FOUR A.M. A FRAUDULENT SILENCE FALLS OVER THE TOWN

FOUR A.M, A FRAUDULENT SILENCE FALLS OVER THE TOWN

Four a.m, a fraudulent silence falls over the town

like the night ward of a hospital, things going on

after the felonious ecstasy of people getting away

with Friday night, underground, healing the damage

by appealing to a new affliction more threatening

than the last just to keep some danger in their lives,

some occasion for the irrational, some implausible rapture

of sex or violence to break the spell of the credibly predictable.

Look at that. Eight lines of abstractions

and not one of my sacred syllables bleeding

like a rose in an abattoir, a thorn in my third eye.

I suspect myself of subterfuge behind this death mask

of ash and shadow. I’ve given my heart up so many times

I’ve lost track of the gods I’ve been sacrificed to.

Did it ever matter we’re estranged by everything we love

in time? The question summons old ghosts

and the moon smears a snailtrack of light

down upon the waters of life I’m not willing

to follow anymore like a star stuck to flypaper.

Let the ghosts fall like chalkdust from the blackboard.

Blood and bonemeal from the zoo of the past.

Those rootfires blazed awhile and went out

like a burnt oak writhing on the crest of a hill

like Pompey caught in the act at the moment of death

a long time ago when Pliny still taught the orators

the memory of deranged pictures is stronger

than the aniconic memory of words. Since then

all my myths of origin are apprenticed to a dream grammar

that has vowed like a copulative verb that means

what it says never to orphan me in a house of mirages

ever again. Never to root the cracks in the mirrors

of the insane in my starmud silvered by flakes of pain

peeling off the windowsills of the moon like petals of paint.

The sinner might care less, but when grief

starts to insist it’s in danger of becoming a saint

that’s far worse than the sybaritic beatitudes of Friday night,

drinking the gods under the table until all you can see

when you look straight in their eyes for the rest of the week

are the stupefied revelations in the lees of the light.

PATRICK WHITE

IT ISN'T THE ILLUSION THAT BINDS YOU

IT ISN’T THE ILLUSION THAT BINDS YOU

It isn’t the illusion that binds you to yourself like skin.

It isn’t not finding the missing link in the fossils

of the chains you used to wear like dna. You’re still

in a dichotomous world if you’re giving your illusions

bad spin, enslaved by enlightenment. Is the play improved

by shaving the heads of the lightbulbs in the billboard?

Are you living alone in an isolation cell of bedrock?

Are you proofreading mirages in a desert of stars

that took things too far to remember where you

started from? Hydrogen and helium. Are you still nebular? Do

you really believe it’s the gathering clouds that get in the way

of your shining? Still trying to liberate the abyss

from its own emptiness, the mystery of life from the lips

of a one-finger vow of silence when it’s your mouth

that’s keeping it a secret? Let the dreamers sleep awhile

like flowers in bud, let the thorns of the locust trees

add to the poignancy of its blossoms. Admit it

all the fixed addresses you’ve handed out

to your peers like identity thefts still leave you

wondering who you are long after you’ve been accepted,

crossed the border, the bar, the threshold

as if there were always another country beyond

the one you just broke into that doesn’t recognize you either.

A garden of light, yes, but why uproot the shadows

that work behind the scenes without applause?

So many things in the world going wrong all at once,

flawed, defective, deranged, all your old starmaps

going up in flames in a state of flux like a phoenix

as if you were the Library of Alexandria and you’re

the arsonist in the crowd watching your pyre burn out.

By the discolouration of your feet, I see you’ve

walked through a lot of educated ashes

like a signpost looking for a road of smoke

in the vatic urns of your heart trying to press

the issue into a grey wine that isn’t perishable enough

to avoid publishing. When you die, do you want

your starmud interred in the sky, or would you prefer

the poppies and butterflies of chthonic goddesses

in a dream time that works the roots of the flowers

like puppet masters and umbrellas at a funeral?

Would you throw that inkpot at the wall

if Lucifer rose up before you like the morning star

or would the earth shake with a new Buddha

who’d lost his identity in the pre-dawn light

where the fresh water meets the salt when you see

the fools you’ve made of your own eyes

by trying to clarify them like stained-glass windows

blooding your eyelids when you look at the sun

so you can see right through them like a nasty spell

of aniconic Protestantism. What next? Rainbows,

moondogs, the chromatic aberration on the prisms

of oilslicks and houseflies? You are the picture-music

listening to itself when you’re lost like a voice in the woods.

Who else is whispering the stars into your ear

as if you were the key to the language they’ve

been speaking to you in for billions of light years?

PATRICK WHITE