THE LILIES WERE OUT

THE LILIES WERE OUT

 

The lilies were out just a moment ago

but they’re already wilting like parachutes

hung up in their own powerlines.

They’ve gone underground

into the skulls of their bulbs

with thoughts of resurrection.

Beauty thaws and is gone in a vapour

and all that is left to attest to the passage

is an ambiguous lament on brown paper.

You can’t cry, eat, drink, dream, laugh, think,

drug, con, deal, steal, fight or fuck your way out of death.

And no matter how many times

I’ve tried to look death straight in the eye

I was always the first to blink.

No more wine of awareness to drink up

your body lets go of the cup

like a moon that’s turned its last page

or the open hand of the drunk slumped in the alley

where his fist disappears,

or your heart stops by the roadside

like a shoe that’s been missing for years.

Lately I’ve been cultivating a feel for emptiness.

Not the something was there and now it’s not kind,

and now I’m lethally depressed

by the postpartum effects

of an ontological miscarriage kind,

but looking deeply into space

as more a mirror of my face

than the light and the dark

that play upon it now

and realizing

the mindlessness of mind.

Somedays I carry the ashes

of my old self around

in the urn of a my skull

just to be respectful to the dead,

or I scatter myself on the wind, on a wave

from the precipice of some microcosmic abyss

and let the long sentence of the last word

disappear into a blackhole.

I’ve lost count of the worlds I’ve passed through

only to slough like the skins

of this serpentine dimension

whose chameleonic physics

makes my eyes break and run

like drops of water

leaking from the lenses

of an enlightened telescope.

And then there are times

I turn into a divining rod

just to taste the lightning

on the tip of my tongue

as if I were horned for it

by the crescents of the moon

to harmonize a mystic snakepit

with a heart that’s out of tune

with its own string theory of everything

like the dunce of a guitar in the corner

that hasn’t been played in years

because no one has the ears

to listen to the light.

I imagine myself after I’m dead

out there in the night somewhere,

invisible and aware,

mingled in the darkness

like salt in the sea

or stars in an eye

that’s given up looking for me.

Could be a ferry, an ark,

could be the pharoah’s moonboat

or the Flying Dutchman

or a raft of bones

that doesn’t float,

the black sail of a lunar eclipse,

or maybe even a sunken wreck

that makes it to the other side

but the only ship of death

I’m clinging to these days

is the solitary plank of a scuttled compass

drifting through the fog

like an empty lifeboat

toward a voice

that’s stopped calling

like a bird on a hidden hill.

You can’t turn death’s eye

like a jewel in the light

the way you can life

and expect to find your way back

over the last event horizon

that just blew you out

like a birthday candle

with your first breath

but I don’t blame anyone

for letting their eyes relax

until they stop looking at things.

Sometimes the facts are blood

on one too many blossoms

falling like ruined eyelids

and skies torn off the branch

who weren’t up for the dream

and couldn’t contain the scream.

It’s not much different from being born.

Still, I like to bite deep into the apple

not to enhance some original perversity

I yearn for like a heretic

his unwitnessed martyrdom

in the sacred fires of the night

burning like a religion he hasn’t grounded yet,

but to hasten the glow of life in the gathering sap

by adding my eyes to the mix.

I want to taste clarity

like an intimate dimension in everything.

And even if I am as lost and startled

as anyone ever has been,

still, what’s that

if not a chance to explore

the mysterious fear

of standing before an open door?

Who knows? Maybe it will be me that answers.

 

PATRICK WHITE