Thursday, September 22, 2011
AS THE NIGHT AND SILENCE
As the night and silence fall over
and random voices are dwindling in the distance up the road
as I vow not to remember anything at all the right times
to the muse of broken gates hanging on the hinge of the year
and o most rare
not to forget a single intimacy
of the mystic love tokens she’s offered me
like black walnuts and ruby-throated humming-birds,
I realize I’m swimming in beautiful illusions
where the starfish lie down with the sharks
and inspired by my own absurdity
and the lack of any kind of enlightened credibility
I’m free of delusion and reality alike.
Crazy wisdom.
The penultimate insight into nothingness.
Who could wish for more?
The streetlamps are still in bud
in the third week of September.
And there’s a painting on my easel
with an autumn sun covered in black spidery birch branches
like a detached retina
that’s been keeping its eye on me since
Free enough to risk entreating the stars to be kind for once.
Free enough to be attached to the things of the earth that are perishing
to ensure they don’t as if I were one of them
on the inside of the joke
that’s stranger than not getting it at all.
Show me the wise man who hasn’t learned
to take his inner clown seriously
and I’ll show you an eagle born without eyes.
Fortune-cookies with all the answers
like dancers with knots in their muscular thighs.
Overhead I hear the
as things are slowing down
and there are fire hydrants all over town
who’ve exhausted themselves trying to put the autumn out
that long to go with them just to know
what they’ve been left out of by holding their ground.
Does in the headlights,
two young women ditching a roach
at the approach to
wondering if I’m the troll
or the pot of gold that lives under it.
I sublimate my indifference with a smile
and keep my distance
not to spook their high
as I pass unnoticed as I can
up the wolf path to lonelier timberlines
without them knowing
I think one’s a willow with slender blonde sorrows
and the other’s a raging sumac with phoenix wings
who eats her own ashes
like the flesh of the anti-Christ
just to get a rise out of things.
PATRICK WHITE
THE STARS SO NEAR
The stars so near it seems the approaching morning
could wet its thumb and forefinger
and pinching their wicks like intimate candles
that have held the lovers close
and the ghosts at bay all night
put them out with a hiss.
An ancient mirror deep within me
I couldn’t bring myself to bury
with the woman who once looked into it
is beginning to flood like a river of eyes with autumn rain
and I want to cry for things
that have departed like water birds
from their circuitous reflections on the mindstream
and leave the heart knocking
like an empty lifeboat against the rocks
that no one sings from now.
I’ve stared at the moon several nights in a row
as if we drank from the same skull
and I want to elevate my tears to a higher level
as a rite of passage worthy of what I mourn
but no lights on in the lockmaster’s house
me and the moon both know
how impossible it is to raise the dead
from their watersheds
by adding a few tears to a dry seabed
out of the largesse of the living
in the wake of so many shadows.
I’m trying to align my third eye like a bubble
in the middle of a balance beam
and build on the cornerstone of the moon
a Taj Mahal of lunar coral to commemorate
the loss of so much beauty
to the things it touched like braille
as if it wasn’t enough just to light them up
but parting the depths of its fathomless veils
open their eyes as well.
I shall turn three times in the silver grass
and stretching my body out like a scar upon the earth
lay down in a deer-bed by the river
with her absence bigger than the night for awhile
and listen to the frogs and crickets
as I used to listen for her footfalls on the creaking stairs
and the moon won’t lay its sword of light on the waters
like a vow of separation to keep us apart
and I shall ask every star
down to the sixth magnitude of time and shining
what has become of her who used to weave
English ox-eyed daisies into her hair
as if she were already among the constellations
showing off the lesser luminaries of earth
as if there were nothing so small
nothing so slighted or disregarded
no moment of life so devoid of inspiration
even the fireflies that can’t stay fixed in one place
long enough to beat a path into a zodiac
and elaborate their own creation myths
into something unborn and unperishing
weren’t enlightened
by the immaculate darkness of her transience.
To suffer everything as if it were a blessing she once said.
I look up through the leafless bough of an aging maple
twisted like a burnt match stick
whose fire’s just flared out.
I look up at the stars
as if they’d built their webs between the branches
like momentary dream catchers.
