MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

Mere threads of the life we once lived when our feelings

were flying carpets, and more unravelling all the time

where the frayed river meets the sea like the bloodline

of a mindstream that kicked the buckets from underneath

its waterclock after the house had burned down,

the fire was out. Now I ride grey horses with manes of smoke.

On nights like this. Quiet, after midnight, a gesture of snow

frosting the streets outside and my rage

at the atrocities of the pandemonious world,

weary of coming to exonerative conclusions about humans,

hoarse with shrieking murder at God and the stars

for this grotesquerie of death even the gaping silence

that shadows the wonder of being alive can’t answer,

knowing how many times it’s tried before, and failed.

On a night like this when my heart is exhausted

as an asteroid that doesn’t care if it makes

an impact or not in a splash of instantaneous diamonds,

meteoric insights generated out of the catastrophic heat

like pure fire in the heart of its apocalyptic translucency,

I just want to sit by the river and watch it take its time

as I drown my mind in the flowing like a sword

I blunted on the rock of the world and now lay in pieces

like the moon shedding its petals and feathers of light

on the waves of the waters of life, in peace, in tribute

like the falling of the snow, and remember

when I used to reach out to touch your eyelids in your sleep

so gently I could feel what you were dreaming through my fingertips.

I want to put these heavy bells of sorrow down

like a windfall of the fruits of the earth that have

sweetened over time like the labour of a human

that tried like the light and the rain

to add an element of heart to the mix

before the work were taken out of his hands

and returned to the root as he must be soon

with a little more love, a little more beauty,

a little more compassion in the visionary tastes

of next year’s apple bloom as you were to me once.

Awake or asleep, what a seance of stillborn dreams

this passion for life can seem sometimes,

and how strange the vows of the fireflies

we once exchanged, pledging ourselves

to each other’s stars as if they’d forever

remain faithful to the wildflowers of the earth.

Dream-figures in passage who don’t always

wake up with us when we do and so much

torn like a purple passage out of the book of life

like loosestrife from the wetlands, all you can do

is share your memories with your solitude

like the smell of snow in her hair, night on her lips,

autumn burning in her green eyes and the council

of five fires at the sacred meeting place between her hips

where the rivers of her legs met like green boughs

that made the nightbirds ache with longing.

Long gone, years ago, so far away by now

it’s annalled in the archives of the fossils and stars,

all the mystic details conserved like data

in the bottom of a blackhole, the open gates

that once banged in the wind like applause,

unhinged like lapwings and grown over with vetch,

and the black pearls of the prophetic skulls

we consulted like new moons every spring,

thatched over with green moss like a funeral carpet.

Disembodied vapours of what we were, our breath

gone from the windows we used to draw in

trying to get the light right on our tears

when the sun came out after a lightning storm

and watergilded the rain that dripped from the leaves

like sacred syllables at dusk in a skin of gold,

and gently restored the direction of prayer

to the deranged fields, standing the goblets

of the poppies upright on their altars again,

combing the hairknots out of the dishevelled grass,

coaxing the turkey-vultures to spread their wings

to dry like totems at the tops of broken pines

as if they weren’t the undertakers of road kill

for the moment, but war bonnets of eagles in disguise.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SUN PUTS MY EYES OUT LIKE A STAR IN TOO MUCH LIGHT

THE SUN PUTS MY EYES OUT LIKE A STAR IN TOO MUCH LIGHT

The sun puts my eyes out like a star in too much light.

I wait for the night to return my seeing to a vision

of things unseen, the unnarrated themes of life and love

that move like migrant birds and sounding whales

behind the symbolic lifemasks of the moon, none of them mine.

Mystery within a mystery, my voice is not a camera

at a seance. I listen to what hasn’t been revealed.

I turn even the homeliest asteroid over like a jeweller

with a pygmy telescope for a third eye

holding a diamond in the rough up to the light

to see what’s been concealed like a secret of life

hidden within the ore of its savage shining.

I invariably rebuff the heavy bombardment eras

of the brutalities of love, though I had to suffer them

like noxious atmospheres in the wake of a cosmic pummelling

to arise so wisely here, the broken pine of my arboreal insight

into the nature of rootless trees. What doesn’t kill you

can wound you so badly that even death

looks like a redundancy in the maimed mirror

of your reflection. Be clear about this. After

every extinction passes like the cloned silhouette

of the full moon, it’s the labour of a lifetime

to publish your poems like apple bloom on the branch

of the lightning bolt that cleaved you to the root

like a French executioner with an imported sword.

It’s not strength to retool the innocence of an open heart

into a lethal weapon, even if it’s a righteous kill.

It’s one thing to heal. It’s another not to be destroyed

by your scars like a shy painting in an arrogant frame.

