THE TRAGIC BLISS

THE TRAGIC BLISS

The tragic bliss of having loved you

like a lost generation.

The farcical sorrow

of the one that was found

like the other shoe

of a crystal slipper that didn’t fit.

What was lost?

What was recovered?

Nothing’s lost until it asks where it’s going.

I was in love with the knower.

But you loved the knowing.

Everything was as it was.

Only the perishable growing.

Only the stars to clarify

the misgivings of oblivion.

Only you telling me

like a leftover voice in my head

that’s been gathering dust in the attic

it’s one thing to do what you want to do

it’s another to do what you must.

It was only then

that I really understood your helplessness.

How weak you were.

How deeply enslaved you were

to adding a new link every day

to lengthen your chains

as a way of earning your freedom.

How far down the road did you get?

I haven’t gone anywhere since.

I let things come to me

so nothing’s ever the same anyway

whether I stay or go.

It’s still the same river

you can’t step into twice.

It’s still the same mindstream

watching the world flow by

like a starmap of fireflies high overhead.

I’ve got wounds that never wear the same scars twice

and get hurt worse

when they realize how rare it is

that a young scar ever listens to an old wound’s advice.

I watch the moon slash her wrists over and over again

on her first and last crescents

and the shadows bleed out of me

across the seabeds of dead oceans

where the bride of suicides

trails her gown of seafoam

on the tides of adolescents

that never made it to shore.

I could never see life as intolerable

except as a form of self-disgust

however brutal it was

watching the seagulls swoop down on the baby turtles.

You changed like seasons of paint.

You wiped the moon off the window.

You disowned all your doors

as the whores of a saint

and rolled a stone back over your womb.

From now on things would be immaculate.

God would come down

and help you clean up your room like a desert.

Thorns for the main course.

And roses for dessert.

I tried to free you from your glass rapture

with lifelines of black lightning

that would thaw your chandeliers

and shatter the eyes in your face

like glaciers in an ice age,

but you wanted to live forever

in a cold crevice of eternity

like a wooly Mammoth in an ice palace

with a thirty five thousand year old afterlife.

You felt a shift in the north pole

and followed your inclination

to fix everything in its place.

You found religion.

You found grace.

You made time stop

but you only widened the space between us.

That’s when I left the Sahara to its hermits

and what little water I had left

to the mirage of my wife

to look for something spiritually green

and obscenely rife with life.

PATRICK WHITE