And I can’t manage it.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
EASY
Easy to extract oneself from the climacteric of doom
that will absolve humanity of its horrors
by placing its destiny in its own hands
like a loaded gun in the hands of a child
by taking long nocturnal walks by the
among wildflowers full of farewell.
To watch the moonrise glowing
on the
as if they’d just been spit polished by morning snails
and sense the just proportions
and inchoate eloquence of eternity
in the trivialities of sublime coincidence.
How randomly everything fits
into this urgent medium of life and death
as if it played the tailor to its own emergence seamlessly
the way the mind stream cuts a path for itself
among a bewildering array of rocks and fallen birch
or a startled rat snake adds its wavelength
like a higher frequency to the laconic water
and yet no river has ever flowed the wrong way to the sea.
Easy to step out of the polluted light of the streetlamps
into the cleaner darkness on the outskirts of town
to renew my innocence
in the macrocosmic reveries of my solitude
enchanted by the mesmerizing details
of the mystically miniscule.
How the
in the middle of September
that yesterday bloomed like stars
in happier zodiacs than this
today are watching their eyelashes fall out one by one
and the daylilies that blazed with desire
wither like the kisses of old women
when no one’s there to receive them.
Easy to accept catastrophe in nature
as the spontaneous gesture of a hidden wisdom
that our eyes are too dependent on the light to see yet.
The muskrat gutted by the cattails
by a posse of rampant coyotes
in a frenzy of panicked hunger
sensing the cold-blooded wind turn vicious.
Soon the air will bare its fangs and snarl.
Soon the earth will harden into knuckles of ice
and the raccoons semi-hibernate
and the blue jays come like thieves
to pick the time-locks on the sunflowers
and the seeds enter the cryonic comas of their afterlives
confident of their revival in a future beyond doubt
as the planet sidles up to the sun at perigee
like an old love affair gone cold
tilting its head away
to rebuff any further advances.
Easy to lose yourself in the life of the mind
and the phantasmagoria of reality
that makes you feel you’re walking with gods
you’ll never know the name of.
Turn your back on the world
and let your thoughts wander off like smoke
from the fire pits of lost caravans
that have pitched their tents
on the dark side of the moon
where they can make up their own myths
about the strange stars
that have misled them this far from home.
How the creek laps the rock
like a doe at a salt block
left out in a farmer’s field.
How the water purls over the terraced shale
that looks like a burnt book in the ashes
of a fire that’s just been put out
like the library of
You could do that.
And who could blame you?
You wouldn’t be wrong.
It’s hard to listen
the way you listen to a star stream
slipping through a grove of birches at night
astute to everything it’s whispering;
hard to listen to the blood
gurgling out of a wounded child
like a poppy choking to death.
Hard to fine-tune your sensibilities
to the miscreant devolution of your own species
and not be savagely appalled
into holding a mirror up to nature
that blocks the view as surely
as if you’d put your hands up over your eyes
to escape it all and wake up somewhere else
where skulls are more natural in
than in the abattoirs of human carnage.
A clean life with no skidmarks of despair.
No fingernails scratching at the walls
in the gas chambers of
No graffiti under the bridges of PsychoBabylon.
No university students on the road to
tortured like Rosetta Stones
that have just had their tongues cut out
for not saying anything
that makes any sense
to the body language of the depraved
mutilating their flesh like slang.
Just the claw marks on the rocks
that have been sanitized by time
like the glacial striations of the last ice age
that gouged out the eyes of the lakes around here.
The bitter aesthetes of retreat run back to paradise
to study demonology by the light of fireflies
to better understand their fellow man
and live tactically out of reach
of their common inhumanity
where there’s not chance of a ricochet.
Under a locust tree in full bloom.
A fragrant cloud of honey-bees
with as many thorns as they have stingers
behind a wall of zinnias, cosmos, gladiolas
on a hill in the eye of clearing
completely surrounded by trees
sitting at a picnic table
with a black coffee, cigarette, and journal
inspired by the beauty of the morning to write
before your lover wakes up
to tend nine bean rows in Innisfree
though it’s eleven miles
and a hundred years ago
outside
where you can hear the scarlet carillons
of the wild columbine in the rain
tinkling like delicate wind chimes
and modestly agitated chandeliers
plucked by the rain like the plectra
of home-made harpsichords
on the moss-pated rocks
of their composer’s skulls.
