I'M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’m learning to dance with eclipses

and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows

weeping rivers of acid rain that hang

like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains

or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life

is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,

and the wolf that came once a week

to teach me to sing underwater grew old

and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.

I don’t know what I want from the walls

I’ve designated heritage battlefields

with an array of awards and degrees

and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,

but everything I ask for seems to make

terrorists of the lamps

and the single moth

knocking himself out trying to crash into flames

against the vanilla fez of the shade

is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter

my eyes have congealed into a still-life

with antique ax-handles, a menagerie

of scarred paint, the landscape of the moon

humped and bubbled in contaminated crimson,

I haven’t seen anything for disposable eras

I wanted to drink from a skull. While the shadows and ashes

discuss what they have in common, hoping

for a marriage of convenience,

the blue night sifts my constellations through a spider-web

looking for the penumbral tear of the last life I shed

longing to avoid this one

like black shoe-polish on the pillowcase of a swan.

Even the absurdities have looped into platitudes

and petty thieves have stolen

the mask of the mouth in the imperial mirror

that keeps telling me

I’m the slumlord of my own ambition,

the blighted rind of the moon withering in the garbage,

the sloughed skin of a serpentine condom full of stars.

And how am I to understand my loneliness

and the fools I deploy to deface it

except as one more yearning octopus

with arms like hollyhocks

trying to cross the highway without a line of credit?

I should be bolder, smarter, more mineral

than light, my bones recast in gunsmith plastic,

and my heart a leaking hand grenade, white phosphorus,

unpinned and ready to hurl like a violent dove

through the slutty dreamcatchers in the windows

of strategic brothels, I should stand up

to the apostrophes of Armageddon

and handcuff my voice to a pair of quotation marks

and send all my friends bouquets of radical placards

until my voice is released from isolation, my blood

from intensive care, my mind from death row,

and I’m paid all the back wages I’m owed for the use of my innocence.

When the wind decides to defeat the leaves with poison

and the charcoal women burn their tongues

like meat on the grill of their dinner-bell smiles,

their charms all smoke and cocktail tears,

I should have the metal to drop

depth-charges on the willow cruising the shadows for convoys,

and depose the cult of scorpions marching south

that tried to brainwash me into believing

I’ve aged like wounded shoes.

PATRICK WHITE