Sunday, November 22, 2009

YOU CAN CALL IT AN EMOTIONAL LIFE

YOU CAN CALL IT AN EMOTIONAL LIFE

 

You can call it an emotional life

but all you’re trying to be

is someone else’s weather.

Right candle. Wrong flame.

You want to blow their clouds away

and reorganize their hurricanes

like daisy chains to make it all better.

You can come on like a Gulf Stream

getting warmer and wetter

as you approach these continental coasts,

but I’m an older ice-age

than you are a spring thaw

and irrepressibly colder than you are hot.

And it’s not much of a planet

that hasn’t got deserts on it

no one can survive.

Your body is full of grace

and there are wings for the serpent

who drinks from your well,

and all over the moon

aromatic fires flower in your oases

as if the night were a season of its own.

But I can remember when the sphinx could cry

and if you were to know me

as truly as you say you do

you’d know why.

 

PATRICK WHITE