No mediocrities in nature
it’s hard not to feel like Mozart
whatever you’re listening to.
No air raid sirens, ambulances
squad cars or firetrucks
screaming like banshees
like furies and erinyes
to the scene of the tragic event.
No fractious braying of political jackasses
grinding their teeth in their sleep
like the mill wheels of the stony bread
the rich resent the poor
like loaves and fishes and mice in the silo
boat-tailed grackles and black-capped chickadees
salvaging what they can
from the dumpsters of leftover gardens.
No pathological racket of garbage cans
being tipped over in a street fight
to end all street fights
like knights in armour on their backs
in front a shield wall of local police
picking them up to hold them for ransom.
No drunks and druggies in the hallways
only bats velcroed to the burdock
blinded by the porch light
and star-nosed moles and snakes on the threshold
the cats leave like offerings
on the stairs of the
So much easier to listen to the eerie wailing
of baby porcupines high in the basswood trees
than the shrieks of a family
being dragged out of their beds
by an occupation army
to see which of their daughters sisters mothers
will be raped like the
whose childhood shall be pressed into murder
and who shall be bred out of existence.
Easy to buff the crack of the world with talcum powder
to spare you from getting diaper-rash of the mind
and side-track the ferocity of your insight into the horror
with lightning-rods and tuning forks
you can break with your pinky finger like wishbones
torn from the throats of children
who didn’t have time enough on earth
to learn to read the names on their own gravestones
if they’re lucky enough to have one.
Easy to have a time-share
in nature’s indifference to death
when there no place left
on the surface of a raging planet
that isn’t a dangerous vacation.
So much easier to tinker with echinacea
and smudge the bad spirits
out of the renovated farm house with sage
from home-grown herb gardens
than it is to inhale the reek of cordite
or the stench of organic decomposition
of the adolescent flesh of the festering corpse
found in a drainage ditch among the weeds
like a lily that smelled far worse than them
on the outskirts of
in the stadiums of
in the Tiananmen Squares of
in the mass hysteria of the bloodbanks of
trying to assail a nest of dynastic vampires
with a silver bullet through the heart of the cloaked one
in the radical slums of
in the
run by
for smuggled vegetables from the
in the native reservations of the originals
who peopled
like a charter of indigenous freedoms
without any concept of surveying their mother like real estate.
Outside the emergency exits and entrances of
where immigrants beaten to death
and dumped on the pavement to die
abandon all hope of ever entering there
and bullfrogs squatting on their sheriff’s badge
croak about getting tough on the mosquitoes
by hand-cuffing them to the food chain for deportation.
Flies eggs in the goat’s milk.
Spiders sucking the life out of the jewel
in the heart of the American dream catcher.
All that is hideous, grotesque, perverse,
genocidal, fratricidal, patricidal, matricidal, suicidal and worse
than acid splashed in the eyes of Afghani schoolgirls
learning to read through holes in the ozone
by flashlight under the veils of
Seek ye knowledge even as far as
Wheresoever ye turn is the face of God revealed
like the encaustic portrait of girl that came unglued
like a multilated candle on CNN
trying to shine a light on
nur wa nur
what’s dark and brutal
about the alif ba ta tha gim
of an alphabet in the mouth of an oral tradition
with an alchemical regime of hashashim for muscle.
You know how many dolls they collected at
You know how many soccer balls
have had their feet blown off by cluster bombs in
You know how many weathervanes
have stiffened their resolve
to look the other way like iron roosters
with alarmist political agendas
and industrious military complexes
as corrupted as the weather
when the wind is blowing the wrong way
like bad spin from the chimneys of
and Sabra and Shatila lie in the direction of prayer
like the gunsight of a Palestinian sniper?
Is this God’s ferocity
or the inconceivable atrocities of mad men
eaten alive by Herodian maggots
seeking the life of the first born of every nation
to preserve their myth of spontaneous generation.
Sweet to see the shadows of the autumn leaves
fossilized like bat wings on the sidewalk;
to notice how they turn
in the same succession of colours
from the outside in
as rainbows sunsets
and the emission spectra of nearby stars
busy on the nightshift making calcium and carbon.
