ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

Anything goes at three in the morning.

I’m dogpaddling in the salvage of the day

after the sun went down like a shipwreck

with all hands on board. A train whistle

mourns its lonely mile and I’ve known

since I was twenty six, the night is not a reward.

And the heart not a starfish you can easily drown

to keep from shining as if it had

a sense of direction all of its own

even if its just a momentary flashback

of a life you’d forgotten on your way down.

The darkness bruises my solitude.

I bleed like deadly nightshade

and talk to myself and the stars, the lamp posts,

the glassy-eyed windows with smut in their eyes

like the rose of life with a wounded mouth.

Trying to express the silence through the afterlife

of my voice, as if I were the ghost in the machine

of a transfixed medium you could get your bearings by

like a candle at a seance that suddenly goes out.

Or maybe I’m just the smoke of an old demon

who feels more like an exorcism sent into exile

like a scapegoat for things I might have done

if they hadn’t been done to me first by the sanctimonious

to purify a long winter of soot, incense, and snakeoil

like an oilslick contaminated by hypocritical rainbows.

But I mustn’t grow bitter. It’s moonrise

and the windows across the street, dirty

as these I’m looking through, seem sublimely elevated

to be used like a lake or a drop of water

when it isn’t raining, to reflect so much beauty

with a moondog for the iris of a third eye

that’s always urging the mindstream

to take a look for itself to liberate its seeing

from a purple passage in a bad dream that doesn’t end well.

The raccoons and feral cats are giving the dogs

something to bark about as they entangle their hind legs

like Houdini in a labyrinth of chains

to keep from running the deer to death at night.

Strange place, this earth. This starmud

that’s an alloy of blood and passion and mind

trying to second-guess where its presence comes from

as if everything had to be derived from something else

to lay a claim to the mystic specificity of its cosmic origins

and to understand that originality’s most unique feature

is that it shares its characteristics with everything else

so the more a human embodies what he perceives,

in his confusion, his horror, his bliss and sorrow,

that forms don’t appear and disappear for him to believe in,

that their passage isn’t a work of time, but the way

life shapeshifts from one dream figure into the next

without leaving the hands of anyone’s who’s ever

grabbed it by the throat and hasn’t let go

like a snapping turtle that’s just got hold of the moon,

its beak full of the flightfeathers of a waterlily

rising off the lakes of the windowpanes as unconcerned

as Cygnus flying over the tarpaper pigeon coups of the rooftops.

PATRICK WHITE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE

Drifting tonight, a poem in the corner of my eye,

maybe a crumb of sleep from last night’s dream,

the willows have grown up a lot since I last came here

but the stars they fix like flowers in their hair

even the lake can’t rinse out, haven’t changed much.

I seek out this precarious granite ledge

shaped like half an anvil or a stone age bicycle seat

with its thatch of moss and yellow grass

and this little patch of dirt, struggling

to cling to the rock, I’ve come to trust empathically

as if many others sat here before me

and watched the moon belly dancing on the undulant waves.

Abandoned heron’s nests in the boneyard

of marble trees, broken statuary in the moonlight

wading through the wild rice with their skirts

above their white, white knees. I come here

to listen to my solitude like a Tarot deck of constellations,

missing a couple of cards when it was stolen from the Sufis.

A nocturne of fate I’m being very cool about

I sing in dark harmony with the nightbirds

counterpointing the silence with sudden rills of longing

my heart resonates with like the hidden wavelength of sorrow

that it’s almost autumn, getting too late for anyone to come,

except for one firefly shining behind her veils

like a diamond in eclipse, a tattoo on the eyelids

of a black velvet painting of bullfighting rose.

And something deeper, more dangerous, like pike

moving just under the surface like nuclear submarines

under the Arctic ice-caps of circumpolar cataracts,

while night creatures are out hunting each other’s flesh

all around me as if the loss of life and the joy it took

in being a field mouse with a mouthful of seeds

were merely collateral damage in the owl’s eyes

of remarkably no significance at all. Life smells

of carrion in the nest, though we all light incense

to deny it. And try to feel as convincingly as we can

life heals its own absence like a wound in water,

like a mouse squealing in midflight above

the waterlily starmaps that hide the snapping turtles.

Generations have sat here before me

with their heads on the flying buttresses of their knees

to relieve the stress of the dome of their prophetic skulls

on the walls of a cathedral wilderness

pioneered into the empty one-roomed

wooden churches around here where the flies cluster

like spiritual footnotes with no real faith in what they say.

And the pioneers have all been ploughed under

and then exhumed and placed in a less savage cemetery

than the earth without black iron fences and gates

trying to imitate the tree line of a militant event horizon

around the graveside of the black hole we all fall into

when we attribute a meaning to death it doesn’t give to itself.

And life and love follow suit, knowing there’s nothing to risk,

nothing to shed, nothing to reveal, nothing to explain or understand

that isn’t whispered in your own voice into your own ear

so nature could imitate art by deepening the mystery

of the human spirit walking like the stars on its own waters

as if it weren’t a miracle the whole sky

with all its legends of shining doesn’t go out in our tears

and love turn into a black farce of suggestive preconceptions

dancing for our heads, as if we’ll be eating

honey and locusts, dressed in the hides of wild jackasses,

or in this lunar wilderness of shadows and wraiths

wolfskins on despondent shamans with

two heads on their shoulders like snake-eyes

trying to howl like smouldering volcanoes at the moon

with one heart, one mind, igneously alloyed

to the heartache and longing that can suddenly

startle and blossom out of the darkness

like the blue fire of the Pleiades flaring through

the crowns of the trees as if love were a conversation

between two, like a star and the eye it’s shining in,

it only takes one to sing.

PATRICK WHITE