THE NEGLECT HE HAD TO IMPOSE UPON HIS LIFE

THE NEGLECT HE HAD TO IMPOSE UPON HIS LIFE

The neglect he had to impose upon his life

to write, to pursue an earthly excellence

to make up for the childhood he was told

was blighted by the time he was seven as if

to be angry in the age of innocence were

a culpable sin of deficiency. A sin of omission

worthy of an imagination pariahed by the truth

not to be as idylically blissful as other people’s expectations

demanded you smile as a child while your heart

was being torn out for adult reasons

by the people who said they loved you

but only as a matter of manners, not fact.

The want and humiliation he endured. The snakepit

of anxieties he slept on like a waterbed

that moved under him like a sunami

as he tried to dream his way back to the stars

to step away from the earthbound nuclear reactors

that kept melting their bells down

into the bullets of a firing squad trying

to make the point it was heresy to act

like a wavelength among so many sub-atomic particles.

Pleasures foregone. The women and kids

who looked at him like a shepherd moon

without any shopping malls. The killer bees

that swarmed his heart like an asteroid belt

when they left for good as if love didn’t matter

anymore than quality had a leg up

on what was being fobbed off as the real thing.

A succession of noble acts by an underdog of integrity

that had to live ten times more dangerously

than the couch poodles with pampered emotions

to express the dark oceans thriving

with unknown life-forms in the depths of Enceladus

within him, or a housewell he dug

like a grave for himself that filled up

like a black hole of galactic mirages

that bloomed in a desert of sea stars

everytime he lowered his heart like a bucket

to draw water he could drink from the skull

of the moon at a Zen tea ceremony with Aquarius?

A hermetic chrysalis in the life of a caddisfly,

always, it seemed, in preparation for a transformation

greater than himself, making a gift of a gift

that didn’t fool people with the mere lustre

of an empty stone that skipped out over the tide

like a pulse that died as if the sea had been crying

all over it even as it tried to revive it mouth to mouth,

but dark matter with a star sapphire for a third eye

embedded in the slag heaps of ore like an eye sore

to those star-nosed moles that couldn’t look upon the light

without wincing. Nightwatchman glowing

like a lantern fish by its own light in the depths

of Pisces, or feeble as a prophet in the belly of Cetus

suffocating under its own weight beached

on the unchained rocks of Andromeda rescued

by Perseus standing up to monsters like a dolmen?

Ambiguities of an echoless vocation, nothing less

than everything all the time, the hidden headwaters

of multi-headed clepshydras that flowed

faster than the towers of the hollyhocks

could bring their microwaves to blossom

as if they couldn’t speak for themselves

without pinging someone else’s thoughts

like bees and hummingbirds cleaning

the wax from their ears. Frogs and anthropods

in the tidal pools and shallow ponds

of the waterclocks dabbling in mosquitoes

like haiku at the beginning of the food chain

as if someone had sucked the enlightenment

out of life by thinning its blood hemotophagously

with feverfew and heparin and a needle exchange

that gave less than it could take fishing for the heart

like a pregnant junkie getting ready to lay its eggs.

Apostate veganism as a radical art of decay.

The jade rabbit sleeps in the clouds at the edge of the sky

watching them prune the tree on the moon with bush hogs.

He stayed up late and wrote like a candle doomed

to die at first light, when the hermit thrush

packed it in with the stars like posthumous insights

on the graveyard shift that dispossessed him of his demons

at an exorcism of fireflies and major constellations.

His eyes began to droop like medicine bags and bells

over the lightyears he travelled alone with his sorrows

trying to enlighten the past with backward looking tomorrows

that always arrived too late to do him much good.

The secret garden he cultivated on the moon

never found a way to put a gate on his solitude

that wasn’t worth walking through alone

like the tusks at the entrance of a kraal,

or a gauntlet of crossed sabres of first and last fangs

that enclosed love in lunar parentheses like an aside

some shadow of a sundial made under their breath as if there were

only a beginning and an end of time, and no eternal moments

in between one heartbeat and the next ad infinitum.

Such were the serpentine mainsprings of inspiration

he drank from like golden ratios of water when the moon

shed her skin like white petals of wind blown peonies

and Apollo lyrically tightened the strings on his turtle shell

as he sang like an abandoned housewell enthralled

by the mysterious voices of the birds on a prayerwheel

lucky enough to be blessed by the jinx of their calling.

Angels dancing on the heads of the pins

in the eyes of a voodoo doll plummeting like Icarus

through the false dawn of the sun toward nightfall in paradise.

PATRICK WHITE  

SITTING IN THE NIGHT AT MY DESK

SITTING IN THE NIGHT AT MY DESK

Sitting in the night at my desk, trying

not to intrude on my silence and solitude

I’m beginning to glow like a motherlode of gold

hidden deep in a heart of dark, dark ore

as the gas furnace cracks its pipes like the Tin Man

learning to play drums with brass knuckles on

and my cat chirps in her sleep beside me

and the goldfish are grazing on oxygen

at the surface of their becalmed tank,

three flames of a water ballet hanging

like the bent tines of a trident or the inverted candelabra

of some flower that blooms in fire as if

a quiet comet were passing through the room

uncertain whether it’s an arsonist in a library

or a funeral home, depending on the ghost you talk to.

