I ENDORSE

I endorse other people’s attempts to love;

never my own,

accounting myself unloveable:

some perversity of childhood

that wants to square the moon,

an infernal-heretical aspect

too convivial with the blind watchman

at the nightgate

that has never been closed to anyone.

Long ago somehow I entered

like a black star on a pilgrimage

to the ancient shrines of the waterlilies,

hoping their ubiquitous openess

reserved a stair for my tribute

as well as that of the brighter lights

gathered more conventionally

into their tribal constellations.

I don’t know what fate I betoken,

but I must be the illegitimate son

of some kind of shining

or what are all these roses

that drowned like eclipses

doing in my blood,

pleading with me

to sever the threads

that sewed their eyelids shut

with a virgin needle?

I don’t know what women see

when they look at me

but I always feel like an oasis on the moon

on the dark side in the beginning

before heaven ruins everything

with the mythically-inflated protocol

of a pygmy on a dragon-throne

when I look at them.

Sometimes I’m bitter,

remembering all the beautiful mundanities

that were later transformed

into visionary terrors,

the indelible eternities

in a smear of lipstick on a kleenex

rumpled like an unseasonal lotus

on the kitchen table after she left,

the endearing love-letters that were folded

like the severing steel of a Damascene sword.

I can’t remember how many times

I cut my throat on the moon

before I learned to sing to myself in the dark

like a bird born without wings

or fought in the immaculate solitude

of my own igneous depths

not to loose faith with the dream in the wine

I drank like my own reflection

from an iron flower.

Too changed by the struggle

to claim I endured,

and fool I may be,

or irrelevantly listed among the ignorant,

but I still can’t concede

that joy is the preface

to a biography of scars

that aren’t worth the torment

of the delirium

that inks these fangs of light with life.

The mind is its own experience.

There is no self

to adjudicate the arraying of the world.

Is love any different?

PATRICK WHITE