THE ANGEL IN THE WAY I'M WRESTLING WITH

THE ANGEL IN THE WAY I’M WRESTLING WITH

The angel in the way I’m wrestling with

won’t box. I don’t get a choice of weapons.

My hip dislocated by a greater intensity than I am,

I’ll walk away the stronger man,

a sacred king with a limp, Richard the Second,

or Vulcan, or Byron swimming the Hellespont.

Down on a sunny day, snarly in the sunshine,

too disheartened to get with the picture and bloom.

Nothing against the vases of sappy daffodils

in green vases on open windowsills,

but I feel like tracking starmud into the living room.

Heavy green diamond steel-toed work boots

with their laces undone, their tongues hanging out,

clotted with earth, so the nuns of the narcissi

don’t forget they’ve got dark, dirty roots

and bulbs like prophetic skulls

that have been buried in the garden a long time

who predicted all this would happen in due course.

Everyone clear-eyed as a haiku in a mirror.

Wholly out of season, my heart feels

like the heavy bell of a requiem for all those

who worked themselves to death for so long

like sweating horses hauling this death cart

of a planet around to change its point of view

like the bent axle of a prayer wheel

inclined toward the sun. On this blue-eyed day

and in the morning before dawn, euphoric commotion

of birdsong in celebration of the return of the light,

but I think of how much darkness, the cast off ore,

extinct forests, Jurassic coalbins,

had to clarify themselves

for the sake of a single diamond of equinoctial insight.

The apple trees are wearing their appearances

on their sleeves, and the willows

are adding blonde streaks to their hair

after their long widowhood of veils.

God I wish I didn’t have to be a poet sometimes

warped into revealing things from the inside out

like a canary in a coalmine on a sunny day.

I try to imagine how sweet it would feel

just to be in the world like a lackadaisical dandelion

blooming like an average G type sun

in the fresh painterly green of the grass

with a couple of ants for planets.

What a miner I’d make. Always

looking for a motherlode of ore in a gold mine.

Reading between the lines of the spring constellations

to admire the brilliance of the darker messenger,

the deeper clarity of a more pellucid view of the world

as it appears on the nightshift

in the black mirrors of the blind chandeliers

I’ve been romancing at a dance of celestial spheres

by tracking my footprints all over the ballroom floor

for those who dance iambically with a limp like me to follow.

And my only alibi for looking at things on the dark side.

You can’t plumb the depths, or judge the age

of a black hole in light years. And it’s totally lost upon me

how you can truly claim to see anything, even spring

if you’re not a two-eyed telescope, one eye on day,

one eye on the darkness, and both open simultaneously

like the sun and the moon at opposite ends of the sky,

and the earth in between like the third eye

of a spiritual refugee with an extra lens for backup

in case I should feel as I do today

like a star-nosed mole with tunnel vision

trying to shine above ground with the tulips.

Even as observatories all over the northern hemisphere

are opening their eyes to the light

just to let a little fresh air in

like house plants on open tenement windowsills

sinking their roots deeper into the darkness,

like back lightning into a mystic watershed

to keep from going blind

in the blazing of the blossom overhead.

PATRICK WHITE