The Silence Has Grown So Magnanimous In The Night
The silence has grown so magnanimous in the night
it encompasses all of space and time
in a palace of dark matter
with light beaming through
the cracks of the planets
that have been stacked into walls
like the skulls the Mongols heaped up
like the foundation stones of Samarkand,
Olmecs in Teotihuacan,
or on a gentler note, Golgotha.
Upon one skull you can build a church.
And an Orphic skull might look like
a dead moon to ordinary eyes
but when your inner vision waxes to full
you realize when it drops its jaw
as if it were gaping at something transfixing
to prophesy what comes next
as you asked it to
life is swarming all over it
like black ants over the globular clusters
of the white peonies abandoned by a farmhouse garden.
Two twenty a.m. and I’m sitting
on the tie of a high train trestle
trying not to get slivers in my ass
and black creosote all over
my last clean pair of jeans.
I’m dangling my feet in the abyss below me
like a kid gone fishing in a Norman Rockwell painting
and positioning my arms like the legs of a French easle
so I can tilt my head back like a telescope
on an alta-azimuth mount
and look at the explosive array of stars before me
without falling off my vertiginous perch
because my gerrymandered tripod
couldn’t keep its bearings straight.
It’s a mistake to count on a crutch for a rung
on this endless extension ladder
on the back of a fire-engine
because it couldn’t reach
the windowsills of the stars
missing a dimension or two
to reach the woman in the moon
with her hands up against the glass
screaming for someone to come to her rescue
as the windows melt faster than they can weep.
Stars are to me
what cocaine is to a mirror
in a reflecting telescope with clock-drive.
I get a rush every time I rail them through my eyes,
shoot them under my tongue
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poem by Patrick White
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