If The Bread Got Any Harder
If the bread got any harder I’d be buttering stone,
and it’s morning again, cooler than yesterday
that licked my face like a dog
with the mosquito-breeding breath of a reeking ditch;
and maybe there’s a cabal of stars or confidential angels,
a thirteenth house of the zodiac
that no one’s ever heard of, with a garden of black suns
overrun by weeds, blooming along the walkway
up to the sagging porch, a place
where the dispossessed gather to own each other, a hidden harmony
that manages my affairs along with the stars and the ants
and knows with the confidence of a nightwind off the sea
that I am supposed to be here, broke, aging, alone,
dreading the landlord at the door like the beginning
of another ice-age, cataract, polar cap,
the shifting of a continental plate
as I wait like a fault in apprehension
of the final jolt that will tear me down.
And all of this in the name of poetry in a world
that holds the tail of the new moon like an old black bull in one hand
and guided aimlessly over the unfurrowed fields
sows microchips and seedless oats, breeds featherless chickens
and patents animals and diseases, pierced by the swords
of seven mad lucidities with no known antidotes.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not crying. I’m not pleading for anything.
I’ve got the pride of a pearl in a scabby oyster about me,
the indefensible dignity of a pyramid built on quicksand,
the air of an exiled king of shadows
living in patrician poverty to uphold me in my solitude,
and this ruinous occupation of deriving an earthly excellence
out of my sinking like a mine, always deeper, in search of the ores
that glow in the night like marrow in the bones of buried constellations:
that’s enough of a labour to keep me dancing in my ashes,
enough of a continuity to believe I might still be a road.
I do it for the crazy, vicious, ignorant, greedy humans
whose lives are only a ribbon of blood in the water
that boils them into a feeding frenzy, cannibals on crack,
tearing themselves and the world apart because
even they sense, wincing into solutions like straitjackets,
they’re a prelude to disaster. And I sing for the rare orchids
that are never seen, the wild asters at the edge of the garbage dump,
the green flame of the blade of grass,
hotter than acetylene, that burns with life through the concrete
until it parts like the Red Sea for an outlawed prophet of one.
There will always be people
who know how to break their hearts like bread
and I write to be worthy of them, to remember them
the way the genes recall, however faintly,
the genius of their last selection, the first time a flower had sex,
and everyone’s eyes have been the colour
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poem by Patrick White
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