AND WHEN WE WAKE
And when we wake we live the lives
we exiled from our dreams. We enter
the wilderness in the hourglass we
drive
our scapegoats into like a dumping
ground
for the waste disposal of our
infectious sins.
Cleansed of our inner incense and soot
in the unlucky month of May. Poor
bears,
poor squirrels, poor scapegoats, poor
brides,
o hypocrites, munifikun, purged
by a ritual bath in the saline waters
of our own eyes, I ask you with
bitterness and irony
without malice, is our innocence not
contagious?
Time demonizes whatever we separate
from ourselves, set aside, cast out,
anathematize,
consign to the lost animal shelter, or
imprison
in the spirit as if the spirit were
some kind of warden
that didn’t have to wear socks over
his boots
when he made the night rounds so as
not to wake the cons recasting their
nightmares
in bronze like rodeo clowns on rocking
horses
before the Trojan gates. Especially in
love
we make gifts of the unknown to each
other.
Could be a curse, could be a blessing,
whoever
knows?---you take it in, you’re
betrayed;
you don’t, the fragrant indifference
of your piety
fouls the nostrils of God, as she turns
away from you
like sundials and wildflowers away from
the sun.
The scapegoat learns to live with
himself
like the dark familiar of a Renaissance
demon
tragically condemned to practice the
occult art
of an infernal kind of compassion in
the world
that transcends the absolutes of
anyone’s condition,
despite the self they have to keep on
shedding
like snakes and dragonflies or last
spring’s
tree ring in your heartwood to keep on
growing,
the death masks of the screening myths
you see in the mirrors your eyes gather
into
like sacred pools of tears unveiled
like the rain
every time you pass by, estranged from
yourself
as if everything crucially vital about
this momentary life,
all the terrors and wonders of this
mystery
we’ve been dreaming like a
waterclock, afterlife
after afterlife, had been reduced, o
how could we
have impoverished ourselves so?-- to
getting on
with yesterday like the hidden agendas
of busy, busy undertakers washing the
starmud
off our corpses for cremation like
felled trees
so we can die like fireflies instead of
real dragons
with ashes on our breath like a urn
full of stars.
O how feeble we’ve become that we
have to lean
on all these wise men like crutches we
won’t
cast away to do our time standing up on
our own
burning ladders of serpent fire
climbing our spine
like scarlet runners, to lead us to our
mangers,
like public beds in the shelters for
the homeless
or the barred cribs of our privatized
jail cells.
No winners, no losers, no villains, no
heroes,
in truth, it’s hard to tell the
victims from
the executioners, given they both wear
a hood over their eyes, and the one
isn’t
a new moon and the other an eclipse,
both bonded
by the isolation of life on death row
as the curtain parts on the last act of
the play
we’re putting on as someone turns
down the lights
on the swan song of the full moon in a
tar pit
to console the tragically purged
witnesses
something infernally compassionate was
served by our death.
Call it fate, justice, karma, see it as
a morality play
or the absurd theatre of life with no
emergency exits
for the actors or the audience, because
as Mephistopheles said to Faustus when
he asked
as if knowing would make any difference
to anything,
ah, Faustus, why this is hell
(can you hear the weary sadness
of the compassion in his voice?) nor
we out of it.
And look at us now trying to
genetically modify the doctor
in order to cure the disease we’ve
afflicted upon ourselves
as if we mythically deflated what’s
truly beatific about us
into the candling shadows of
pharmaceutical elves
with gargantuan inferiority complexes
in the collective unconscious
of a time---was there ever a
time?---when the angels
mated with the daughters of men? Silly
question,
when it’s as clear as the windows of
an orphanage
on Heartbreak Hill, we’re the
illegitimate children
of now, not designated heirs among the
children of then.
Is there ever going to come a day when
we’re
disappointed by the disappointments we
are to ourselves
we live every moment of our lives,
barring
a few fools who think the way to
enlightenment
is just a matter of prying your eyelids
open with a crowbar,
like an ox-eyed daisy before its time
to bloom,
shucking the shell for the sacred
syllable
of the black pearl on its tongue like a
fee
for the ferryman with his hands on the
wheel
of a deathboat lowered into the waters
of life
as if our only hope of rescue were
oblivion.
Nada. Nada. Nada. In a sunamic
Shangrila of dopamines?
Even if you find yourself shaking like
a persecution complex
from withdrawal in the bitter dawn
of your tragically flawed impotence
as you watch the spy satellites transit
zenith
in everyone’s telescopic eyes, and
there’s a circus
in town but no one’s laughing at the
pie-bald clowns
like interventionists in disguise, why
labour
like an Oxycontin to yoke your gazelles
of light
to that apocalyptic deathcart you drag
around with you
like an implausible loss of heart in
what
you’re doing to yourself bleating
like a judas-goat
on a food chain for a morsel from the
mouth
of a tiger of wrath you’re hunting
like a perfume in heat?
If you’re living in expectation of
never
being understood by anyone, maybe
you’re
a star ahead of us and the light’s
just a little late
in getting to the rest of us, or you’re
sorely
underestimating the innate intelligence
of your solitude
to make a fool of you by insisting
everybody
mistake you real seriously for the
mystic missing link
that’s come to help us all like a
starting pistol
in a firing squad a legend ahead of
your time
to fill in the blanks with our last
names first
and you with your flashflood of a
vocabulary,
surfing your own thought waves and then
announcing
as if you were confessing something
wonderful,
a new blues riff to the lamentable
nightbirds
you patronize with compassion for their
lack of range:
I know you all like secret passwords
you only
use once, then throw away. Though, of
course, you don’t.
But that’s ok. The nightmares only
lie to people
that nothing can change, and that were
the strangest thing about them. Their
stem cells
were never irreparably deranged by
their metaphoric selves
when even the inner potential of hell
has evolved
into a funeral bell that never rings
true until it tolls for you.
PATRICK WHITE
