I LEFT YOUR IMAGE OF ME SHINING
I left your image of me shining
just where you wanted it
in that glass menagerie
of broken mirrors
you’ve hung from the ceilings
like chandeliers
like constellations of frozen tears
in the thirteenth house
of the misbegotten
on the wrong side of the tracks
off the beaten paths of the zodiacs
that sometimes like to go slumming down
here
when the sun shines at midnight
and the moon’s out of town.
I left the light on
but that star is long gone
past these extremities of shining
into the abyss of an unforeseeable
future
that disappears into its own
illumination
like an eye into its own seeing
or a bad likeness of God
into a human being.
I leave you handcuffed to the dead
like the Standard Model of the Universe
that lost it all
like the physics of the Mad Hatter
to the singularity at the bottom of a
blackhole.
I would have met you half way like
anti-matter.
I would have found a way
to bend that negative space
that so often distorts your face
into a more comely illusion of time
that isn’t stitched together so
clumsily
like some patchwork bride of
Frankenstein
taking it out on the mirrors
that keep dodging your reflection
by turning their eyes to the wall
everytime you insist
you’re the most beautiful of all.
So be it.
You are.
Good-bye.
You’re trying to impose
a habitable order on the universe
like the cube of the sphere of life
that would allow you to get by
like Tolstoy
who built a shoemaker’s hovel
in the middle of his aristocratic
palace
to improve the commonality of his
inferiors.
You’re like the Taj Mahal looking for
a room to rent.
You’re a shore-hugger trying to teach
a jumper how to fall toward paradise
without a parachute.
And if I ignore your raging advice
as I do now and have done
it’s only because I play Russian
roulette
with the lightning
and you come to the table with a
cap-gun.
And I’m wholly at home
even immortally alone
in this compatible chaos
that improvises my life
sometimes as a dirty joke
I go along with for a lark
and other times
raises me up above
the web of my furthest horizons
like a spider that’s transcended
clinging to anything
and dancing in my radiance
like a star that isn’t afraid of the
dark.
Listen to me, woman.
I’m singing.
PATRICK WHITE
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