Bitter
Bitter, bitter, bitter, the taste of men and the curdled perfumes
of their women putting on weight like the moon
and the gaudy hopelessness of their ejaculant children
living in the extinct carapace of a condemned volcano; bitter the lies
they whisper in sleep in dreams to the gods they keep
like spare rooms with skeleton keys
to their public coffins and closets. And bitter the nightwind
that vipers over the schooled sands of their cities
looming a harp of astringent acids into the whole cloth
of a funeral shroud, a body bag to contain the miscreance of their music.
Face after face after face, among orchards, planets, waves,
how many come to fruition, how many fall from ripeness
in unknown places, elicit arms, looking up into the sun that wined them
and sent them away without tears, mysterious sugars
in the fleets of their heart, and seeds, and green
superstitious stars tangled in the lifelines of their unmooring,
to unknown exorcisms on barbarous shores that fear them?
Their blood unspooled like a ribbon for a gift
they never gave, their blood, a scarlet noose of spectral chromosomes
slumped across a bough on the tree of their bitter knowledge
to lynch the lean thief and the ardent stranger
to the rigorous sorrows of their vaporous lustrations; bitter the fate
of the poor as they wait in a traffic jam of genes for the lights to change,
and bitter the restless, blood-drenched soil that receives them
like an embassy overwhelmed by the emergency of their arrival.
Are the paupers of dawn brighter in the root than in the flower,
is there no gentleness left in the flaring poppy to console them,
no milk that isn’t soured, no crumb of light in the pantry
to redeem the crushed heartscapes of a disinfected dream?
Bitter the monstrous sterilities of affluence
that dance on their graves like shovels full of deranged stars
elated by a fate unworthy of their shining, and bitter the church
they pearl around the lie of their filth
to convince the maggot of wings. That song is dead in the mouths of men,
that song is rock that once transformed the desert into roses
and gathered eyes like bees, like poets to their unfolding,
and bitter the aftermath of forgeries that heed the call
but will not answer the singer in the well
hoarse with mysteries in supple tongues
that confound the fallen towers with echoes, thieves, and voiceless birds.
And bitter to know this, bitter to say this, bitter
to discover this truth on the wrecked shores of the heart
the corpse of a beached dolphin suffocating under its own dead weight,
betrayed by the Judas-needle of too many messianic norths.
And there shall be no respite from the pettiness
of the enflamed parasite grown fanatical with the consumption of power,
no grace in the waltz of the tide that wears its gown of oil
like bitter weeds and formic nettles to a funeral ball
celebrating the providential death of excellence, no refuge
from the scorching wind that burns the eyes like glass
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
