FIFTY YEARS OF WRESTLING WITH THE DARK ANGEL IN THE WAY

FIFTY YEARS OF WRESTLING WITH THE DARK ANGEL IN THE WAY

Fifty years of wrestling with the dark angel in the way.

You’d think we’d be friends by now. Blue flower

rooted in all that dark energy standing like an eclipse

in the burning corona of the doorway, the flammable sugar maple

fallen across the road, the sun that shines at mystic midnight,

the aniconic black wisdom of a one person cult

marking its own door with an X for extinction.

Even a spear of light that drinks from your heart like a heron

can sometimes feel like a blackfly up against

the cold windowpanes of obstructive immensities

shaping the course of your mindstream in the shadows

of the valleys of death, and darker yet, the flightpaths of love

buffeted back like arrowheads against the vortices

of hurricanes and black holes unworthy of the names of women.

If you haven’t been crippled and mended by God,

you’ve never met her. You’ve never known what it’s like

to be so deeply loved by a wound you’d happily bleed out

like a waterclock for the rest of your life as you hung

on the hook of the moon prophecying in euphoric agony.

If you haven’t looked upon human suffering, your own

and others. If you’ve bleached your soul with industrial disinfectants

because you’re too weak to get down and dirty

in your own starmud, and more than your heart

it’s imperative to keep your hands clean. If you

haven’t taken off the deathmasks of the slayer and the slain

to look deeply into the eyes behind the disguise

like peas in a shell game, you’re only holding a candle up

to a blind mirror that will never see anything at all

until you blow it out. Until you learn to love humans enough

you hate God in your heart of hearts, she’ll excruciate you

with her absence until your passion is perfect

and your heresy breaks into the flames of a great blessing

that knows the night is not a reward,

and even if you’re fully enlightened

you’re still ploughing the moon with a sword.

Until your blood burns like a black rose

in the killing frosts of the abyss etching

the inside of your eyes like tears of crystal glassware

when the windows turn their eyelids inside out,

you’re still not intense enough to thaw the next ice age.

There are no visionaries in the eyes of your dice.

You might be buried alive in an avalanche of prophetic skulls

or roaring in the mane of a Leonid across the atmosphere,

but you’re still heaping the corpses of your constellations up

on the pyre of a starmap administering last rites at a sky burial.

The words might be yours. But the voice that animates them isn’t.

You can say to the starclusters of the New England asters

when you’re startled by their wild beauty like a new tenant

in the organic apple orchard you inherited with the house

one early autumn morning these are my eyes, but the seeing

knows different. And the being you are is still a stranger at the gate.

I’ve always tried to live in such a way that my ghosts

were proud of me, though I know how nostalgically absurd that is,

an immaculate misconception of my own ignorance,

an affectionate preference, if nothing else, it gives me an excuse

to celebrate the qualities the dead have incorporated into my life

as effortlessly as the air I breathe for all of us awhile.

And not just the angels, but the demons as well,

the lucidly dark gifts it takes more courage than wisdom to accept.

Compassion continually enlightened by its own delusions.

Inimitable starlight hidden in the glitter of tinfoil.

The inconceivable revealed by the unattainable

like the memory of an event that had already occurred

and been forgotten in the rush to understand it.

How we throw ourselves like keys into the grass at night

and down on all fours begin a systematic search

even when there are no locks on the doors

and everywhere is passage, no exit, no entrance,

out in the open as obvious as space with nowhere to hide.

We fashion compasses and destinations out of

our labyrinths and cul de sacs. We lose ourselves

so deeply in what we’re looking for we’re dying of thirst

immersed in it like fish crying out for lifeboats.

One mile west. One mile east. One step back as

the other moves ahead. Progressing backwards,

in a looping universe is as good as regressing forwards

whether you’re walking with galaxies along the Road of Ghosts,

or standing in your own way without giving your assent

to the creative potential of coming to the end of yourself

like an unassailable impediment, an undeniable fact

that returns you like a key to the open gate

that’s always been yours to enter by as vagrantly

as the map of a lost leaf on the mindstream

that’s been following you blind for lightyears.

