I WANTED TO SING YOU A LULLABY
I wanted to sing you a lullaby
that would bring tears to the eyes of the stars.
I wanted to write you a creation myth
without any scars.
I wanted to make you a garden
that would give water on the moon
a reason to bloom.
I wanted to part the curtains of rain
on the distant blue hills
and show you again
through a broken windowpane
it’s always been your face behind the veils.
Remember when I used to connect the dots
and make up spontaneous zodiacs
of random fireflies
as if we were reborn
under a different sign
every moment on earth we spent together?
Time held its breath for us awhile
didn’t it?
We aged like astronauts.
And everywhere we stopped to kiss
along the paths that could lead anywhere
we made by walking without a care
for those who are truly religious
we were the direction of prayer.
When I first touched you
I was afraid to bruise the orchid
but after that first night of desire
I knew your body was fire
and I was its unrepentant heretic.
I remember the compassionate lustre
of your soft soft eyes
as if all the sidereal vastness of the universe
took mercy
and shone down on me
to let me know
that it wasn’t necessary
to approach your mystery with a telescope.
Before I met you
I was embalmed in my own birthwaters
like a sea of shadows on the moon.
You unravelled my rivers
and took the loose threads
like stray riffs of hair
and sitting down at the loom
played picture-music with them
late into the early hours of the morning.
And isn’t it strange
how the smallest most inconsequential things of the moment
are charged with a significance they derive
from the beauty of the field they happen in
like the first violins of the crocuses
breaking ground like the Queen of Hearts
on the rebound from her best mistakes
in an old garden bed
that had been left to go it alone with the dead?
You were the watershed.
I was the divining rod.
And between us.
The lightning.
Uprooting our nervous systems like weeds
and planting them on another planet
like the bloodroots of the tree of life with seeds
that opened their eyes like stars
trying to remember what it was they were dreaming
before they woke up at nightfall
and bloomed like street lamps.
Before I ever spoke to you
I used to choose my metaphors
like silver bullets I was loading into a
that was too afraid
to play Russian roulette with me
for fear of winning the round.
I was masked like the Lone Ranger on location
but on my own in the anywhere zone
of the green room
I was a cross dresser
in the feathers of Tonto.
I was Sitting Bull and the Buddha
enthroned on a lotus
with my crazy legs crossed
at a ghost dance
that summoned the rain like a seance.
And when we cried together
for the way the wind died
in defense of the freedom of the wilderness
our tears were just a way of tempering
the carbon and steel
of the Zen-edged swords
of the Diamond Cutter’s words
that kept things real.
I thought I was darkly enlightened
and had gone gone gone altogether gone beyond
over the event horizons of a black hole
but I can so easily remember that morning
I saw Venus in the dawn
and knew right then and there
that the tree of life
I sat under
waiting for a lightning strike
was neither a cross
nor a stake
and I may have seen the light
in my heart of hearts
but until my pulse
gave up playing the drums
to become a solo vocalist
singing alone like a nightbird
in a dark wood to you
I hadn’t heard the thunder
a feather makes when it falls.
The years go by
like the mirages of a waterclock
trying to make its way to the sea
through a desert in an hourglass
and you can read them
as the brave wavelengths
of a dragon in an urn of ashes
or understand them as I do
as the sacred first and last letters
of the undeciphered text
of birth and death
that is the story of everyone’s lives
once they realize they’re not the Rosetta Stone.
There’s hardly a moment
when a bird doesn’t fly by the window
like some memory of you
before it learned to bear the souls of the dead
like Persian angels
and Ojibway ghosts
after their bones had turned to dust
transmigrating to the dark groves
and threshed fields of the dead
in the bodies of
high overhead after
passing across the treeless expanses of the moon.
Not a moment
when the past doesn’t walk up to me
like a complete stranger
and tell me that I’ve changed.
But it’s ok
it’s ok
and I take time’s word for it that I have
knowing it gives it out like a boomerang
a starfish
a sunflower
a jinxed galaxy
pinwheeling like a prayer wheel through space
and all things will come back to me
like the memory of all my afterlives
in due course.
And all those weather warnings
that have stood by the window ever since
wondering if I could spot you one more time
walking toward me in the rain
as if you were keeping a fire alive in the deluge
like a flightless phoenix that had fallen from its nest
or your Bronze Age auburn hair
no matter how many waterclocks
answered the alarm
refused to go out.
All those jelly fish
and their long painful tendrils
have long ago risen into the stratosphere
like unmanned high altitude helium balloons.
And occasionally when I see
small threads of lightning
receding over the distant hills
I’m tempted to think
whatever flying carpets
we might make of the loose ends
and downed powerlines
of the snakepit
there’s always a snag
a rat behind the arras
or a king with an arrow in his eye
on a tapestry on a castle wall somewhere
that just has to pull one thread
like rip cord on a parachute
to make it all come undone.
Someone blinks.
Someone jumps.
And some come to realize
they never had a heart to begin with.
And for them it’s always recess in the playground.
And for me?
My best feelings just come to me
as you once did
out of the darkness
like fireflies after a storm
trying to guess which stars
belong to which constellations.
I sit on the crest of the hill of my heart
just above the moonlit fog in the valley
and watch them trying to get a fix on themselves
like starmaps and flowers
with the same immaculate sense of timing
that makes sure they don’t all bloom at once.
And I make up myths
according to the seasons
to go along with the shining
so I don’t belittle the night
by looking for reasons
when everywhere
it arrays its hidden jewels before me
like chandeliers of insight
that make me feel like dancing alone with a mirror.
Sometimes I take you in my arms like a telescope
and waltz with you
across the sea floors of the moon
in trines of time that turn and counterturn and stand
like a lense of the waters of life
that opened its third eye
on a equatorial mount with clock drive.
Take the romance out of the radiance
and all your left with is clarity.
Pellucid space.
Eyeless time groping its face in the mirror
as if all its crows’ feet and laugh lines
were an occult form of Braille.
My mother always said
I had the hands of a surgeon
or a classical pianist
when she turned them up like Tarot cards
to true the future
to the lifelines of a few random suggestions.
I play the keyboard and write the lyrics
for a one man band
and I can wield a painting knife
as easily as a scalpel
when I cut into the flesh of Alizarin Red
as if I were doing a heart transplant on the dead.
Some things almost come true
if you don’t look at a disguise
as a death mask of lies
made in the likeness of the truth
like you and I
like the eyes I saw in a dream once
peering through a mask of reality
as if they were not estranged
by what they knew of me
and I were not afraid
of being burnt in the fire
as I am now with a smile on my face
in this retroactive future
singing to their memory.
PATRICK WHITE
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