WRITING LOVE POEMS

WRITING LOVE POEMS

 

Writing love poems like belated elegies

to people who died before I was born.

Missing the future as if it were already gone.

I’ve sweetened my blood like the wines of time

but it’s time that lives on

like the wine-dark sea of a blind poet.

I imagine my way in and out of things like air

and every day I wear a different atmosphere

and every night I’m naked as the moon

through the window of a sleepless room.

My dreams are ashamed of me

but my eyes can’t help but see

what isn’t there.

I’m a kind of dark energy

that shapes things behind the scenes

by pouring the stars out

like serpents of hot metal

flowing out of black matter

like ores that burn to shed their skin like light

the night’s outgrown faster than space.

And I don’t know if folly is wiser than pain

but I have suffered variously enough

to know that if you’re not wounded in life by a sword

you’ll be wounded by a plough

and that a bell can be a weapon of mass destruction

that can break the spirit of the most explosive cannon shell

that ever tried to make a lasting impact

on the bodies and souls of the innocent.

I’m not absolutely indifferent

but even the laws of relativity

feel like strangers in a large enough frame of reference

where there’s no starproof roof you can take shelter under

like classical physics

or goldfish bowl of celestial spheres

that changes the water every day like your tears.

And I’m Zen enough

not to stuff the impersonal secret of the universe

into my sentimental little heart

and there isn’t a dragon on drugs

that would venture into the unholy places I’ve been

where just to have eyes is obscene

and to look upon anything with compassion

where even the enlightened are unclean

is to hear the sound of one hand clapping

like the Buddha in the way

you killed with detachment

like a spiritual version of gangrene.

I uphold the dignity of a foolish human being

like a royal blood-line

that died out species ago

like the Sahara covered in trees

before the big freeze that crawled toward Bethlehem

like an ice sphinx older than water.

I’m a starter civilization in a skull-bound cave

scrawling paint on the walls

like grafitti from a spray can

outlining the negative space of an amputated hand

to prove I was here and human

in the presence of everything I am

that’s perpetually missing.

I think of life as a siren

that sits on top of the world mountain

like a rock in the middle of the cosmic sea

that sings to me like a fountain to a bird

to risk everything I’ve heard

in the precocious silence of my assent

as if that were always what my life was meant to say.

Yes to it all.

It’s beautiful.

It roots in us like lightning in a dark heart.

It kills us into itself like life perishing into life

like firewalks and waterclocks

we had to pass over

to get to the other side

like chickens and bodhisattvas.

It rocks the stillness at the center of things

like a blackhole in a guitar

that adjusts its strings to the light

and sings of sorrows that weep their way through the night

like wounded mindstreams

losing themselves in oceanic visions

of worlds within worlds within sight

of a drowning man

whose eyelids overturned like lifeboats

that couldn’t save him from his dreams.

 

PATRICK WHITE