BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows.

A respite in time and care. A hole in space

I can escape through without setting off any alarms.

And I don’t care what this poem is going to be about

I can write it with no preconceived deceptions,

no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects.

For a moment, the ice age is thawing

and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies

like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches

are a riot of Queen Ann’s Lace and Viper’s Bugloss.

Temperate consolations modify my mood

into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life.

I’m gulled by the sunshine. I’m a schill of the mindstream.

The killer bees are away from their hives.

Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins

without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable

in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details.

Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths

of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom

in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame.

And later tonight, if I’m still so entranced,

I’ll make my way down to the Tay River

to see if the fireflies are out dancing pianissimo

with the abandoned lighthouses of the stiff-necked cattails.

I’ll sit on a rock that doesn’t aspire to lord it over

anyone’s kingdom, and I’ll stare at the stars

until they’re tattooed like an indelible starmap

on the back of my eyelids, to keep my tears

from diluting them like smeared watercolours

or my more igneous aspects, from shattering them

like the menagerie of a zoo with glass bars.

And o, basking in the freedom of my own madness,

hilarious as peace, the infinite homelessness

of knowing I come from everywhere all at once,

and there’s nowhere I’ve walked alone in my life

down any road beset with assassins, or feathered

like strippers in boas of white sweet clover,

I haven’t been stepping across the threshold

of another wilderness always as vast

and cautiously intriguing as I am mysteriously lost

when the human intimacy of a longing heart

encounters the sentient impersonality

of an infinite mind that isn’t aware of anything

the heart doesn’t bring before it like a child’s drawing.

And there are themes you can follow

like bush wolves through the back woods

trampled down by the padding of their circuitous descents

into the dangerous pantries of the farms

pseudomorphically nestled between the hills.

It’s an itinerary that’s serviced the pack for years

with a sufficiency that’s got them this far against the odds.

And each to their own way, go with the gods

and I’ll rejoice in hearing you howl among the trees

to the chagrin of your detractors listening

with a begrudging admiration a civilization away

from what’s been bred out of them like freedom

under a full moon in heat. As for me

and my homeless approach to the ghost towns

of future zodiacs, I never want to know where I’m going

until I get there inconceivably as the only path

I could have taken in the first place,

because that’s always the way it is

even when you delight in the wiles of going astray.

Signs of your emptiness in the midst of the great unknowing.

Time and space mindscaping the exploration

you keep thrusting into the dark like the light and the lamp

of an estranged nightwatchman, hoping

you haven’t been here before, and anything

worth keeping an eye on has already been given away for free.

PATRICK WHITE

UNBUCKLE YOUR HEART

UNBUCKLE YOUR HEART

Unbuckle your heart, undo the luggage strap.

Wash the smell of old lovers out of your laundry.

Sow the dreams you’ve carved from your skull

like dice in sacred ground

and let’s see what springs up.

There’s the bathtub you can renew

your virginity in, and there’s a corner

you can stand your bass guitar in

like an Irishman at his wake in a coffin.

And there’s the garden for that persona

you took on the road like a scarecrow

for a travelling companion with a limp.

All the flowers taste of hummingbirds.

And it’s ok the raccoons come for the corn

like second storey cat burglars in the night.

They never take more than they need

and in a world of greed, that’s integrity.

I always leave a smile ajar to let them in.

But with you, my heart’s an open doorway

the moon’s standing in, and my blood’s

a transfusion of black roses into the occult.

My eyes, a rare conjunction of fireflies

that won’t happen again for another hundred years.

Doom can spend all the time it wants

messing with its calendars to co-ordinate

the apocalypse in all zodiacs at once

so the year of the rat and the year of the swan

don’t synchronize their prophets to the dawn

like waterclocks who think things are

just going to go on and on as they always have

like imperially inclined aqueducts without a rupture.

Eclipse, millennial poseur, you’re a lyric of carbon

that makes the diamonds flow like tears

to realize there’s galaxies of white sweet clover

more to you than appears under the cloud cover

of a hundred billion stars burning into the silver nitrates

of the photographic plates I take of you

in the humbled mountains of my all night observatories.

And even at this distance, alone in the cold company

of these one-eyed telescopes, I’m tempted

to cross your event horizons into your black holes

and see what worlds might come of us

on the other side. Throw caution to the wind

like a rodeo clown and take the ride

as if you were not too wise or wild for tenderness.

Even when you hurt I’ve seen how you wear

the corona of the sun so lightly in full eclipse

all the haloes shining by a reflected glory

seem mere brassy moon dogs by comparison.

Out of fury you insist upon your originality

like a gamma ray burst in the path of the earth

as you weave your interlocutory wavelengths

into the flying carpets and labyrinths

of an alien cartographer mapping out the stars

with your third eye open to the loneliness of beauty

and how everyone’s threatened by an intelligent orchid.

I imagine sometimes you’re almost as unloveable as I am

when I’m at my best, when I’ve been accurately blessed,

not too much, more or less, beyond my aspirations

and I see at the speed of light how time stops,

and my mass and volume become as infinite

as my body and mind, and everything

is perfectly inconceivable in a fallible eternity

that’s adapted to us like the medium of a mystery

in a graveyard of dead metaphors we keep giving

new meaning to as if we were all randomly immortal.

Are you the supple bubble of effervescence

in a tsunami of sorrow that could keep my spirits up,

or a methane moon waiting for an airlift of oxygen

to light you up. You’re too incandescent

to shine like a brown star, too imaginatively immense

to be a black dwarf. Are you the omnipresence of a particle

or the oracular wavelength of an apostate saint

when no one’s looking but me and you

through your holy books to see if what we said

came true or not? If we kept our word

to the innovative absurdity of it all in peace and war

or threw the moon through the window

like an alarm clock that didn’t go off in time

to save the earth? I know you’re not

the existential bricklayer of the paradoxically sublime

outside the gates of Babylon, nor the whore within.

I’ve seen you wing your way from one planet to the next

trying to thread your lifelines into a nest

that wasn’t a begging bowl in the hands of tree

that came on like a slumlord in a ghetto of birds.

There are no aviaries for the hopelessly free.

But could you live with me in this homelessness

like a tent in the wind that scours Mars for survivors

of the last expedition of seeds that tried to bloom here?

I’d build you a palace of black water that eclipsed

the beauty of the Taj Mahal and plant stars

all around it that would fountain into waterlilies

and we’d be so full of moonlight and solitude

in the silence of each other’s eyes, the darkness

couldn’t help but envy us the danger of the enterprise.

PATRICK WHITE