SITTING AT AN OPEN WINDOW IN THE STUDIO

SITTING AT AN OPEN WINDOW IN THE STUDIO

Sitting at an open window in the studio, nothing

on the easels, watching the night rain

in the storefront puddles on the road below.

Earrings falling from the lobes of the leaves

of the trees in the half glow of the overgrown streetlamps.

I rest the flying buttress of my elbow

against the wall of the abandoned cathedral

of my top-heavy head against a windowsill

chipped, pocked, scraped, thick with years

of old paint discoloured as scar tissue, my cat

a quiet sphinx beside me, and it’s one

of those moments when you know for sure

as it sometimes does like a wounded eclipse of the moon

without a word, or a sign, it’s come to this,

as if the insignificance of an entire lifetime

were summed up by the stillness, silence, and solitude

of a stranger at the gate death left open

when it grew tired of waiting for me to arrive.

Not much of a garden and still less of grave

to house my bones in autumn, somewhere tonight

an old man is contemplating suicide like the tuber

of a flowerless life and it feels all right

to be uprooted like an eye of rain in the dark

without hope of seeing anything bloom again

quite the way it used to. I’m blocking in

an underpainting of the truth to see if the truth

is beautiful or not or just mucky with thought.

Or careless of the way it looks, life blooms

and then it rots. All that contested magnificence

of the rose exhumed like Richard III from a parking lot

to be reinterred in a touristy tomb as befits an English king.

I turn off the lights and light a candle to remind me

of the vapour of a dream I once had

when the arpeggios of the rain last played me

like Scarlatti on the keyboard of a harpsichord,

but it goes out like the denouement of cathartic pity

at the end of an unappealing life in a tragic city

where everyone walks over the corpses of the chorus

as if fate were of no concern of theirs.

Bring on the darkness exorcised of the false gods

that don’t know enough to leave things the way they are.

Everything gleams like a coat of varnish

on oils that have long bled out like Proserpine

leeched by the underworld until next spring.

It isn’t easy to go down singing into death

knowing half of every breath you take

is the expiration date on a prophetic skull

that knows all too well that looking back on the past

retrieves nothing, even when you’ve got wings on your heels,

you can bring to the surface of consciousness

but a last gasp of desperate bubbles that flash

before your eyes like the life of a man drowning

in municipal puddles of agitated starmud

the rain keeps falling into like blackholes

in the asphalt of a road whose cup runs over

like the gutter of a grail drunk down to the lees.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I WERE TO CRY NOW AT THIS AGE

IF I WERE TO CRY NOW AT THIS AGE

If I were to cry now at this age

it would be a grey, September rain, running down

the half windows, half mirrors of my eyes.

Alloys of light. A veil of rivers and roads

I’ve firewalked on burning diamonds to get here.

A waterfall of waterclocks. Time run amok.

A dog let off the leash of a long continuum

to remember tomorrow as if it only happened

yesterday. No more eating the dust at the heels

of Orion as if he were chained to a parking meter,

the dogstar sniffs at the ankh-shaped fire hydrants

as it will, free of the master and his noose,

Black Dog shadowed by Blue Flower on the loose.

If I were to cry now at this age

it would be as a sage washing his face in his own ashes

to get the greenwood creosote off the glass

he looks through darkly into oracular dragon fire

dreaming the world on a lotus of flame

to ember in the blaze of two year old red oak

with cracks through the tree rings of former springs

to testify it’s aged right as eyes and wine,

and still burns hot as blood in the caldera

of a volcanic heart. Prophecy might be the art

of great discretion, but poetry should be as

open-faced as the skull of the moon in a mirror.

If I were to cry now at this age

it wouldn’t be for fame, sex, power or influence

among the literary politics of the nitwits

in the regalia of a kingdom of gnats,

nor yet as any kind of repentance for the life

that demonically guided me in and out

of the stations of the mystery through the rootfires

of paradise that blossomed like stars and waterlilies

in the fetid gardens of the fallen transforming

their swamp lust into paradigms of amorous enlightenment.

I disciplined the severity of my disobedience

into rules of thumb that let more of the defeated live

than the one-eyed angels with blood on their feathers

ever did. Heaven condemned my demon to compassion

for never taking offence at anyone else’s miscreance.

If I were to cry now at this age

I doubt if I’d remember precisely why I wept,

but my bet would be it had something to do

with life not cherishing its own creations

like a busload of schoolkids at a railway crossing

with a brutal sense of timing, or twenty-five million children

who starve to death every year in their mother’s arms

while farmers pour galaxies of spilt milk out on the ground

to keep the price of human kindness high

as a subsidized quota of children that have to die annually

to reach the projected goals of unweaned shareholders.

Why so many children open their eyes like flowers on time

to be flogged by the whips of their own umbilical cords

like weed cutters along the fence of an indefensible border.

If I were to cry now at this age

it would be for the beauty I discerned growing

in the cracks and crevices like blueweed and dandelions

between a hard place and a rock

that kept rolling down hill at the peak of life

like the door of a tomb somebody used

for the foundation stone of a corrupt house of life

built on sacred quicksand that lost its footing

like a burning ladder of rafters in an earthquake

that buried the priestcraft of a snakepit

without the last unction of an oilslick on its forehead

as if God looked upon the works of humans

and spit on their eyelids in disgust at a waste

of quantum foam that frothed like hydrophobia

from the shrines of the dry seabeds of their mouths

as if every ditch of hell were once an ocean unto itself.

PATRICK WHITE