THE UNREFORMED LIFE OF A POET THICK WITH SCAR TISSUE

THE UNREFORMED LIFE OF A POET THICK WITH SCAR TISSUE

The unreformed life of a poet thick with scar tissue.

What did I write forty years ago? O ya, la, la,

the live ones sing, la, la. Always knew it meant more

than I could discern at the time but it’s lasted

as I have a lot longer than either of us thought we would.

If you persist in your ruination sincerely enough

light years from here, creation gets quantumly entangled

in your root fires and things begin to bloom like a moonrise

you never suspected was a flower down on its luck.

I don’t care where you’re hiding, everybody’s

got something to fear, but I know you can hear me

though I’m not asking you to show yourself,

stay where you are. I’m not the answer to

all those secrets you keep up your sleeve

like an aviary of parrots you’re trying to teach to talk,

but have you ever given any thought to being here

at the indulgence of a dark mystery you embody

in flesh and blood, starmud sullying the light

on the waters of life with hermetically unstable intelligence?

I gave my word to the X on my spotted heart

I’d fall on it like a sword in the name

of the most dangerously compassionate art

that demanded nothing less than everything of me

all the time like a renewable Promethean sacrifice

chained to the altar of a rock by a long, dynastic bloodline

of hot-fingered thieves of fire. My votive candle

of self-immolation. Though I’m compelled to say

ashes are ointment on my eyes now that my tears

have boiled away into the more vaporous emotions

of less revealing gnostics lost on a sea of awareness

without so much as a moon or a lifeboat to stand on.

It seems it’s got to be this way somehow for reasons

that happily elude me in my pursuit of the perfect illusion

to offset my sense of being an enlightened eclipse

among fireflies trying to throw a blinding light

on the best of my intentions. If that accounts for anything.

Wolf, when I’m noble, bush dog when I’m not,

I can change totem poles like a shapeshifting dolmen

when the moon is new and I’m scavenging my way

into an ongoing exploration of the life of a human

with an unwieldy mind that keeps toppling on its axis

like Neptune bobbing bottoms up like a duck,

or a waterbird, to put it more gracefully, into its own reflection.

Is this narcissism, or the slippery slope to solipsistic idealism

in the first person singularly alone in a peculiar universe?

It’s never been a purpose of mine to make a precedent

out of my absurdity like a law of life that doesn’t

inspire people to disobey it freely so they can come into their own.

Nobody else can do your flowering for you and expect you

to grow to fruition. The green, bitter apple in the chilly dawn

of its fair beginnings is sweetened in time by the loss

of its blossoms, and the erotic pulse of the windfalls of autumn.

Pain. Was there ever a poet worth reading that wasn’t

a worthy candidate for what they hated the most

until they were house-broke into being the accommodating host

of it, instead of the nervous guest? Work with it

like a cat kneading a pillow into a loaf of bread

or a white-tailed buck trampling the grass into a deerbed

for the night. Take a hands on approach, and grab it

by the throat like a hydra-headed python

with nowhere to anchor its coils like an oracular genome

that gives the secret of its extinction up

like the open-mouthed blossoms of the hollyhocks

swaying to the bird-bone flutes of the wind.

It’s ok to be a snake charmer with a silver tongue

as long as you don’t milk your own fangs

to anoint yourself in snake oil instead of serpent fire

or die of smoke inhalation in a vain attempt to put it out.

Burn, baby, burn. You can’t be beatified until

we see if there are any ashes in the urn

worth scattering among the stars like flames

that played you like the patron saint of dragons

that remained true to the heretical alchemy of their nature

like the angels that eventually evolved their flightfeathers

out of the repitilian sky burials of their hereditary scales.

Angels bear the souls of the dead south and west

like geese and undertakers in folksy vests

with a timepiece like a goldwatch that stopped ticking

cremations ago when the ground got too hard

to mine it like a grave and death had to take to the air

like a transmigration well before the invention of back-hoes

that permitted people to be buried late in the year closer to home.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DARK GOD FLOW OF OUR CIRCUITOUS BLOSSOMINGS

THE DARK GOD FLOW OF OUR CIRCUITOUS BLOSSOMINGS

The dark God flow of our circuitous blossomings,

the hourglass lips of two bubbles kissing

like membranes in a hyperspatial multiverse

where everything is possible ad infinitum,

the creative crossroads of contradictory energies

whirling like prayerwheels and dust devils

in all directions at once on the heels of our gnostic vertigo.

