Fumarole Poem by Patrick White

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Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada

Fumarole



The beast of a thousand unconsummated yesterdays
born without names in the gutter
roars in the rags of its own blood
for the poxy apricot of the rising moon. My voice
is a guitar without strings, the dark well
of an eclipse that eats the dragon
that has lingered too long in the depths without stars.
The crazy windows in this burning room
plead for a reason, a purpose, a sign
as they weep themselves into weary honey, sick
of the equity of their seeing, the sloppy script
of another dirty winter that scrawled
its drunken name in the amber penmanship
and metaphysical sunsets of nicotine
encrypted like scars or dry creekbeds
in the guestbooks of their sagging eyes. On the sill,
the ashes of birds, of stars, of dead fly hearts
smaller than the nuggets of gold
panned by the convict bees from the feigned tears
of the cocktease flowers who know how
to renew their virginity by giving it up
like a handful of keys to anyone who knocks. Hot ores
adumbrated into the slag of unapproachable islands
and treacherous harbours in chastity belts.
And though I know better, accepting
what I cannot change in this graveyard
of geriatric storms that have blown themselves out
against the implacable glass that disguises itself as the sky
and waits with its decoy of clouds
for the inadvertent sparrow
to dash the nut of its brain against the impassable windowpane,
I long for a heart of brick, a stone of dried blood
worked loose like a tooth from a crumbling temple
to smash my way out of this brittle museum of things,
this menagerie of balanced coffins
and cordless spinal columns
that account for nothing but the unearthly stillness and vacuity
of a reasonable effort to survive surviving
without a taint of life exceeding
their industrious accountancy. And though I know,
how has it not been drummed into me
by suffering the violet penalties
of love and prismatic separations, the madness
of trying to bridge your own mindstream
to the further shore with the peacock rainbows
of midnight oilslicks that let their serpents down
like the hair of a drowning Medusa, and though I know
and know and know the sad alleys
and unforgivable garbage that reeks like an over-ripe moon
in the cul-de-sacs that enshrine the priestly drunks,
did I not once tear my own heart out at their altars,
and wait for a divinity to seize me
like a flower of fire in ice, still, this long probation
that leaves me with nothing to confess
is a skeleton trying to masturbate, a chain of enslaving orbits
hauling the moon by the nose to a vicious market
that bids for exotic desecrations
to gild its impotence with curious compulsions. And my crime?
I ignored the prevalent hypocrisies of improvement
and self-advancement to occupy
my own harvest-throne in the midst of plenty
and raise myself up like a siege of gratitude
on mystic ladders that scaled
the burning towers of the stars. I obeyed
the stratagems of fire that voiced
the assaults of wonder I launched
like occupation fleets against the willing surrender
of my own mind liberated from the sapphire dungeons
of its own birthstone, the inherited castles of quicksand
that betrayed their own foundations. There was no clemency
in the sentence of the passing years
that hung me like a trophy
in a straitjacket of spider-webs, no poetry
in this exile from light, this starless sky
that no one has ever looked upon with yearning,
no music in the rain that falls from this nuclear winter
that nuns the cauldron of a sterile sea. And though I know
my fate might well be righteously imposed
because I played while others toiled, sang and danced
and squandered the abundant summers of my heart
on the impossible empires in a woman’s eyes,
made dice of the stars and rolled them against
the impregnable walls of chance like constellations,
thrilled by getting away with life
while my blood was still green and brave with expectation,
is it just that my shadow should die before me
longing to be buried in the light
as if it weren’t a suicide; is it God, and mercy, and reason and right
that a warrant for my freedom should have been issued
before a law was contrived to contest it
in the meager forums of feeble appetites? Damn me if you must
to the absurd tillage of these forsaken acres,
yoking the moon to a glass plough
that shatters on the prophetic skulls
of an unrocked cemetery opposed like salt
to the impudent resurrection of the dead.
A volcano thrust through the fault in your seed bed
I will install my shadow
like the relic of a sacred nail
in the perilous hole
it will drive
through your unhallowed head.

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946 / 834
Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada
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