Monday, December 19, 2011

AND WHO CONSIDERS THE BATS


AND WHO CONSIDERS THE BATS

And who considers the bats
smoked out of hotel attics
with cedar boughs and burning buckets
so much like the poor; how
they move from house to house
like shoes in a second hand store,
diasporas of worn leather, well-heeled
by the walking of others,
their spinal cords unlaced
and their tongues torn out like wings?
If your heart is still a sapphire
in the orbit of a wedding ring
around a black hole
brighter than the light, if
your wounds give up their dead at night
to crawl into bed with you
like moons around a fractured planet,
afraid of intimate strangers,
and a sorrow you once met on a blind date
still puts bouquets of flashlights on your grave,
you will notice such things:
mothers abandoned like winter wheelbarrows,
tripedal dogs who were third
on the burnt matchsticks of their limbs,
the bruised violins of teen-age girls
whose tears fall like lost earrings,
old men with the courage of bridges
shaking like ladders of bone
at the crooked rungs of schoolyard crosswalks.
If your blood is a sullen radiance
that didn’t make the charts, a ribbon
in the hair of a black comet
that passes like midnight at noon,
and your mind is a star
that’s turned its blazing down
to be softened by life and if
you’re still greeted like an affectionate defeat
in the thirteenth house of candles
condemned by the fire marshals
of a safety-minded zodiac
armed with alarms and emergency exits,
then your heart is probably tender and good,
a mushroom with gills, a loaf of bread
that rises from the spores and yeasts
of the kinder ovens and quiet shrines
that bell your best emotions; and you notice things
that few but the broken can cherish,
charmed and enchanted things
in the lost and found of the sea
that no one ever claims, lives
that went to the wrong address
and wound up in the dead letter bin, bent pins
in the crack of the floor
that once put galaxies on the map,
the dolls of aging prostitutes
with chipped marbles for eyes
propped up like scars and childhood choirs
on the bestial floor of the bed. You notice
the rose arbors and overgrown bowers
that look up like old ladies with garden trowels
whenever you pass the mountainous gaps
of the missing pickets on the gate.
And because you are wide with empathy,
your heart an open life-boat,
you can feel the insulted shadows
of the dejected lovers
toying with each other
like the posthumous menus
of the things that they’ll leave on their plate;
you can hear the lyric in the leftovers
and thumbing the edge
of their sharp good-bye, relate.
And only those who have been cut like a lemon
into a rosette of bitter windowpanes
can know the loneliness of buttons
that bloom like carefully guarded flowers
on the shirt of stinging nettles
wearing the overdressed loser in the corner.
And if not for the nights alone
in a labyrinth of cheap apartments,
when you slept skinless in a swarm of blackflies
that bit like thought,
your body smeared with berries of blood
and your mind radically dwarfed
by the rumours of small exterminations; if not
for the empty cartridge shells of lipstick
you wasted on your suicide,
shooting at a face in the mirror
that dodged better than you aimed,
how could you now decipher
the cuneiform of razorblades
scored like a tragic journal
in the wet clay
of the junkie beauty queen’s thighs; how
could you ever lament
the lucky charms that have fallen
from the stigmata of her bracelets?

PATRICK WHITE

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