Monday, October 13, 2008

YESTERDAY THE MOON

YESTERDAY THE MOON


Yesterday the moon was a swan on gentle water.

Tonight it comes up like a used ashtray

somebody stubbed their eyes out in.

I could be a nightbird in a bad dream

and slip myself like a message

from a distant constellation under your door

but there’s something tedious about the stars

mindlessly spinning overhead era after era

like a loom in a sweat factory flatlining.

I resist the sway of the metaphor

by staying rooted in the mud of the mindstream.

Happiness just happens. Happ, an Icelandic word,

(remember Snori Sturlesson and the Viking skalds?)

means luck, grace, good fortune

but like a stone, like a planet

you keep turning yourself over to look for it.

You can crack your emotions open

for another thousand lifetimes

like fortune cookies

that have had their tongues torn out

and never find it.

First and last, the moon

may be an Arabic sabre,

the beginning and breaking of a long fast,

the alpha and omega of extremes,

a holy war,

but you never heed the phases in between

as you live from cover to cover

like the front and backdoor

of every heresy and revelation

that eventually shreds you like paper in an abandoned embassy.

I don’t know what your heart’s wired to anymore,

your body still supple and pliable

as C-4 under a bridge,

and you’re always dangerously appealing

when you let your candles dance with your scalpels

in a lethal alliance of science and art

that pushes down hard on my libido like a plunger

that wants to set you off

like a real apocalypse on a Halloween night

tricked out like the treat of the bedsheet ghost that haunts me. Boo.

Sex is an exorcist.

But with you,

it drove the human out of the demon

and charged the darkness with raving angels

that fell like snow on a furnace.

If I didn’t know any better

I’d say love was a delusion of snakeoil

and all its fire-eyes, the testing tines of its flame,

soot on a lamp, why nothing is seen here

expect through a glass darkly.

Or maybe it’s a disease you take

to get through the cure?

But I’m not a saint.

I won’t paint my window to improve the view.

I like to look clearly into things

until there’s no seer, no seen,

just this whisper of seeing like water

in the voice of a bottomless well

that drinks like a dragon from the skull of an ominous moon.


PATRICK WHITE