and in the great reservoirs and watersheds of memory

that generated muses to inspire the living with the fires

of the dead, to keep them from going out, everyone, everything

down to the last mystically specific detail of scarlet paint

flaking off a fingernail as if someone painted a window

to cover up a moonrise with a sunset, lives, endures, thrives

in the well springs of an expansive mind that celebrates

its regeneration out of the magical black holes and top hats

it’s been pulling itself out of like rabbits by the ears for lightyears

while supernovas go berserk with applause just to tempt itself

into finding out how the trick was done by its own sleight of hand

without anyone catching on. Whatever it washes its hands of,

science is still an antiseptic magic that keeps reminding itself

of where it came from the harder it tries to deny its roots,

but there are other vital organs of the body that can

lay claim to being children of the mind as well, not just

this one changeling of a brain child laid on the steps of a temple

or found among the bullrushes. Eye-child, the bird

that lives like a larynx in your throat, heart child,

and the shy child that can feel the light breathing on her skin.

We are the neurons and axons of a galactic intelligence this week

and we’re communicating with shepherd moons and starclusters

that are as alien as we are sending out space probes like genes

unlocking the secrets of the universe like wardens and nightwatchmen

breaking koans like keys to the cosmic eggs where they’re imprisoned

like seven sleepers in the cave of our genome. If you

can put up with that many similes in a row like variations

in the evolutionary bush that might or might not catch fire

like sage brush happy to lay back on the wind and drift, just drift

in the wanderlust of not really knowing what we’re doing here

but taking it on faith, it’s blind luck to be aware of it.

And the available dimensions of tomorrow will have recourse

to these metaphors poured out of the heart like a waterclock

and new dinosaurs will walk the earth among the emotional mammals

in boas of ostrich feathers and suggestive snake-skin sequins

that shimmer like the waves on a lake at night, liquid anthracite,

dark tears with black diamonds for eyes burning heretics

in the unconfessed fires of their adamantine translucency.

Maybe it’s time to let the caves we enter like carbon-based life forms

paint us for a change in colours that have yet to be seen

in anyone’s paintbox like the bulbs of wildflowers about to bloom

in the starfields with a rainbow coloured thumb for gardens.

Let’s turn our astral portraits inside out as if the stars

were embodied within each of us like a starmap

in the crystal skull of a drop of water on a spinal blade of grass.

Mind only. Everything is mind. Not two. Not one. Not nothing.

In every part, in every grain, the whole of the harvest moon.

And the formlessness isn’t inchoate. And the form

is as homeless as the mind looking for its lantern

with its lantern, as if it wasn’t accompanied by its own light

like an honour guard of stars and fireflies the whole way

to the gate and the threshold of an endless beginning.

That’s what’s inconceivably beautiful and playful

about being alive in a mind as aniconicly vast as this.

We only hide the secrets from ourselves

that we must urgently want to be known

like mirages breaking water in the wombs of our wells.

We’re rummaging for grails in our own spiritual lost and founds.

We’re sending telescopes into space like foreign embassies

acting as plenipotentiaries for our eyes only

as if our seeing had to be diplomatic about

the infinite number of ways there are of deciphering the stars.

Make it a loveletter from a bride catalogue of Asian mermaids

if you want to hear the lyrics of what they’re singing to you

about the music of the mind walking on the waters of life

like the Pleiades webbing the constellation of Taurus

among the leafless boughs of the horned locust trees

standing in the moonlight gaping like gored matadors.

Or make up stories to keep the fires within you amused

with a ghost of smoke on a rocky road rising

out of the ashes of its deathmask on a distant hillside

with a nebular glow on its face and a secret syllable

you have to hear with your eyes before you’ll believe its yours

hidden like a jewel in the folds of its veils like a prefix

that isn’t just another false dawn on the mother tongue

of the word for bliss because no one yet has even known

how to say it in the silence of waiting for it to speak for itself.

PATRICK WHITE