OLD SORROW, I'VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

OLD SORROW, I’VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

Old sorrow, I’ve forgotten your name,

you’ve been with me so long, pouring

the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart

that’s climbed back up this sad tree of my spine

so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,

these sad planets collapsing in on themselves

under the decaying weight and water of their own tears

from the inside out, and gone to seed

like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,

trying to make it up out of these watersheds

to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard

whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin

climbing back up toward the stars again,

until one night I’ll raise my sail

like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way

and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires

I’ve danced around alone like the only child

of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold

of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.

Who did you bury that we weep for, what

did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,

what love of yours was so betrayed when it had

its eyes pecked out by the song birds

you never sing anymore when the bees

are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening

the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,

except there’s a wound in your voice the lyrics

are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,

the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells

with oceans of disappointment like the run-off

of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain

after we’d talked to God like bathyspheres

trying to get to the bottom of our tears

like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,

our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope

fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,

looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves

toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?

And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself

when you came back down from your tete a tete,

and returned your commandments like a library book

that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons

have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons

as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note

of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders

are writing music you’ll never play like the wind

in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River

when the black walnuts are floating by

like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud

of all these roads we’ve walked together to get

nowhere in particular but wherever we are now

in this graveyard of shadows

that talk to the stars who have none

about how to wash our names and faces off

like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness

like a candle at a black mass at high noon

with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won’t look at

for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,

you bend my boughs toward the earth

with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature

seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immovable buddha, are you the ancient echo

of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience

being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms

of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors

you could blow into bubbles of the mind

like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?

Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon

in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted

like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat

growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?

Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind

like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit

like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon

lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.

Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins

of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars

like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever

finding your way home again through your lion gate

or have you encamped like so many other nations

to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?

Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal

that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?

I shall call you, friend, given how long

we’ve known each other like shadows of the valley spirit

blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.

I shall open my heart like a fire to you

and we can share the silence together for hours at a time

on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside

and there’s no need to speak of things

that neither of us understand about why

the fountains with the deepest watersheds

are always sadder than the last of the flowers

in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.

Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,

red shifting into the longer wavelengths

of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,

and I’ll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream

that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,

though you probably know better, keep us both afloat

like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock

that’s been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

PATRICK WHITE 

NOTHING MYSTICALLY INTRIGUING ABOUT MISERY

NOTHING MYSTICALLY INTRIGUING ABOUT MISERY

Nothing mystically intriguing about misery

but I do the best I can with what there is to work with

when I’m down, when I’m blue, it’s not azure,

it’s a stormy Prussian waiting for the sky to clear

and array a starmap of lapis lazuli freaked

with flecks and fuses of gold. Add a touch of cobalt

for aerial perspective to give myself a little space

to wander in while I remember not to short-circuit

the tarpits in the shadows of my depression

or under estimate what’s so extraordinarily ordinary

about the lifemasks I’ve shucked in the mundanity

of my middens, the museums of arcane waste

I’ve squandered over the years like garbage on nothing.

Just because someone drove a nail through your eye

you keep insisting is a sliver of the true star

might wallpaper your imagination like Matisse

but doesn’t mean you’re a one-eyed messiah

crucified like a Cyclops by a red hot stake

from your own fire, or that your tears are somehow,

because of the quality of your crying, better aged

than New York City tapwater, or the ensuing darkness

is necessarily prophetic. Could be a black hole

or the heavy lift of the cast iron lid of the total eclipse

I used to remove like a shark’s pupil to look into

what I imagined the sun must be like on the other side

without my eyes evaporating in the blaze with the hiss

of water droplets falling on my mother’s wood stove

when I was a blistering kid. Uncannily shaped

like this archaic desk I sit at now trying to write

my way like a counterintuitive backroad out of hell.

The train through town is trying to howl with the wolves

but it hasn’t got the agony for it and I’d rather

not know where I’m going despite the exuberance

of the gnostics who indict the same appearances

they’re enlightened by like apparitions in shallow mirrors

though I don’t mean anymore than they do by it.

It’s like art, love, life, the less you know about it

the more you’ve taken it to heart. If the whole

is in every part of what’s been broken, then mastery

must be as well. The human brain a ballet of cotyledons

performing swan lake on tour rising from the stage,

flowering out of death with the unfurling of a leaf

with a twist to it like the turning of a page by the wind

trying to read what it wrote behind its own back

when no one else is looking to see what it sowed

in arable rows of boustrophic print on the moon.

Like thornapples and rabies, I’ve cured my own disease

at times, with home remedies that very seldom,

if you live through them, leave you feeling

like the happy lunatic of a creative psychosis

inspired by a compendium of excruciating transformations

learning to swim hydrophobically in the Burgess Shale

as you say to evolution, physician heal thyself,

and somehow like a snakey faith healer miraculously

it does by killing entire species of itself off at a time.

Where are the fireflies in this ice fog of nuclear winter?

Why is the moon sleepwalking with the dead?

Who’s pulling my wishbones apart like crutches

that nothing depends upon not even my struggle

to wrestle with the dark angel in the way,

the prophylactic shaitan keeping me from

harming myself in the apprentice years of Lucifer

fulfilling the prohibitions that were expected of him

as my railroaded emotions walk away with a limp?

I’m screaming for red. I’m going through

ultra-violet withdrawals from life at dangerous frequencies.

I’m boiling like a kid in its mother’s milk.

Who cut the tongues out of my deaf mute cowboy mutes

and left me nothing to say in a sign language

not even the abysmal silence up ahead where the road

leads me into a wilderness with keener eyes than mine

nods, empathically, and bows its head like a sunflower

mimicing a streetlamp and says, yes, I think I understand.

My heart’s been torn out of my chest

like a canal root of starmud at the hands

of a Mayan dentist pulling my back room wisdom teeth out

like the molars of astronomical temples he had to abandon

like the calderas of extinct volcanoes impacted

like chimney fires of lava and creosote on a shepherd moon

marking the cards that bluff genetic codes into signs

of thermophilic life to prove we’re not freakishly alone

with the dark energies of quantumly entangled light

upstaging the dawn by clinging to the gunwale

of a lifeboat waiting to be salvaged by a coffin.

PATRICK WHITE