Sweet to know this and to wonder at it
easy in the mystery
among the dragonflies and the blue hyacinth,
nailing bluebird boxes out of the reach of the barn cats
and egg-stealing raccoons
to play your part in it like a companionable spirit.
Asylum from the world.
Sanctuary.
Diplomatic immunity among the great blue herons
because you’ve stood there so long
without disturbing a fish
they think you’re one of them.
Monday, September 19, 2011
YOU PHONE ME UP AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
You phone me up after all these years
drunk and coked up
hot enough to blow glass
and ask me to forgive you
for things I didn’t even know you’d done
until you showed up at my funeral
with more mascara than tears on.
You turn the tap on
and it shrieks like a banshee in the rain
and then there’s a few moments lag time
until the blow back in the pipes
of a great apartment to burn to death in
groans like a foghorn in the desert.
In
to buff their coke in butter urns
just like the pioneers.
But I live like one of the livestock
they brought over on the boats
to go wild in
until the whole Sioux Nation
is mounted on winged mustangs
that refuse to be broken
in inspiration and spirit
even when they’re spurred in the eyes
by night riders with stars on their stiletto heels.
You want to know
if I might want to see you again
and I can hear you flipping your zippo
as if you were ejecting
the cartridge of a spent shell
like the coffin of a corpse buried at sea
to ignite the flame of love again
as I recall last time went out
twenty minutes to forever
after it was lit like a love lyric
to burn for eternity.
Now you want to see if it can live longer
on the ghosts and ashes of seasoned desires
than it did on the pyres of elephant bones
you dug up from the graveyard
like the memories of old lovers
to cremate your pet mouse by the
to give it an afterlife as big as the Taj Mahal
compared to that hole in the wall it used to cower in
for the few crumbs of the dreams
that used to fall from your eyes
into a coke spoon in the morning
like shining from cooked foil
to give an ironic twist to a line from
The black widow with the hourglass on her back
wants to know if she’s lost her sense of timing.
If she can still wake up from her coma
like a ravenous alarm clock
to eat her mate in the throes of sexual rapture
before he can dismount
and scamper away into the sunset
like an eight-legged easel
that paints a picture of itself
running back into a burning barn
like a horse that knows its way home.
The aging undertaker
wants to purge her crematorium
of the smell of burning flesh.
I want to tell her
that perishing isn’t so much
a matter of forgiving and forgetting
as it is a thorough exorcism of everything.
But I bite my tongue to spare the young and say
I was the one who put my heart in harm’s way
like a small warm mammal
thinking the same flute
I used to charm the spitting cobras
could teach an anaconda in pantyhose to lap dance.
You say you had two kids with the same biker
as if that were some kind of new norm for you
but then the government stepped in
and took the two kids and the biker into care.
And you’re on your own now
with no one who knows you the way I do
to ease your inconsolable despair.
And I don’t want to
but I remember how painful it was
patching that deflated vision of you up
when it went flat as a bicycle tire
by gluing my eyelids to your skin
like Japanese plum blossoms
over the holes in your inner tube
that kept letting the air out of the coils
of a Burmese constrictor
that couldn’t find a heart anywhere
to anchor its fangs in
and crush the life out of
and had to settle for the butt-ends of its own tail.
You were always a lamia
picking on sickly knights
who came to your rescue
but you occasionally appeared
almost human to me
whenever you were baffled to tears
realizing as your nerves went off the grid
like Sleeping Beauty
as the spiked apple fell from her hand
(Or was it a thorn she pricked herself on?)
even a full moon isn’t immune
to the poison glands of her own crescents.
And there’s no known antidote
tucked like sweetgrass
in the medicine bags of anyone’s balls
that can do anything for you
to break the fever
except offer them to you like a placebo
knowing the cold sweat of your nightmare
is as terminal as the dew
on the last flowers of autumn
when your blood drops below zero.
You ask me if I remember
when I first saw you
pole-dancing in
to pay your way through university.
A stripper into kundalini yoga
you wrapped your body
around the axis of the earth
like two wavelenghths
of synchronous serpent-fire
winding its way up the spine
of the winged cross
tattooed like a medical symbol
on the arm of that all night pharmacy
you called your boyfriend at the time.
One to afflict the wound with desire
and the other to heal it
by opening all its chakras at once
like a chimney-fire
making the pipes glow cherry-red with lust.