Are these wings or propellors? Or dizzy starfish?

Anybody know where I’m going with this?

Enlightened and lost. Guided by chaos

into shapeshifting modes of order? The mind

as it is. No table of contents to alert you

to what’s coming next. Or did we take

too much acid in the sixties? One too many

amoebically galactic lightshows with strobe lights?

So immersed in the algorithms of my intuition,

no reversing the emergency exit signs now,

I move into a deeper darkness, enlargements

of space, the stars separating in the vastness

like wildflowers at the end of autumn, grains

of pollen all that’s left of the garden. Always,

sorrow, anger shouldered as a responsibility

to people who can’t fight back, the moral legacy,

until recently, of having been born Canadian,

opportunistically trusting, healing, just as happy

to be overlooked as I am elated to be recognized.

My scars smile. My self-sufficiency, differential.

Good, good, so be it, but beyond the pale

where the moon is chopping wood with a double-bladed axe,

its light frosted to the bark, fingers aching

as if I’d been playing a guitar without callouses,

death’s brutal lack of preference in the night

that puts me on an equal footing with the animals

the birds, the people, and even the flies and spiders

that are trying to keep a little life alight within themselves,

why is it I always cut a solitary figure standing alone

staring up at the enormity of the stars, longing

for a larger frame of reference than a pink dominion

in a nineteen fifties’ atlas that asked permission

for its independence? I feel the inexorable onceness

of it all, remote, aloof, uncaring, yet wholly inclusive

as an extinction event in the awareness of being a witness

to it, a mere firefly of insight, no more than can be seen

in the drop of a dream in the galactic waterclock of the Milky Way

before death wakes us up to what we’ll never be again.

Unredeemably cold and immaculately beautiful as a knife blade,

the aesthetic horror that freezes in the blood

like some kind of polar ice cap that says, this far, but no further

engenders the poignancy of a wounded love in me

for everyone and thing that lives, and I sometimes think

even the rocks and the stars suffer the same fate we do,

that everyone is so rarely unique and irreplaceable,

so mystically specific and cosmically incomprehensible,

as crucially intimate as a stranger we met on death row,

as much in pain, and hope and joy, lost like a wandering starmap

in the labyrinth of their own fingerprints as I am,

I can’t help but cherish everyone as a revolutionary act

against our inevitable extermination. Once, for everything

and then decapitated zero like a reign of terror

we pass through like a nightmare of liberation

into a being so utterly free, like the stars on the growing edge

of invisibility, we’ll never see each other again.

At least not in these forms we so blithely assume are our own.

It can only make a fool of you to go on loving humanity,

life of all varieties, your own included, despite the evidence,

but there you go. So be it. What did it ever have to do

with me? Given I was born Canadian enough not

to want to belabour the issue. Given I can’t be any other way

than I am revealed to myself and interpreted by others, each a star

like Gemma in the northern crown of my abdicated

will to power, to move among the peasants and the paupers

as if crude ore and coal were the nature of all that lives

but once you accept you’re over your head in it like a nightsky

you begin to see, as your eyes adjust to the dark,

there’s diamonds and gold within everyone. Motherlodes of it.

Perseids of shining panspermically across the universe.

Zodiacs of the way we arrange the stars to accommodate our fates

without leaving a lasting impression upon anything

beyond the occasional Burgess Shale or Library of Ashurbanipal.

Ciphers of meaning neither real nor unreal,

watercolor starmaps of the paths we take in life

bleeding into one another like bloodbanks of roses

we dance with in our teeth awhile as our hearts and bodies

move to the picture music of our mindstreams, and then

throw in our graves as if the beauty we once danced with,

were the least perishable of the flowers we had to offer

the unanswerable brevity of knowing the silence

that follows indelibly in our expanding wake lasts forever.

PATRICK WHITE