Big night out there. No stars. Nothing moving.

The clouds are holding a pillow of snow

over the face of the town as it sleeps.

I can’t see anyone’s eyes and there’s

nothing I can say to the dreamcatchers in the windows

about the quality of the picture-music their listening to

that’s making them feel like spiderwebs other than

spring’s coming, the butterflies will be out soon

and we’ll all hang out like flypaper sticky with stars.

But in here where I’m witnessing my awareness of I am

as if I were swimming in a sea of nocturnal sapphires,

the first draft of a deciduous starmap caught

in the vertiginous eddies and whirlpools of the black holes

and supernovas exploding like fireflies and lighthouses

in distant island galaxies trying to warn me away from the rocks,

I go along with things like moonrise on a lake when there is one,

or mermaids singing like the Burgess Shale on the mountaintops

of lunar shadows creeping across their dead seabeds

like the long wavelengths of an outgoing tide.

The life of the mind isn’t mine though I’m

still delusional enough to think I’ve taken

possession of my heart. Let the wind blow

like the spiritual broom of an enlightened rehab center

and try to sweep my mirage away like stars

from the stairwells of a desert, let it huff and puff

as it will, no matter, it stays like a mirror that’s been kind to me.

It’s as important to have a fool in your life

that makes you laugh at yourself or at least break a smile

you can be loyal to, as it is to honour a wise man

with garlands and laurels and words he has no need of.

I’d rather be denuded by the fingertips and lips of love

than skinned by the manicured nails and scalpels of clarity.

Or let it make this scarred wolf-hide into a drumhead if it must

but once the duststorm in the hourglass has passed

and time has come to the end of its traplines like a good thing

that couldn’t last, I’ll still be standing here as I am tonight

in my tattoos and starmaps with the tears I painted

in my own blood under their eyes like ripe plums

about to thunder like a pulse in the ears of the abyss.

The banshee of the train whistle goes looking for her lost child

like an orphan she abandoned in the woods. Even

under the duff and detritus of last year’s works

the wet night bleeds of light by putting leeches on their eyelids

to draw the four humours of their infectious visions out,

I can feel the wild-eyed crocuses blooming

like the cervixes of spring unashamed of their sex.

I can feel the heat of the sun like a bemused caress

on the grey cedar driftwood of my arm as if

all these puppets in chaos beside the lake

were made of flesh and bone as small snapping turtles

lay their shields against the gunwales of a half-sunken log

in the warrior hall of a Viking funeral ship on fire

at Lance aux Meadows in Newfoundland

watching the ice bergs drift by like lazy, white whales

in search of the Titanic and the Pequot caught

with their lifeboats down like the typical hubris

of an anachronistic biblical death wish

to drown like Narcissus in their own ship-wrecked reflections,

like critical questions left unanswered

by the Attic dialect of a chorus of satyrs

celebrating life at a sacrifice of tragic scapegoats.

Imagine that as if you were one of the voodoo dolls,

strawdogs, or a scarecrow of smouldering hay

that smells like methane in the sun as the snow

rots around you like an archipelago of lunar leper colonies

trying to imperialize the moon as they lose

sight of the last of their shorelines to global warming,

I say to myself in compassionate tones of Wilfred Owen,

the poetry’s in the pity, not the wherefore of the atrocity.

Mine moves in like the shapeshifting wraiths of a cool fog

into a no man’s land of dead trees sticking out of the lake

like crucifixes and stakes where my ghosts

can breathe freely like comets at their own wakes

in a detoxified upper atmosphere of northern lights

whose veils are neither a seance nor a summons

to a mystic exorcism in the green sunsets of ochre mustard gas.

I lay a wreath of cedar boughs down on the lake

like a poultice of moonlight to remember them by

and cool their eyes kissing each of them to sleep

to keep them from feeling like bats smoked out of an attic

where we keep the dismembered toys of our childhood memories

we’re not in the habit of playing with anymore

as if we grew bored with trying to destroy them.

A shudder of cobalt blue in the sky, and here comes

the sun like a burning bush of vagrant tumbleweed

in the ghost town of a deserted zodiac, thinking

it can tell me what to do again like a prophetic errand boy

with messages for a pharaonic reality of lesser magicians

trying to drive the golden chariot of the sun

like corporate executives and spin doctors of Amun Ra

through the gunshot slums of a great wound in the side

of the Red Sea in the morning that’s about to overwhelm them

in sunamis of fanatical holy blood on the wings of a burning dove

consumed by self-immolations of savagely righteous indignation

that the night should end in exile, and the day

that’s journeyed so far from what it used to know

wake up alone and homeless as a love lyric in ashes to this.

PATRICK WHITE