PATRICK WHITE

THE CATASTROPHIC INSIGHT

THE CATASTROPHIC INSIGHT

The catastrophic insight. The black hour

on the widow’s back, spirit of ice-picks,

and my blood, my nerves, split ends

of red lightning freaking my flesh

with burning rivers of fire that clings

like tar and creosote to the shrieking skin

as if sound could be cold, silence so mad

peace is a high pitched truce between wars

coiled like the mainspring of a chromosome

in a wind-up alarm clock mistaken for the heart.

Moments of aggressive impersonality,

angry houseflies electrocuting the window

with black power surges in their downed powerlines

as they die on the windowsill, the exhausted words

of some black dwarf of a world that imploded

on itself, baffled and betrayed by the sky

that one day out of the blue, just said no to the light,

no to the houseflies, no to the broken neck of the wren

against a brittle mirage of motiveless clouds

that wrote their names on a black list

that denied them their alienable rites of passage.

Vicious carbon of martyred scarecrows

who insisted they were the favourites of God,

after walking in the brilliant starfields

among the resurgent lyrics of the wildflowers,

I can sense the emergence of mini blackholes

sinking my solar system like eight balls

in a pocket too deep to be retrieved from.

I gnash at nothing as if there were an immaculate intent

behind the brutal venality of random circumstance.

I’m restrained by a straitjacket of killer bees

like a gamma ray burst of toxic thought-waves

that don’t mean anything more than the usual extinction

but reek like the post mortem effects of a curse.

Even an abandoned house that’s burnt to the ground

can give shelter to the sacred syllables

of the song birds that used to sing

from its green rafters like the boughs of my bones

before my mouth was stuffed with ashes like the urn

of the asmatographer I was last week before

I was scalded in this acid bath of a dream fever

that revels without joy in the perverse glee

of disillusioning my will to fight for life

by whispering to me like the chorus line of a snakepit,

you may be strong, you may be immunological fit,

but there’s a limit to how many times you can be bit

and not succumb to the delirious radiation of the melt down.

When your dream of amelioration turns on you

like a pet python in your sleep and presses itself

like a pillow full of fledgling flightfeathers into your face

and says the more you try to believe you can fly

the more I’ll swallow you whole in a single gulp

like that vast sky and all those stars you keep lit

like a nightwatchman of lighthouses and fireflies

along the shipwrecked coasts of your consciousness

deluded by the radiance of their rescue and warning,

the beauty of life and light stepping out of the dark

as if mind were the happy exception to the undeniable

and not the rule as perilous hope wilts like a flower

of crazy wisdom in the eyes of an ailing fool.

And I shall reply, as I do now in this poem

from the deepest watersheds of my volcanic solitude

because I’ve been alienated from the surface

all my life, let despair do what it must. I’m sick

of cringing like a bubble in the shadow of its thorns.

I’ll fly like a cinder of a dragon in the eye of a hurricane.

I shall enlist an army of heretics and lead them

in a holy war against recalcitrant hypocrites

who haven’t got the imagination to stand up

for their wardrobes and personas when depression

pulls the plug on the applause of their pollsters.

Being true has got nothing to do with being right.

Though the road I’m on be trampled

into a bog of starmud and snapping turtles

pull my wild constellations down like swans and eagles

I’ll remain shining as sidereally

as a blade of mystically surrealistic stargrass.

I’ll make a faith of my spite, a religion

of all the most cherished mistakes I’ve made

believing in life as the most inspired child of the light.

Though spurs of razorwire cut the tendons of my winged heels

I’ll morph into a clubfoot dancing with fireflies

in the condemned ball room of a homeless starmap

and I won’t think twice about the worth of the sacrifice.

Even when death holds its dress sabre

up to my jugular like the last crescent of the moon,

I’ll remain the unkempt buffoon of my upbeat futility

and smile like an eclipse in face paint as if

I knew something absurdly wise about being alive it didn’t.

PATRICK WHITE