COULD I BREATHE THE STARS

COULD I BREATHE THE STARS

Could I breathe the stars, I would expire in light.

Were I the harvest moon, I would retract my claws.

Were my heart anything other than what it is,

I would be a windfall of silver apples burnished by crows

and not this rag of a man with a mouthy wound.

I would not be this perversion of radiance mutating

in these acephalic mirrors warped by shape-shifting space.

I would see clearly the angry red berries of the hawthorn

and adopt them as a solar system. And think I was blessed.

And, o yes, spiky woman, when love was in eclipse

if I were not so afraid of falling upon you like a sword,

I would notch the moon like a gunsight

with its own valleys and mountains,

and let the light shine through like Bailey’s Beads,

and place it on your head like a laurel of fire,

the enlightened corona of a door I’ve left ajar.

You agitate the spiders in their morning webs

into vibrating like the needles of sewing machines

or the clappers of fire alarms, as the sun

takes the pulse of its dreamcatchers,

looking for signs of life from the night before.

I am a creature of darkness. I know the abyss.

It fills you like a universe you just can’t seem

to get your heart and arms around.

It’s bigger than the wingspan of your spirit,

the one vacuum nature doesn’t abhor.

No end of it. No beginning you can hope for.

You embody the impersonality of it intimately.

The dark mother of the abounding stars

whose beauty adds an edge to the emptiness

that keeps you from pleading for oblivion

in an isolation deeper than the dead.

The irises were surgically removed from your eyes

and you’re out looking for rainbows at night with a match.

But there’s no one to keep your promises to,

and just at the bend in the river, where you laid

a poppy on the grave of the white crow

to pay your respects to the end of the road,

you plunge over the edge of a finger-pointing precipice

like a willow of water into an ocean of awareness

and there’s no one there to catch you. And the dreamcatchers

aren’t the safety nets they said they were.

Were I a witchdoctor that knew the antidote to love

I would come with strange concoctions

of the Pleiades and deadly nightshade

ground with a sexual pestle in the mortar of my skull

and spiced with a measure of the inconceivable

and have you rise from your death bed

like a miracle among roses that escaped the frost.

I’d stroke the back of your hand like the head of a swan.

And you’d feel it melting like ice. The moon would bloom

like a love letter delivered to a dead branch.

The nightmare of the dispassionate fever

would transmutate into an elixir of life

that would thrill every flower into believing they had

lightning for roots. Wondrous blossoms of insight.

Into the Open. Into the Absence, the nihilistic emptiness

of the cup poured out in a hemorrhage of the heart

when the wine went bad. Someone there in the doorway

gone like a shadow from the sundial of the farewell

they left you with like the wing of a bird

that doesn’t sing anymore in the morning.

And even the birch groves don’t feel very strong

when they’ve been cast down by an ice storm

into white canes and crutches of suffering

you once could lean on for emotional support.

I would be a lightbulb in a house well for you

to keep you from freezing and more grandiosely

if I were a pagan architect, I would erect a temple

with pillars of fire for you that even time

when its hair grows out like solar flares

couldn’t pull down in a fury of indignant ions.

There would be no lack of heretics, martyrs,

or Norse gods to sing in your flames

because they would have finally found something

greater than their solipsistic selves to sacrifice to

that consumes them with devotion

axially aligned with you. And wherever you walked

true north would be under your feet.

As it is I follow you like an oriflamme

in a pageant of longing I will not be ransomed from.

And even if the court jester to the queen

isn’t the grand marshal that gets to carry it,

the one who rides first in the wake of your love,

his armour burning like a mirror of your reflected fire,

I have raised a small banner of blood

on the lance of a thorn the white knights

would think was laughably burlesque

were it not for the fact that it pours out of a dragon’s eyes

like the eclipse of a black rose in tears

igneously bleeding in the darkness

to temper its fangs like swords it remits in tribute,

from a burning bridge of fireflies,

to the solitary river of the unhonoured waters of the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

THE RELENTLESS INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD

THE RELENTLESS INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD

The relentless indifference of the world

to the monkeys who think they’re in charge.

