LIKE A STAR WHEN YOU WRITE Like a star when you write, you never really know what happens to the light, how it gets bent by somebody else’s gravitational eye, or if, somewhere on a nearby planet flowers open like loveletters from an anonymous admirer. Maybe there’s a mother in the summer of life teaching her daughter to make a wish upon you and keep it like a secret to herself, or fireflies in a valley after a thunderstorm aspiring to the heights you shine down from, knowing there’s no up or down in the space you emanate out of in all directions at once like arrows on the circular Sufi bow of light that embraced Muhammad in the cave of Hira when he was told by Allah to recite and he didn’t know how. Sometimes there’s a nightbird caught in your throat like a canary in a mine and the gold just comes pouring out like honey from a hive. Like the dawn no one ever knows until they open the aviary of their mouth whether they’re releasing doves or crows, great blue herons, or wrens, or a comet streaking across the sky like a shrieking phoenix, whether you’re attending a seance of dead friends or an exorcism of yourself. Poetry isn’t morality, politics, prayer, social altruism, a raffle ticket in the genius lottery run by corruptions of the original text, therapy, the cure for a broken heart, or the meaning of life. Not a curse, or a blessing you’d wish upon your children. Not a mirror for magistrates or shapeshifters, nor yet a reflection of nature in the bloodless abstraction of a blank stare trying to fix things in place like a thumb tack on a starmap of seastars guiding the drowned to ground like an island universe they can be washed up on by an ocean that doesn’t hold a grudge. You get the point? Poetry’s more of a wavelength than a god-particle, a dangerous river, not a highway that’s had the hazards conditioned out of it by the well-meaning who deplore the road kill all along it like the collateral damage of a will intent on making things better and better by ignoring the extreme chaos of their refinements, handing out parachutes to eagles and crosswalks to frogs and turtles. Hymns to the dragonflies who died in the balleen grills and bumpers of cars the sparrows will pick clean in shopping mall parking lots. If you’re a poet, when you write, you’re always whistling in the dark to a star in the corner of your eye that’s been following you for miles down a long dirt road that ascends to the moment like a hill you can walk right off into the nightsky ahead of you like a moonrise confiding in its own shadows. And don’t get fooled into thinking you’re the undertaker of a dying art embalming your vital organs in Canopic jars like alabaster wombs doomed to go gummy and post mature in the dark without ever breaking like water into an afterlife of literary immortality that can’t breathe on its own without artificial life support, here, or at the stargates of Orion, you may be read forever but you only get to sing it once acapella and that on the fly, like a grave robber or a thief of fire that’s burning with life to put the dead to better use than just leaving them where they lie in their toyboxes. Embalmed in the mummy cloth of the dying fall of your dactylics, what could you be but the echo of an afterlife that’s always a step or two behind you like the shadow of a star that can’t catch up to itself? Your poems will die right along with you if you insist upon it, like slender cup-bearers who used to serve you wine like willow-trees down by the river when everything poured out of itself like stars and fireflies from your long hair and Ophelias of waterflowers tried so hard to please you well. They’ll drink the poison and lie down at your feet without dreaming anything anymore. In the dark. In the silence. In the stillness of all those lifeless images that keep their secrets to themselves because you stopped the waterclock on an empty bucket as if you knew what hour it was on the nightwatch and you struck the bell like the skull of time that prophesied soon you would have been fulfilled like a new moon if you’d only opened your eyes a crack in the dark, left the door ajar, come with a crowbar to let the light in and out like a pulsar. Wasn’t it Keats who said that of all God’s creatures a poet is the one with no identity so as to know the whole of existence as intimately as that little white square of emptiness centred in the heart with no one standing there that wasn’t a stranger from the start? Little wonder then, nothing but the forged passports of our poems for papers to show the border guards in the doorway of our homecomings that we’re who we say we are, we clamour to be recognized like the names of flowers and stars, metaphors with inky fingerprints, the labyrinthine shadows of ghosts that have been here before us. Fame’s a trap. More poets have been killed by the adoration of a pitcher plant than by the neglect of waterlilies in a festering swamp. Poets can bloom like wild orchids in the shadows of outhouses, or crack concrete like the jackhammers of the dandelions you can read in between the lines of the sidewalks. There are lyrical mystics weaving bamboo pots and sandles in the back alleys of black markets from the ganas of Calcutta, the ghazals of the Ruknabad, the haiku of Tokugawa Japan, the sagas of Iceland, to the approximate sonnets of Denver, Colorado, on out to the blue picture-music of the Pleiades backcombing their hair into nebular rhapsodies of inspired hydrogen. What’s a good review compared to the depth of the silence that follows the song of the nightbird even the hills are moved to echo among themselves like a voice they overheard with a longing like their own to dignify what’s most unanswerable about life by dancing with desire to the music of their own solitude? Arpeggios of rain on the petals of the unseen flower playing variations of thorns and vines like Scarlatti alone at the harpsichord for an hour out of mind as if someone had left the gate to the culture garden open and the music had spread on its own like the rootfires of purple loosestrife and wild columbine. If I write about you while I’m alive will you write about me after I’m dead as if one gravestone a lifetime weren’t enough, and every autopsy open-endedly ambiguous in the teaching hospitals of the literati hovering over the persona of your cadaver naked in the surgical theatres of their dress rehearsals flower-arranging their scalpels like bleeding hearts in an abattoir of featherless roses turning cyanotically blue from a lack of oxygen at those heights? Better to befriend a dog, than literary immortality, if you want your corpse dug up to the quality of the starmud you’re interred in like tar sands on their way to a refinery to be dumped like petrocoke and soot on someone else’s funereal dreams of a best-selling book. Better to chip all the cartouches of your regal name like the scars of old wounds off the pillars you rededicated to the one sun god you were the embodiment of and wander off like an apostate poet who preferred the desert to the promised land because none of the stars out there were ever compelled to wear yellow armbands and nobody counted the plinths on an abacus of shining because there were more needles than there were haystacks to hide them in an infinite number of directions. Back to eyebeams. You create the star you see, the star you want to be, out of your own light. The way you shine upon things is what gets reflected back to you like a karmic message in glass bottle bobbing along your mindstream like the prophetic skulls of previous dismemberments to please wake yourself up from the dream you’re having of yourself like the thematically connected scheme of a waterclock of purple passages on your way to turn the water into wine at a wedding of flesh and spirit. Sooner or later everybody gets married to the world, and you can’t nullify that anymore than you can seek a divorce from yourself as if you wrote nothing but decree absolutes published in a book of bans. You can’t unshadow the world as if you were taking a saddle off a winged horse that had had enough of the bit and the spurs and the burrs under the saddle and threw you off for not knowing how to ride your inspiration bareback. Just say to yourself if you’re brave enough to take your own advice, o well, there’s more poetry in walking to the stars than there is in hitch-hiking, and give the matter a rest. Just sing to yourself in the enormity of your solitude and listen to the rumours of silence in the dark that answer you in a million voices like the moon on the undulant eyelids of a lake in deep rem sleep, yes, we’re here, too, with you in this abyss overhearing ourselves like hidden secrets in the bushes gesturally expressing a wish to be known not so much for what we say or the way we say it for our eyes only, but as a kind of sign language, a universal dream grammar among night birds conversing alone with the Alone, from one conversation to the next, without taking each other out of context like the sacred syllables of the waterbirds disappearing like words of farewell on the wind as we take our leave of each other at the silver-tongued forks in our wake. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 15:51:45 +0000
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