Green bough. Dead branch. Same song. As I’ve said

before. The nightbird sings on the tongue of a serpent

as readily as water and wavelengths on witching wands

and tuning forks, the sound of sorrow in a human voice

where the rivers divide inseparably for life

like the strong rope of a spinal cord into the weaker threads

of a string theory of profoundly significant departures.

So be it. I trembled. I cried like an abandoned housewell

whose lightbulb just went out like the filament

of a genome that tried to keep its afterlife from freezing

when the world was destroyed by ice

in the terrible clarity of the eyes that blew it out

like a mutant candle that tried to add its odd gene

to the constellations of razor wire that imprisoned it

like the dangerous exile of its own dna. In this game

of musical chairs, I always try to take the low place

like a sea on the moon so all my lost atmospheres

and high tides returned to me, kinder, deeper,

more experientially seasoned loveletters than those that left.

Hatred isn’t creative. Judgement accuses itself.

History is written by the victors in dust on a shelf.

When we all lie down on the pyres of our deathbeds

may each of my lovers have enjoyed a better

dream of life than I did, more stars, more flowers,

fewer chains, less red shift in reality than in

their memories of the way things could have been

with the strangers we became over the long lightyears

looking back in arcane wonder at how love changes

to keeps its balance against a backdrop of creative chaos.

I observe the protocols of a poet approaching

the allure of an unknown bird at the gates of my voice

like a lyric I’ve only ever heard before at a lonely distance

from its source within me. The wind blown seeds

are more prodigal with insights into the mystery of life

than the genetically modified, and every exile

tends a secret garden that travels with them

like a vagrant motherland planting a starmap

of hyperbolic comets in the open fields beyond

the prize-winning asters of lesser zodiacs.

Petty monuments to transcend our mortality

won’t arouse the quiescent jealousy of time.

Truth doesn’t renew its virginity in an acid-bath.

Beauty isn’t marked by the singularity

of a star-nosed mole piercing a black hole.

The clock shows up with a second at a duelling sword dance.

Evolution advances surrealistically like a fast lane

for atavistic snails and the celebrity messengers

try to steal the spotlight from the message

they were created like flying fish with fins

on their heels to convey as a warning of pre-eminent change.

Circus animals in an abattoir of balancing acts.

Emotional jugglers and fire-eaters, sword-swallowers

easing the silver scimitar of the moon down the throats

of shallow lakes drowning in their own spit.

Freaky sages and anointed snake-oil salesmen

gulling the vanity of those seeking to be enlightened

like exceptions to a species going extinct

since some disappointed scribe divined

by the sunspots on his shining, every bloodline,

but the holy book of his own phylum, was a bad idea.

Not to be mean, vicious, feeble, ungenerous

to even those who tried but failed to love you in life

like crutches that didn’t break into blossom under your armpits

or the right idea with the wrong blueprints

for ladders and wings to get you out of the snakepit

that keeps swallowing your cosmic eggs

like albino whole notes, the stone cartouches of eyes

that never got to see how big the sky is because

you didn’t break out of your shell in time to see the stars

or even hear a whisper of the oceanic awareness

within you like the white noise of your afterbirth

still traumatized by your universal intrusion into this life.

One night laid out on your deathbed in a tidal pool

of febrile sheets, staring into a homeless abyss

like the return address of an anonymous enquiry

reviewing what you said and felt, or didn’t say,

because you calculated the effect in numbers,

not the words in your heart, like a silent movie

with more of a gift for pictures than conversation,

you’re going to see yourself unadorned as porn

in a snuff flick of all your myriad love affairs with life,

and the bloom off the rose, whether you were

a petal or a thorn, it’s going to be too late

to rewrite the black farce of the leading protagonist

as the rising star of the person you should have been

instead of the one you are in the sewer of fame.

The intensity of the clarity won’t leave you

a patina of mind to hide behind or insulate the view.

Naked, alone, out in the relentless open, for

your eyes only with eternity your sole witness

and you about to notarize it with your flesh,

even if it be the noblest folly of a leftover child,

a dragon-slaying firefly, an iota subscript of self-respect,

the taste of crazy wisdom you can’t rinse out of your heart

like the bloodstain of a rose, honour those

you have loved painfully like a morning frost

or in joy, though lost now, when you shared the dusk

with a moonrise as lovely as any muse

you’ve ever known, come down to the river

to drink from her reflection in your eyes, or just

for the hell of it because you prefer it that way,

let your heart remain as large and lavish

as any gesture of stars the universe ever squandered

on your impetuous love of life that embraced it all,

blessing and curse alike as the old moon opens its arms

both crescents wide to the dark abundance of the new.

PATRICK WHITE