COLD SUNSHINE IN THE CHILLY ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE DAWN

COLD SUNSHINE IN THE CHILLY ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE DAWN

Cold sunshine in the chilly enlightenment of the dawn.

A paint rag of dreams I’m working on. I study

the grime on the window like the gnostic gospel

of a dead docetist I’m trying to decipher.

I expected to be happier than this when I woke up

but when have I never? As my bones have stiffened

I’ve grown more mentally supple over the years

like a sapling flaring out of a stump, green fire

shooting out of the ashes of the eyes of a dragon

on its pyre like the second innocence

of a surrealistic fairytale after the myth

didn’t keep the crops from failing from lack of rain

and the temples were burned by those who built them.

I’m an oracle in an observatory abandoned on Mars.

Night after night, I make the rounds of an unknown zodiac,

checking the doors in a ghost town like a solitude

people will come back to if you give them

enough time alone with the stars. I love

the creative energy of the morning like a tree

loves its cambium, but there are signs deeper

in the heartwood of the night that speak like the arcana

of an older magic that keep the lights turned down low

like a subliminal house of life with mysterious windows

into a past they’re looking forward to

like a prodigal afterlife they don’t have to break again

like the waters of life to get into because

death doesn’t stand at the gates of renewal

to bar the path of the returning exile and the morning birds

aren’t the urns of last night’s sky burial.

On the easel, red dragon breathing fire over Chernobyl.

On the computer screen, a mosquito having

a mystic revelation that snowblinds it in the light.

Bad omen to start a poem by killing the first

punctuation mark in sight, but Zen or no Zen,

I’ve got a right to sacrifice a bloodbank

like a medium to the message now and again.

Give the horse I bought with his purse

back to the Buddha because I don’t need wings

to fly anymore. And I don’t mind a little grime

on the eyes of my vision of life. It makes

the windows feel more at home, and even the sun

occasionally sullies its own light beams waking up

to scry its own sunspots like a maculate birth

or if Venus caught up to it sometime in the night

like the transit of a waterbird in a wet dream.

If perception is reality then things are the way they seem

for you and you alone, your eyes only, like a big secret

hidden from all the others out in the open

where you’re least likely to look for it in retrospect.

I’m a prophetic skull in orbit around an ancestral planet

of foundational hearthstones where I burnt the starmaps

of a nightsky so many have lost like the use of their mother-tongue

they’ve forgotten the names of the constellations

they were first born under like the archetypes

of an ancient dream grammar with strong aorist verbs

that don’t sweep their tracks after them like stars in a false dawn

that makes things seem more insane in the morning light

than the madness of the clairvoyant measure

your eyes make of the night when Virgo rises to her feet

and knights the black walnut trees with a stalk of wheat.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU CAN TELL BY THE BURNT OUT HALOES

YOU CAN TELL BY THE BURNT OUT HALOES

You can tell by the burnt out haloes and copper moondogs

around the match head pupils of her eyes

she’s been digging deep black holes

like a star-nosed mole a graveyard for the fireflies

gathering like a starmap of the extinct creation myths

of dead relatives at the end of a long dark tunnel

she doesn’t recognize anymore except as camouflage

for the ghosts of the lives she disguises for the living

not wanting to violate the innocence of their lies.

She nurses a darkness inside like a tumulus of petro-coke.

There’s no gold in the ore of her suffering, no blood

in the rock. Medusa’s been writing her memoirs

in glacial runes on her heart, and the ashes

of her loveletters read like the hollow urns

of charred dovecotes she’s scattered like the cinders of crows.

I can remember when she was a Pythian oracle

at Delphi, the new moon of a high priestess

alluring as a pole dancer in a snakepit at a strip joint

not this lunar crone who keeps her secrets to herself.

Queen of a street that’s grown so numb to its outrage

it isn’t nearly enough to be merely brutal anymore,

she didn’t get those fangs at a needle exchange.

First crescent kills and the last if she feels like it

heals. She doesn’t dance to the green bough

of a flute the way she used to like a moonrise

of music in the east, but if you make a firestick

of a dead willow branch, sometimes you can see

the ice crack under your feet like a wry smile

of winter on her face thawing out the longer wavelengths

of the knotted snakes in her heartwood. Love shrieks

what it used to whisper clear as a broken mirror.

And the veins of the roses have collapsed like rivers

in a map of the Sahara. She shoots the silver bullet

of an hourglass syringe like a sniper in the desert alone

under her tongue like passage through the slums of the dead.

And all her sacred syllables have gone into exile

like ostrakons she’s given up trying to slash her wrists on.

And her children despise her like a tarpit

on the dark side of their blood and she hardly

seems to care anymore whether they think of her

as prey or predator. She doesn’t have her stomach pumped

for prophets in the belly of a whale anymore

when she comes up for air like a moon with no atmosphere

she can’t cling to for long like a bubble in her bloodstream.

She’s Algol hanging like a bloody chandelier

from the hand of Perseus swinging his trophy like a bell

of depression era glass. And, yes, she’s ugly now,

hallucinogenic as a toad you’d have to lick

like the back of a stamp or the blood seal

on a loveletter to a wax museum. And if you were

to paint the agony of seeing like a tormented soul

that’s weathered her eyes on the widow walk

of a haunted lighthouse, you’d have to do it in encaustic

by a votive candle with a wick of serpent fire

that used to burn like Draco at both ends

among the dragons of desire that wrote her name

in lights that have shadowed her for the rest of her life.

What she knows about being on the receiving end

of human beings with nothing to give to an outcast

would bleed your eyes of the light like leeches

clinging to a vision of life like a scapegoat for the tribe,

smallpox among the natives, infected

by the blanket you committed sexual genocide under

relying on the immunity of your feigned innocence

to protect you as if God were on your side

as you drove her out into the wilderness

like a beautiful wound that came back

in a deathmask of scabby scar tissue to mock you

as if you could ever have made love to a thing like that.

And suddenly you seem uglier than original sin itself.

PATRICK WHITE