BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows. A respite in time and care. A hole in space I can escape through without setting off any alarms. And I don’t care what this poem is going to be about I can write it with no preconceived deceptions, no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects. For a moment, the ice age is thawing and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches are a riot of Queen Ann’s Lace and Viper’s Bugloss. Temperate consolations modify my mood into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life. I’m gulled by the sunshine. I’m a schill of the mindstream. The killer bees are away from their hives. Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details. Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame. And later tonight, if I’m still so entranced, I’ll make my way down to the Tay River to see if the fireflies are out dancing pianissimo with the abandoned lighthouses of the stiff-necked cattails. I’ll sit on a rock that doesn’t aspire to lord it over anyone’s kingdom, and I’ll stare at the stars until they’re tattooed like an indelible starmap on the back of my eyelids, to keep my tears from diluting them like smeared watercolours or my more igneous aspects, from shattering them like the menagerie of a zoo with glass bars. And o, basking in the freedom of my own madness, hilarious as peace, the infinite homelessness of knowing I come from everywhere all at once, and there’s nowhere I’ve walked alone in my life down any road beset with assassins, or feathered like strippers in boas of white sweet clover, I haven’t been stepping across the threshold of another wilderness always as vast and cautiously intriguing as I am mysteriously lost when the human intimacy of a longing heart encounters the sentient impersonality of an infinite mind that isn’t aware of anything the heart doesn’t bring before it like a child’s drawing. And there are themes you can follow like bush wolves through the back woods trampled down by the padding of their circuitous descents into the dangerous pantries of the farms pseudomorphically nestled between the hills. It’s an itinerary that’s serviced the pack for years with a sufficiency that’s got them this far against the odds. And each to their own way, go with the gods and I’ll rejoice in hearing you howl among the trees to the chagrin of your detractors listening with a begrudging admiration a civilization away from what’s been bred out of them like freedom under a full moon in heat. As for me and my homeless approach to the ghost towns of future zodiacs, I never want to know where I’m going until I get there inconceivably as the only path I could have taken in the first place, because that’s always the way it is even when you delight in the wiles of going astray. Signs of your emptiness in the midst of the great unknowing. Time and space mindscaping the exploration you keep thrusting into the dark like the light and the lamp of an estranged nightwatchman, hoping you haven’t been here before, and anything worth keeping an eye on has already been given away for free. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 15:53:34 +0000