IDLING LIKE A PENDULUM

IDLING LIKE A PENDULUM

 

Idling like a pendulum in the abyss

or the moon on a locket,

a lingering kiss,

a sunny afternoon

in timeless childhood

where I’m still swinging on a gate

looking down the back lane,

a ribbon of dust and defiant weeds,

waiting for you to return

like my next breath

but you never did.

In the years since

I’ve sat on the curbs

of the fiercest cities

waiting for parades that never came

though I can hear my heart

warming up in the distance

like the thunder of an approaching drum.

Time has pulled the fangs of the storm

that used to strike

the tree like lightning

and the hidden serpent

under the shuddering leaves

it used for eyelids

is a now a toothless flower

gumming the air like a spent wick.

I have endured

the extremities of your absence

as if I had been born without eyes,

waiting for the dark side of the moon

to turn around and look at me.

I have broken bitter bread

around the oil-drum crematorium

that became of my heart

when the fires of my anger and desire

flared up like volcanic lilies

and consumed everything

and everyone I ever thought

I could not afford to live without.

I have stood around the lean flames

of demonic communities,

more shadow than man,

shaking in the cold,

and understood

the sympathetic ambiguities of evil

and the internal subtleties of the snakepit

knotted together like a fist of ice

in the face of a cruel winter.

Your absence was space without gravity

and perhaps I should have known

there was no way

I could become a stranger to myself

and escape you by breaking

through the black mirror you left behind

like the last thought of a homeless mind

as a sign of nothing.

You went off chasing visions

and I’m still looking

for the source of my eyes.

 

PATRICK WHITE