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Driving Up To Mayberly

Driving up to Maberly for cheap cigarettes
at the Two Eagles Trading Post
across the highway from Silver Lake,
frost of the night,
mist of the morning lifting
in the blaze of the sun
in the bleach-blue sky
that wheels the reds and oranges,
and the wild, canary, grosbeak yellows
into their complementary hue,
I can't really see the autumn
until my blood stops thinning itself down
to peer through the lenses
of the watercolours in my eyes
and flowing, deeper, darker
turns into fire and paint
and dancing on the funeral pyre
of my last unknown masterpiece
instead of trying to walk on stars,
celebrates the crazy wildness of my solitude
by elaborating a world
I can almost forgive
as I brush myself
off the shoulders of the hills in passing
like a thread of smoke,
a parrot of ash,
a glaze of Prussian blue,
and cry like an arsonist
in an old-growth wilderness
that the trees don't wait for me to burn.
There is a void, an abyss, an emptiness
that wears a human face
in the presence of things everywhere
that are reflected back
in the black mirror of space
as the mystically specific features
of every mineral, plant, and animal
I've ever been.
I'm not just a figure in a landscape
I am the whole of the scene
and even in the shadows
that don't feel like me,
that are sometimes horrid and strange,
intensities of separation in faces
that have fallen far from the tree,
I am the child in the darkness
rooted in a fever of fear
that is slowly learning to trust me.
And it's been like this for years
though memory is just another way
of quoting yourself
more comprehensively
through the tears
that keep turning up
like Desdemona in autumn
to audition for the play
by drowning for real.
Have you seen October sumac
set its wings afire?
I wrote that in my twenties
sitting down on the curb
with Ben Jonson
watching the house burn,
writing odes
to Vulcan's acumen as an editor.
If you summon a phoenix
a phoenix will come
like an aspiring passion
for enlightenment
that will shake you like ashes
out of the Buddha's sleeve
where you've been hiding
from a world you didn't conceive
and doesn't believe
in abiding with anyone
longer than it takes to say good-bye.
Now you're alone in the darkness
with yourself as the only witness
down to your last match
like a tiny lighthouse
looking for a lifeboat
lost like a voice in the fog
and you strike your head against the rocks
like one of the black eggs of music
a phoenix lays in a nest of ashes
and suddenly the autumn flares all around you
like the sum of all sums
in a womb of sacred fire
that immolates you into being
the light in the night
of your own unborn, unperishing clarity.
Go ask the star, the candle, the maple-tree
setting fire to the roof
of the abandoned roadside fruit-stand
with its vagrant leaves
whose light their light is the child of
and how it is they all have the same eyes as you
when you don't bind yourself
like a nun to a cross
or a blind man in the mirror
to a match that has gone out
like the swords in the hands
of the flammable angels
who burnt paradise to the ground
so they could be doused
like the torches of autumn
in the retrospective lakes of their own tears
and know what it is
to die into yourself
like a god or a human
or a leaf of fire
like the torn page
of a calendar
on the mindstream
that makes its way
through the placenta of the full moon
all the way to everyone of us
like water through a dream
of things to come
that come of us
who are the magnanimous hosts
of our own transience.
Fountains of words
from a golden mouth
for the ghosts and the birds
that are always heading south
or like me, west,
up highway seven,
a shadow at the wheel of a sundial
or the spirit of an Ojibway outcast
set free from his burial hut
after ten years in isolation
without a cigarette
flying with the geese
who carry the souls of the dead
toward whatever afterlife they want
as if their futures were already forgiven.
Forgiven for having outlived
whoever we are
like the light of the stars
that go out in the wells of our eyes
so that we can see,
or the small search-parties of the fireflies
who won't stop looking for us
like a postmark
we left like a homeless fingerprint
on the lost address
of the last constellation
of the transcendent myth
we were born under
like a loveletter to everyone
written on the leaves of autumn
in passion and paint,
blood and pain,
in the cursive script
of every artery and vein
that throws its books and maps in the fire
like the posthumous effects
of an old affair.
And there, it sheds us like the apple
of an expiring art
that seeds
the myriad keyholes of the heart
with peeping toms
that lower their zeniths
on the star-crossed thresholds
before the promiscuous doors
of the moon-horned virgins
who wait like owls in the trees
for the x-rated version
of their venereal hagiographies
to be martyred into movies.
And as I said to myself only yesterday
life has a good eye
and anyone can say it and see it
in every detail of the passing scene
like water trying to hang on to its roots
but when the lens of the air
is angled for fire
like the third eye
of a deciduous choir
then it's one thing to see it
but it's altogether
a much more dangerously creative affair
even among the inane mundanities
when it takes more than the truth
and less than a lie
to be it.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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