I’VE HAD ELECTROMAGNETIC SEXUAL ATTRACTIONS

I’ve had electromagnetic sexual attractions

to women I didn’t even like

and as I got to know them despite myself

felt I was mud-wrestling

in a squalor of mutual disrespect.

And I was the one who loosing.

Anacondas squeezing me in a heart lock.

I’ve seen root fires burn underground

through ten miles of cedars for a week

down the whole length of a valley

and no one know for sure

if they’d finally been put out.

And I’ve often thought

growing up angry bored and deprived

and caught in the emotional crossfire

of my father’s and mother’s annihilation

in an era of clashing Titans

and cannibalistic ogre fathers

on the look-out for Olympian sons

they could swallow like a swaddled stone in a single gulp

the reason I dared the thrill and danger of breaking taboos

my Icarian plunges into seas of awareness

was that it was a revolutionary’s way

of acting out against the authority of my own mind.

Light a candle in church for me

and I’d blow it out

as if I’d just gotten into bed

with the forbidden key to my freedom.

More of the immensities and intensities of human life

are encountered in the dark

than are met on the street in daylight.

Dark dark dark they all go into the dark.

Yes. T. S.

But for a lot of different reasons.

Mine was the desecration of old idols

myself among them.

Outlaws pariahs misfits and heretics.

It’s ironic now to look back and think

if you weren’t an outcast of some kind

you were cast out

like the shard of a broken mirror

that didn’t fit the puzzle

of a slowly evolving vision of life

where the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

You weren’t a grand master

in the dark arts

and ardent discipline

of disobedience.

You didn’t know how to obey in reverse.

Your childhood hadn’t progressed

through the initial seven stations of futility and despair

so you didn’t know how to keep faith with the faithless.

I sometimes think that’s why

so many of my relationships ever since

have been misalliances of dark matter and light.

The parities of mass and function might look the same

but you’ve got to check the charge and spin

before you can be sure that this is love

and not annihilation.

Synchronous happenings in a charged particle field.

Or love playing chicken in a hadron particle collider

at nearly the speed of light

But hey that’s not to say

that there aren’t some women

worth evaporating in a Wilson Cloud Chamber for

like a God-particle in a mystic cloud of unknowing.

Vapour trails and skid marks

that leave their mark on the world

like comets of cosmic graffiti

spray-bombed under a bridge

by gangland trolls

to warn everyone whose turf they’re on.

An urban form of land naming.

The writing on the wall.

And what’s annihilation anyway

when you turn the jewel in a different light

but the unsung beginning of another universe

that couldn’t be any worse than this one?

Hail to the dark muses behind the veils

of my most ferocious inspirations.

Evolution consults the mutants to know what to do next.

For some the dice are loaded like chromosomes and genes.

For others they’re hexed

like dead albatrosses

caught in the rigging of shipwrecks

that have been down so long it looks like up to them

if you can remember what happened to Richard Farina.

Killer-whales in the Oak Bay Marina

making a big splash for the tourists.

Killer-whales waiting for baby seals

to slide off the rocks like careless mermaids

or hookers in rehab.

Maybe it’s just a matter of taste

and learning how to say grace

whether you wear a neck yoke

or stay underground like a missing link

when everyone’s enslaved by a food chain

for reasons that are as far beyond them

as Jamaica is from the Ivory Coast.

The difference between a domestic pet

and an exiled species of wildlife.

And maybe that’s why I often think

poetry’s just a loveletter

you’re writing on death row

to someone you’ve never met.

O firefly!

O synteretic spark!

O fairy dust mingled

in the soot of brooding chimneys

like the birds that keep getting caught in their throats

like songs they were meant to sing

words they were meant to say

but didn’t

I can taste the sun shining at midnight

and the eclipses that have freaked your honey

in the hives of killer bees

with the fragrance of a dangerous elixir

it’s a greater madness than wisdom to resist.

Lao-tzu says a sane man prefers heaven

but it’s heaven that courts insanity.

Sane long enough

and the fountain of youth grows old

waiting for Ponce de Leon.

The darker the muse the deeper the insight

and the further you have to go for stars

to keep the night happy and high.

Forbidden people like forbidden things.

No danger in the writer

and the reader’s got nothing to fear.

But it’s the one percenter death’s-head patched

to the executioner’s hood of the cobra

the hourglass on the black widow’s thorax

and the irisless eyes of the great white shark

that don’t make a sound

that catches the ear

and sends a shudder through the blood

like the poison and the potion

of a dangerous love affair.

It’s not the cause of the injury

but the depth of the wound

that’s the measure of whether

you’re just another

superficial predator in a petting zoo

or your feelings went deep enough into you

it’s less painful to leave the arrowhead in

and learn to live with it like a second heart

than it is to take it out.

If the rose lacks thorns.

If the mountain goat

has lost its figs and horns.

If the lines of a poem don’t sting

like a lover’s scratches on your back

or the striations of passionate glaciers

across the Canadian Shield

who can make love to you for years

submitting to all your desires

for fur and fire and food

without ever once yielding

anything of themselves

but tears and lakes and rivers of farewell

when things begin to warm up.

If the wolf isn’t mauled by the moon

it’s not high enough on the mountain

to be inspired by its wound

to intrigue the indifferent muse

on the far side of its agony

with the odes it writes

to the lunacy of its longing.

PATRICK WHITE