GNATS IN THE SUNSET

Gnats in the sunset,

drunk on the light,

women like comets and vapour trails everywhere

flaring across a skullful of sky

like the omens of a toppled throne,

like the inspired slashes of a mad painter,

the deathbed confessions of an expired mirror,

but no planet with the blue rose

of a sustainable atmosphere in sight,

nothing worth naming, no heart

that isn’t the black hole of an eclipsed pearl

mired in stars like quicksand.

So many the gate to a garden they’ll never enter.

So many waiting for the mountain

to circle the burning cloud, so many

choking to death on their half of the wishbone

that got caught in their throats like a harp

they once tore apart

like the crescents of the moon

going off like mutually aimed triggers.

This one smiles like a birdnet

hunting swans on the moon,

and this one bruised her lily into a brass trumpet

to announce the doom

of the last days of her Vesuvian lover,

and there are glass shadows of women

splintering everywhere like the uncandled chandeliers

of a black ice storm, and women with eyes

like sad olives trying to root in Antarctica,

and scorpions tattooing their own hearts

with hate literature

and lethal mushrooms, angels of death

who suddenly come up in the night

and tempt you to page like oxygen

through the first draft of their gills,

idling like the thresholds of an hallucinogenic sea,

for you to slip into an abyss of agony and longing

like the lost voice of a radioactive love-letter

in a readdressed envelope.

Better to be an empty boat

unmoored like a ghost from the moon

than snag your blood

on the thorn of the weeping nightrose

shedding like eyelids and forbidden keys

in the secret doorways of her open wound.

You’ll end up trying

to paste your life together

in an abandoned embassy

that’s lost its diplomatic immunity

from the petals of the infinite sentence

in the bridal orchard

denuded like a blizzard in a wastebasket

shadowing the moon penumbrally

as she puts you through her phases

like a sky encoded with stars in a paper-shredder.

PATRICK WHITE