Wednesday, August 21, 2013

MADNESS, AT ITS BEST

MADNESS, AT ITS BEST

Madness, at its best. Should I name a star
after you that rises in the west and sets in the east
and later gouge its eyes out like a cartouche
on an obelisk I erected when you were
the queen of heaven, and I was pointed
in the right direction, make a course correction
and say the compass lied? Things just
reverse spin sometimes. The moon
gets stuck in your throat like your last thin dime
in a telephone booth, and everything you feel
is long distance after that, a soothsayer
parsing aorist oracles in his sleep, as he grinds his teeth.

Would you understand, would you know
what it means to enshrine what you’ve laboured
to love the longest in the ore of meteoric metaphors
with nickel-iron swords at the core of the rock
I keep pulling out and falling upon
like the significant absurdity of a peasant king
who refuses to sit on any throne he can’t abdicate
on a whim. I want to wing it on the wind
like a maple key, or the silhouette of a crow
in the locket of the moon. But know this,
consider this wisely as a starmap on a lake,
crazy as I am not to care what I sound like
when the stars confide what’s in their hearts
to the leaves of the silver Russian olives,
there’s a magnificent abyss without a view
of anyone when you come before them
like a lover’s ledge no one’s ever lept from
precipitously enough for you to believe
the inconceivable has fallen in love with you
like a discontinued theme song that never
made a big hit on the bottom you’ve been reaching for
like the bedrock of a water palace whose depths
are way over your head like a waterclock
you weren’t counting like a lover to show up on time
at your door. Can you hear my words ticking by
as if they were sword- dancing with their own shadows
like galaxies and sundials, Sufis and Buddhas
comparing mirages at a crossroads in the desert
and laughing because so much is missing
from the message they have to humour the medium
into making a surprise appearance at her own seance.

The underage magician is pulling doves and crows
from behind your ears and releasing them
from your privatized aviary like voices
breaking their parole like a love song they’ve
been singing too long in the choir of a false dawn
at a sky burial for lapwings on a pyre of crutches
that weren’t even real, that never got the feel
of spreading their feathers out on the lake
like wild swans getting ready to take off in the moonlight
with no cause for alarm among the stars
they leave in their wake like the Milky Way
rising over the horizon of the flightpath they’re on
like a catalpa tree in the spring, or a road of ghosts
beyond the gateways of the starfields in the autumn,
a scar of light on the wounded waters of life
that heal themselves like eyes that have cried enough
to return like the rivers of paradise
through the burning gates of Eden as if, water
only once, but you get to jump through the same fire twice.


PATRICK WHITE

PEACE A MOMENT

PEACE A MOMENT

Peace a moment. A bubble of cool bliss
in the skin of a tear. Grace, with a green thorn.
The moon as I’ve never seen it before.
A ghost in the willows feathers down
upon the dark waters of the Tay
in an aura of moist summer air,
indelible as chalk on a blackboard
as if it were trying to write its name.

Solitude’s a priestess leashed to a water snake
that meditates on the moonlight
like a theta wave on its own path through life.
Look where you will, even the search parties
you organize like poems with real candlepower
are still lost in the labyrinth of your homelessness
looking for your true address until
you realize it’s been under your feet all the time.
You are the road. And there’s no one on it.

The shadows of the trees lie down
like thresholds that sense someone’s
been crying in a derelict doorway for years.
Severe sorrow. A bell for a bucket
bailing out the empty lifeboat of the moon
long, long after it’s set. Love. No help for it.
White sweet clover, swan’s plumage,
both sides of the road. The wind
in the vocal cords of the wild grape vines
overgrowing the half closed gate
of someone who meant to return one day
like a loose page of a book to its binding.
An unfinished loveletter to the fire that wrote it.

The maples reach out to touch me
to see if I’m real. Nocturnal enough,
but who’s to judge? The dream
doesn’t have a dawn or dusk. The end
goes on forever. The beginning never happens.
Born into perishing my way through life
what could death mean but another night
of living my passage through it
as the juniper sweeps my tracks
from the trails I cut down to the river
like deer paths, and the stars
in the shrine of my eyes devote their candles
to the same darkness that inspires the fireflies,
or my insights into the nature of love
as the way the nightsky is transfixed
by what is born of it like the mystery
of why life shines on its own likeness
without going blind or turning into stone
as if imagination were the first sign,
black walnut trees losing their voice
like Lyra in the west, as above, so below,
autumn approaching, o, yes, the autumn
and the poignancy, almost the flavour
of creation, that what we love last
and the deepest, is the perennial beauty
of our own passing, galaxies and waterlilies
embedded in our hydra-headed starmud
like a blue moon inseparable from
the dark waters of life it blossoms in.

A nightbird shrieks. A ghost kicked up
by the dust of the Milky Way in my wake
weeps like a sad loveletter that’s taken the words
right out of my mouth like an empty mailbox
standing at the side of the road, listening
when there’s nothing, not even an echo,
a whisper of my own innermost voice,
to the silence that lingers in the woods
for asylum from the intimacy that has
forsaken it, and the love in its heart
that trues it like an arrow fletched by the light
to a rapturous wound that hasn’t,

as the fish at both ends of the equinox
jump back like bulls-eyes into the targets
they made of their exits from one medium
to hit in the next like the tree rings
of the grand entrances we make on our way out.

Love perishes like apple bloom in the spring
to be born again among the windfalls of autumn,
the burning bridges of the maple trees
between the fountains on the moon, with birds,
and the housewells we dig like graves
here on earth, to drink our own tears from
like sacred syllables pouring through
the open floodgates of the moonrise
like a prophetic skull trying to hit
all the oracular high notes of the shrill treefrogs
celebrating the dark abundance, bright vacancy
of our corporeal entrances and disembodied exits.


PATRICK WHITE