A DAY OF WRITING

to Alysia, myself, Alysia, to the night rain,

trying to hang the universe on the tip of an eyelash

without blinking, pulling handfuls of the stagnant dimensions

of my apparent magnitude off

like the dead undergrowth

of a plausible star to try as an antidote

to the junkmail perfume samplers

that keep heaping themselves up on my doorstep

like the fake leaves of a tree somewhere on acid,

mini-nirvanas that reek in the dark of enlightened snake-oil.

Tonight I like the windows black, starless,

but keep the company mellow with my rendition

of musical lamps, one lightbulb less everytime

someone asks me what I feel most when I write.

I look at the trinity of faceless wolves on my easel

that accuse me of eyes, and punish myself by taking note

they’ve moved since I last looked at them,

and there’s a poppy of blood on the snow that’s atavistic.

O Nietzsche, how wrong can you be, though

I like the way you sublimated your rage

into the colic of apoplectic, apocalyptic prophecy.

I don’t know if the world’s bad enough to deserve you,

or if chaos has miscarried at the birth of your dancing star,

but blessings on your head and house, anyway, wherever you are.

Alysia, willow, Druidic trees, the French river Alyse in Arles

where Van Gogh sliced off his ear in self-disgust

and gave it to a hooker like a premature embryo

swaddled in a gesture of genuine tenderness

and when has it ever not been this way,

brothels and asylums and expressionist reliquaries

shredding their smiles in the spokes of a cosmic wheel

like a last-minute embassy over-run by the radical passions

of a fashionable artistic solitude, the whole world with a headache

or on the rag, and even the flies that could cover the earth

forty-seven feet deep in flies every breeding day of their lives,

not in the mood for all that generative commotion.

Genius is a different kind of lonely, the third wing on a bird

that doesn’t know what to sing to the dawn or why,

when the other two are getting by just fine

in the usual sky that hurls them into the usual ecstasy,

the esteemed feathers of the coincidence of the contradictories.

The important thing is learning how to rewire your eye

to your heart, not your brain, so when they ask you

what you were writing about before they came

you can hand them a black, tight-lipped envelope

sealed with the impressionable bloodwax of your pain,

captioned by the resident emptiness of a paper airplane

so that they can go away deluded and delighted

that you’re the one that’s insane, not them,

and that for once upon a time as long as life

they’re the ones who aren’t living their death in vain

and yes you can use rhyme in a poem if you want to.

But what a price for such a little kindness;

refusing to endow your wolves with eyes

so they can spot the typos in their blindness.

PATRICK WHITE