I COME TO A WALL

I COME TO A WALL

I come to a wall, the morning intellectually numb,

soft grey rain on rough-cut fieldstones that have stayed in place

two hundred years like the masonic cemetery of buildings

around town, lodged in time like books on a shelf for show.

I imagine honest, capable men, for the most part, with broken hands

that mended like starfish learning to throw a knuckle-ball.

There it stands, their work, in space and time, functionally sublime

long after life has run out of use for its makers.

Sturdy work, skilled and dirty, did they eventually

ache their lives away, old men with back problems,

sitting on a porch overlooking their wives’ flowerbeds?

Were they fastidious as Michelangelo in the quarries of Carrara

about the marble they chose for their headstones and who,

if their fingers couldn’t grip a chisel anymore, determined

not to lie under shoddy work, would carve them and set them

like jewels back in the earth they took them from? Here

and there the sway-backed stone bends under its own weight

as if it carried the world on its shoulders like an avalanche

it hasn’t let down. Someone solid you could stub your heart on.

How insubstantial this art of the evanescent that practises me

as if silence were making its own reeds for a woodwind

and I was the shriek of a blade of grass between its thumbs.

Discarded stereotypes of the man I would have been

if I hadn’t been born by nature and nurture to seed the sere

with the colour green, and listen to the mute stones sing

of the intangible mysteries of spring that seize them by the throat

like swallows building their nests like begging bowls

in between the cracks of the stone-walling earth. By other means

I build castles for the pageant of the wind on tour

to eat out of house and home, I lay the foundations of zodiacs

to come that will shelter everyone under the eaves

of their shapeshifting signs, symbolic as a guild hall

in a country parade where everyone is represented as an individual

apprenticed to the masterless trade of being themselves

just as they are, each a candidate for their own constellation

like a shire reeve that wins by acclamation. No one else

to run against with the experience of a trained eye

to keep the black and whites of their eighty-eights straight

and on the level like the skeletal keyboard of a celestial piano

playing to a full house of musically inclined ghosts.

I work in quicksand. I work in starmud. I work

on a nightshift of stars like a watchman holding up

the light he’s been given to go by like a lantern in the shadows.

Once I feared madness, but now I know,

as the waxing crescent of the moon sets above

the all night grocery store, it’s an unparalleled labour of love.

It doesn’t matter who or why. Is the rain out of focus

because it has a million eyes and there’s no end of the seeing?

Even in the way it weeps whole firmaments in every drop

along the seam of a blade of stargrass, you can’t halt

the flourishing of life along the unplotted course of the mindstream

making its way to the sea and source of its awareness.

Water remembers everything like the taste of wild irises

because it’s inspired and alive, the legendary beauty

of the fires it fed like daylilies and the ashes in the urns

of the single-petalled roses that flared for a day and a night

before the wind blew them out like loveletters it held over a candle

to read between its tears in the dark the horrendous farewells

of passion and blood that liberate the light from our starmud

and elevate our private sorrows like root-fires into the realms

of the rain that falls like compassion on everything alike

in a world where every experience is a simile of who we are,

imagination individual as a fingerprint in a mirroring consciousness

with no identity of its own, together alone with everyone

bonded like the weather to the sea of awareness we seek shelter in

like a posthumous work of spiritual hospitality that’s been

opening its door to strangers for the last 13.7 billion light years

after the first foundation stone of the universe was laid reciprocally

without pomp and ceremony on the creative side of a singularity

that popped like a mad rabbit out of the white hole of the hat

of a wise magician still gaping like an open window

at her vision of a crazy life before birth and how on earth she did that.

PATRICK WHITE  

THESE WORDS ARE NOT MEANT TO BURN YOUR SMILE

THESE WORDS ARE NOT MEANT TO BURN YOUR SMILE

These words are not meant to burn your smile.

I lay them gently like cool herbs on your cracked lips.

This light takes its shoes off before it enters your eyes

like shrines to the apostate darkness that lives within you

and waits for the moonrise to gentle your Vesuvian wounds.

Pompous to call myself a healer when all I am

is a confabulation of lyrical cures for what ails you

but I call the wind to the winter willows

and the taste of rain in the air washes the blood

out of your hair like a painter caressing a watercolour

with sable brushes that bleed like dusk on the river.

Let that man pray discretely no evil comes of his words

when he speaks of love as if his heart knew

what he was talking about so I will not tell you

to exit by the fire-escape the next time he fire-bombs

your palace of water gardens with emotional phosphorus.

You take that up with the silence of the abyss

you’re already pleading for consolation answers from.

It’s your light and the way you bend it like a gravitational eye

is how love can wander like a straight line for lightyears

without realizing it’s always been a special form of a curve.

Even with a chubby lip and that orchid of a black eye

that will descend like a moonset into a bruised eclipse,

wounded so, whipped like a rose by a comet

disappointed by the lack of spectators who anticipated

being more amazed by the light show, your beauty

is still an unspoken assumption that pervades the air

like the vulnerable fragrance of a woman mourning

the death of a dream that made the lesser nightmares tolerable.

I can hear the understudies of the mermaids backstage

trying to overcome their stagefright, and, sweetness,

it would be so easy at this station of my life

to include you in my aniconic pantheon of mystic influences

that have been shapeshifting my heart like renegade muses

as wild as they were dangerous in their heretical solitude

for more inspired memories behind me of what was

with no rancour denouncing what could have been

than there are creative eternities ahead that will be validated

by the annihilations I’ve suffered through to aspire to them.

You’d be the right door but I’d be the wrong threshold

you need to cross right now into an abysmal absence

that makes even death wince like something paltry

by comparison, and immolate yourself in the intensity

of the clarity to sort through your ashes to see

what hissed and evaporated like an exorcised ghost

from the green wood that smothered your fire

with the need to possess a life to make up

for the neglect of its own squalid smouldering.

Spontaneously distinguish the star sapphires and emerald lakes

the white gold of your burnished bodymind could swim in

like the plumage of the moon unfeathered like a peony

on the supple waters of life whispering a secret

that has slept like an ocean in a seashell waiting

for you to remember it when you first picked it up on the beach

like a little girl wondering why something so beautiful and strange

came such a long way for you to find it like a kiss

you could hold in your hands like an eyelid

or the petal of a nacreous rose in your palm.

When your prince proves something less than mortal,

appeal directly to the fire of the dragon

to refresh your innocence in the rain

that will fall shortly after as if it just discovered

the sacred syllables of lunar flower seeds

in a desolate garden trying to bloom like the palings

of a closed gate and you will be received like a messenger

from another state of seeing with crucial news

about how love can root in the shadows of desert seabeds

like a mirage of waterlilies that actually float

like stars on the wavelengths of unmapped rivers.

Risk the fear of being who you are even

when the voices of the dead have your best interests

at heart, and gibber about not making the same mistakes

their authority rests upon like resolute quicksand,

and don’t scorn the pettiness of what people

are willing to die in the name of, but turn your face

like a sunflower toward the sublime perils

of what you’re truly inspired to live as

with no gap between your imagination

and the shadows of reality it casts on the clouds

like the penumbral wisdom of compassionate dragons

passing over your intertidal moonscapes

like the eclipse of a dark blessing that buries

its shining like a loveletter in a black envelope,

serpentine jewels in the ore of the night

that will flood your eyes indelibly with the mystery

of being illuminated by the light of your own heart,

galaxies of fireflies reflected in the sea stars at your feet.

PATRICK WHITE