AN ABSTRACT SENSE OF BEAUTY

AN ABSTRACT SENSE OF BEAUTY

 

An abstract sense of beauty

is the secret wish of a closet gelding.

There’s nothing abstract about it when it passes

and a rose doesn’t come with its own fingertips.

It isn’t a theory that’s pressed to your lips.

The senses are always autobiographical.

There’s nothing numerical about a woman’s hips

and no wine in the grapes of the cosines

that touch her skin like tangents

or the sick fingers

of great stupid lumbering books

bellowing on like dying dinosaurs about S-curves.

In the war between line and colour

heart and mind

mammal and lizard

skin and idea

sex and death

put your money down on cadmium red.

Wild poppies spread like fire through your head

and even if you’re ashes in the locket of an urn

doesn’t mean you’re dead

doesn’t mean the phoenix has forgotten how to burn

or that ashes are anymore absolute

than good weather that’s taken a bad turn.

Let reason mark the passage of time

like an abstract season with a shady sundial

timing the geese as they return

overhead at night in the spring

like breads on the rosaries of the dead.

It’s your ears that receive the greeting first

not your head

and your eyes that search the darkness in vain

like midnight at noon for signs

and your skin that maps the places they’ve been

like stars at your fingertips

and your tongue that tastes

new water walking on the cool night air

like a ghost returning to an unburied bone

or the moon when it draws its reflection out

like a sword from stone

and magic adumbrates design.

If you think of your senses

as five windows on the world

an apparition of ideas peers through

like the face of longing caught in the curtains

and you feel your blood turn to glass

in a botched attempt

to clarify your rubies into diamonds

and burn like ice in your translucency

wash yourself clean of yourself

like an Arctic thaw

and catching up like river to its long delinquency

throw a stone through your cataracts on the inside

and see for yourself

the true colour of thought isn’t clarity

it’s as lilac as Mercury

in a Piscean sunset in spring

when shy violets bloom like bruises through the snow

and reason is green with envy

it isn’t wearing

Joseph’s coat

like a rainbow

at the bottom of a dry well.

The abstract lyric

of the god caught in the machine

like a spider tangling kites in its own ideas

is the swansong

of the emotional hysterics

of a bird caught in a dark chimney

thick with the moody creosote

of insufficient fires.

And long before God said

let there be light

or in the beginning was the word

red was already a fossil of the night

embedded in a chameleon’s memory

that burned like maples

in the Gatineau hills in the fall

before abstract beauty

began showing up at its own funeral

like a face without eyes

that missed the blue of the flowers

it pissed out like April showers in a mirror

all over the vertical feet of its own conceit

as the ears of the hydra-headed hollyhocks

listened discretely from their watchtowers

for the tiny hooves of purple rain on tin

to begin jamming

like the sunburst of a classical tintinabulum

with the electric blue riffs of an unrehearsed first violin.

PATRICK WHITE