Savage Ashtray Poem by Patrick White

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Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada

Savage Ashtray



In the early grey morning trying to tune the tinny rain
to the fleeting keys of the pentatonic birds,
a bad musician lost in the labyrinth of its ear
like a spider or a sodden note with too many sad flags
caught in the torn stave of its saturated web,
I arrive like a messenger from far coasts
and the exotic nightlife of the bright cities of the stars,
having crossed the passionate ocean of the poppy
that dared her maiden voyage in a bottle.
And I say to myself, because no one is listening, behind seawalls
of black coffee and rolled cigarettes
because I own no part of the sky, no
fraction of the leaking house I’m quartered in
with a library of pleading guestbooks I refuse to sign:
look for the secret gold in the crumbling foundation stone,
pull yourself out of the rock like a charmed sword
or the mad ore of a sad crown in a kingdom of one.
But pauper that I am, I’ve never managed more
than an empty throne, and the antiquated office chair I sit in
was crafted from the timber of burnt windowsills
I rescued like eyelashes from the cooling ashes
of my last revision of the schools of weeping glass
who loved the flaring of the mystic arsonist I used to be.
Whole generations can die in the pause
between one heartbeat and the next and I don’t remember
when it was that I woke up older than the rain
that once derailed my affair with a married sphinx,
but yesterday is not a bruise I want to wear tomorrow
and today is not wise enough to guess the riddle of my sorrow.
More amused than bitter in the expanding interim
of my cosmic solitude, there are graves ahead
I feel compelled to answer from the irrefutable depths
of the opulent silence that owes my voice
a god and a name. And there are roads that I must lead home again,
adopted rivers that have never met their natural headwaters,
and valleys full of fireflies I must endow like brides
before the last crescent of the autumn moon
severs the fruit from the wombs of their lachrymose guitars.
And I am weary and scared and inconsolably alone
in the stern mirrors of the morning that reflect my face
like an apology that came too late to make a difference,
or bridge the distance between one beginning
and the next. This is my life, I tell myself, and hope I’m lying;
this is the blue stairwell of my irremediable longing
to suffer the unattainable until I am wholly transformed
in a single embrace, to die with eyes, to heal the wounded beast of coal
so much like nightfall in my blood with salves of flowing diamond,
or crawl from the ashes of miscreant angels with wings.
This is my life on earth as it is, and this who I am in the changing,
a lightning rod in a makeshift morgue
trying to raise myself from the vast surrender of the dead
I was born among to weld their chains to the clouds
in a flash of liberation. And this is my life in the ruins
of darker aspirations that squandered its victory bells
in useless assaults against the instransigent walls of heaven,
the adamant gates of hell. And should I now deny
out here in the open with my small army of masks
depleted by desertion, what I haven’t even admitted to myself:
there never was a way to wage peace against a world
collegiately braced for war. There never was a way
to campaign for love and survive the treaties and truces
that snarled like poison kisses on the cheek of the moon
I could not turn, the bitter cups and skulls and crazy wines
of the sacrificial knives it kept refilling like a garden. So now
there’s this exordium of islands and exiles like me
buried every step of the wayless way ahead
in our own footprints, casualties of the blessings and bullets that missed.
This is my life, and I will not decry it like a stormbird
off the precipitous coasts of savage ashtrays
nor haunt the shore with reading lamps to jackal through the salvage.

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Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada
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