How does a human skull not rot like a feral dog’s

killed by wolves? Babies die like a carillon

of columbine above their cribs. I see

through the camouflage of my little hill

of a vantage point, ants on the Ho Chi Min Trail

carrying away the piecemeal wings of the butterfly

for scrap metal spare airplane parts. We’re

on the menus of all other forms of life.

Poachers would kill the white elephant

of the moon for its tusks, black bears

for their medicinal livers, stem cells for body parts.

All branches of knowledge, frayed ends

of the lightning unwinching its bucket of rain

on the root fires of dendritic axons in the garden.

Dark matter perishing into its moment

of radiant flowering like English ox-eyed daisies

and stars. Maybe being born into this world

is the shallow death of a black hole in labour?

As much of the elm underground as there is above.

Six million leaves in the beaming sunshine

feeding the dark that scatters them like birds

from a fountain, words from a poet’s mouth

that grow old and die like solar panels erected

on the far side of the moon that lives on starlight alone.

Death can be as useful as roadkill to a turkey vulture.

Hominids lapping marrow for bigger brains

from the charnel houses of the predators

they most fear when they risk extermination

out of the trees being culled by the encroaching grasslands.

Everybody’s too busy running from it

to look death straight in the eye to see

deeply into the black mirror they can’t find

their reflection in, as if you couldn’t shine

without a shadow telling you what time it is.

If I lose my eyes do you think that will

bring about subtle, but lasting changes in the light

adjusting the filaments and stamens of the way

things flower for reasons you were meant to take

as a guess you could build on like a tent

with a portable threshold like a meandering crosswalk

instead of institutionalizing your creation myths?

I have an innate mistrust of the lies that back up

certainty, including the lie behind the alibis

of the tenured sceptic. Dubito ergo sum. Doesn’t

leave you much of a leg to stand on

like a mountain village gathering foundation stones

from the last earthquake. Or a Mongolian

pyramid of skulls promising you an afterlife

to assuage your surrender. Some are washed

in the blood of the lamb and some the goat.

What was pagan about the Romans who bathed

in the blood of a bull? I wash in my own tears

and that’s as close to capitulation as I ever get.

No doubt I may be about to blend into the Great Mystery

with a lot of regret, but, to hear my mother tell it,

I wasn’t too happy when I got here anyway,

and except for a few malignant Catholics who

imputed sin to my original nature, if, in fact,

that’s where things begin, I was innocent as far as it goes

in a world that cuts off its nose to extol

the righteousness of its toes in an infantile mouth.

May be a blessing. May be a curse. Maybe

one foot in the boat, one on shore, and a topknot

tied to a low hanging bough on the tree of life

like a ghost with a dislocated hip and a limp.

Who cares? The river’s running full out of the garden,

and the leaves are better poets than the wind

ever imagined them to be according to modern standards.

They don’t seek awards for the folly of their calling.

They don’t keep track of the anthologies of foliage

they’ve been published in. They just give themselves up

to the mad genius of the wind like the flames

of wax candelabra in diaspora that don’t equate death,

like seeds, with exile. The harvest moon in the hands

of the sower without the plough of the Big Dipper

to show her how. And yet there’s grain in the arms

of the Virgin as if her lover were a scarecrow,

driving its equally innocent twin of a scapegoat

further and further out into a wilderness

where the six and eight pointed stars

thrive on the trash of the universe recycling itself.

Maybe I’ll be the reason sacred dung beetles keep rolling

the starmud of the planet up into a larger cranium

to accommodate the fatty abyss they’ve sipped

from my marrow as the ants who drained

the wetlands and watersheds of my eyes

are beginning to conceive of the bigger picture

my mind painted when I look at them like a visionary

that didn’t believe you had to stick to the beaten path

of somebody else’s pheromones, that you could

put out your own little blossom of stargrass

like a sign of amazement you’re still alive and aware of it.

That death wasn’t a closed door anymore than life

was an open gateway into a garden of wild delights.

PATRICK WHITE