The silver thread of the moon
interwoven with the golden thread of the sun.
But it’s been a long time
since the tapestry
of that flying carpet came undone
and though Aladdin’s magic lamp still burns
it shines like a night light
in a morgue among the urns
of the afterlives
of a phoenix prone to nightmares.
So, yes, pop over if you want.
Sit down.
Unburden yourself like a volcano in therapy
and I’ll try to show you as I always did
the tropical islands that became of all that fury
when things cooled down enough for birds.
As the Oxyrhyncus sayings of Jesus Christ point out
what you bring forth will save you
and what you don’t will destroy you.
You can take the same approach to i.e.d.s
if you’re enough of an apostate not to kill.
Whether you’re a junkie
a wise-guy or a terrorist.
Not to make the hit
and then frame God for it.
PATRICK WHITE
POST-MORTEM CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF
Post-mortem conversations with myself.
Dissociated memories of old fires and distant smoke.
Rainbows in eclipse.
Gothic lovers with oilslicks on their lips.
Covens of doves at a black mass for bleeding hearts.
Echoes returning like smart comebacks
to the original lines of the voices
I keep trying to slip between
like a love note waiting for a name
to address it to
as if thinking weren’t a dialectic at all
not this not that
being and non-being
but an ancient mode of migrating
without anyone noticing you’re gone.
And I still burn in the memory of some fires
that weren’t worthy of the heretic they consumed.
Creative intensities that turned my eyes into glass
to clarify the darkness of the black stars
that kept their shining hidden
from the cults and constellations
on the fast track of the zodiac
that liked to see their name in lights.
I preferred hydrogen to inert gases at the time
and there was always something garish about fame
that made me see all that neon
flickering like a cheap one night motel for attention.
All outlaws are wandering scholars
but these days I feel more like a Druid
walking between warring factions
with the diplomatic immunity
of an estranged superstition
to put an end to old conflicts
that live and die like blackflies
in two intense days of direct sunlight
at the end of May when they cleanse the temples
of what winter tracked in like a shelter for demons.
The victory is as boring as the defeat.
And I’ve run out of white flags and red capes
to use for bandages to stop the bleeding
so I let my wounds mummify themselves
without interring any grave goods
under the geoglyphs of their scars.
And here come the righteous rich again
like another crusade against the infidel poor
to dislodge them from the global expansion
of the holy lands over the whole earth
like dandelions in the lawns of
within the corporate reach of napalm
and bell-curves of white phosphorus
going supernova
like the Star of Bethlehem
burning through the eyes and skin and hearts
of the children of
like the evil side of Tinkerbelle
spreading the fairy dust of ethnic cleansing
like a foreign policy that salts hell
with deathstars no one can make a wish upon.
Six pointed stars.
Eight pointed stars.
And that square constellation of fifty
arranged like beer in a box
over thirteen wavelengths
of blood on the snow
with no return on the empties.
And there the bloody handprint
of the red maple
of my own autumn country
complicit in the history
of bigger fires on the world stage
than this one little flame
we’re all huddled around
trying to keep one side of our hearts
warm and human
in the first storm of the new ice age
that keeps blowing it out
like a candle in a manger of straw
like a phoenix in a barn-fire of heritage ashes.
Armoured war mice
war elephants
warring troops of snarling baboons
with red decals painted on their asses
like underbellies of Mitsubishi Zeroes
to identify the friendlies
from the swarms of killer bees
raising cults of i.e.d.s
like terrorist drones
in hives of milk and honey
wired to cellular phones
like bombs in the promised land
that break the word of God
like the bodies and hearts and minds of children
who huddle in their ancient places with the fairies
under the concrete rubble
of the stone that slew Goliath
and all his children
like a ricochet of collateral damage.
Hashashim pouring out of the mouth
of the Old Man of the Mountain
like fire ants down the slopes
of their heaps of formic acid
to sow the olive groves with stinging nettles
and make war on weddings
by rending that which God has joined together
asunder in
Undoing the zippers of their flies
as if they were parting the
like the chromosomes of the unborn.
Half their genes on crusade
and the other half on jihad
where love has pitched its tent
as a disappointed Yeats would say
in the place of excrement.
PATRICK WHITE
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