STEEL TEARS

STEEL TEARS

Steel tears that have hardened out of the April showers

of crystal chandeliers I’ve shed over the years

for others who suffered like me. Pain makes

strange bedfellows, and when you’re twisted up inside

with your umbilical cord wrapped around your neck like a noose

and you know things just aren’t going to come out right,

or strung out like some old shoelace of dna

that’s lost its telomeres at both ends, frayed

and trying to thread the eye of the needle,

because all the cells in your body have risen

from their ashes one too many times. When

some hydra-headed anaconda of suffering

that held you in its coils like childhood,

hunts you down again long after you thought

you’d cut the last head off

like a dandelion gone to seed,

and you see it grinning

like a gleeful malignancy in your sleep

as it crushes the life out of you as if

you were pearl diving for the last gasp

of atmosphere left on the moon,

and you don’t even know why, if you did,

what you did wrong that this background universal hiss

of ancient radiation should have

held a grudge against you for so long

so cold, so vast a vacuum of starless time and space

and then have the guile to plead

that it’s innocence is impersonal

whereas yours is immaterial.

When all your swans are swimming in an oilslick

and the Great Square Of Pegasus is going down

into the La Brea Tarpit like a new moon you were betting on

to secure your passage out of hell like a coin on your tongue

and you come to death and find out

you’ve been tragically short-changed,

and it’s lights out even before the music starts playing

the electric requiem that keeps shorting out

like your own personalized national anthem of one,

and you’re too angry to feel sorry for yourself,

just as a house fire doesn’t ask for water to put it out,

and even when you do coming running, it’s white phosphorus

and it laughs in your face at all your futile heroic efforts

like your reflection in water, and sneers like a nuclear winter

at all your transformations to stay alive creatively against the odds,

you might do what I do and make a mighty effort to dig

the last of my first magnitude stars like spurs into its eyes

the way you do when you’re trying to get a shark to let go,

befriend one of those black holes you alienated from yourself

and ask them to come over and bend time and space a little

and getting a good grip, break its jaws like the pelvis of a wishbone

that got the short end of the stick with the help of a little muscle.

When you find the wings on your heels crushed underfoot

like a killdeer under the weight of the world,

and all your false idols have driven you into exile

like a scapegoat with the sins of the tribes on your back

at the cleansing of the temples in May, and even the Milky Way

sweeps your shining like the gift of an unwanted child

like stars off the stairway to heaven into a dustpan,

don’t stop to ask for an explanation, or as the Buddha said,

don’t ask for the name of the archer

before the arrow’s been taken out, or why

the lightning should kill the messenger like a weathervane

before it’s had a chance to crow at its grand entrance,

come with me, don’t wallow in what you’ve laboured for

and lost like the afterbirth of sorrow, or a wheelbarrow

of what’s been pulled up from the garden like a weed

and heaped on your heart like the death cart

of a spiritual refugee with a starmap to nowhere.

There’s a gate on one hinge, overgrown with wild grape vines

on the far side of the high starfields, that’s an exit out of here

that hasn’t been used by a domesticated animal in lightyears.

And the constellations that burn like shattered mirrors

come to terms with their own tears like gypsies

sitting around their own fires, and break into flower

when you least expect it from the least expected quarter

just to add a little auroral flare to the affairs of the night.

And soon you’ll be up on your feet tripping the light fantastic

in a danse macabre of fossilized constellations

from another era of shining when the whole sky

was a dance floor with a musical sense of timing.

And whatever farce you’ve made of yourself

here in your own mind is the legend

of your own ongoing creative myth of origin there.

And the nails they’ve driven into

your old growth forests here are tenderly removed

and the muzzled chain saws no longer gather

at trunk of the bleeding sequoia

like snarling hunting dogs trying to

break the bones and lap the marrow

of waterproof telephone polls in the making.

Every journey’s a lottery of small steps you take

through a dangerous gate until you’re on the other side

and then you hit your stride like a white-tailed doe of light

the arrows and the shadows of life just can’t keep up to

and take up fletching flowers just to get back to their roots.

I’d tell you a big secret if I could, but saying

nothing about it is the best way to get the point across.

I’m not going to string you along like another spiritual wavelength

from a snake oil salesman who doesn’t even want to taste

his own medicine, too aware of what he put into it,

to take the cure himself like a bath in his own grave.

And I’m not saying the house is on fire, and there’s

only one doorway out to escape being consumed.

You could always jump out the windows of your world view

or stay and hope you’re a phoenix

that can get used to the taste

of eating your own ashes by the urnful

or wait for the prophetic fire-ladders of paradise

to come to your rescue as the windows thaw in the heat

like the pent up tears of an ice-age of bitter emotion.

I’m just saying deep within you there’s a starfield

laid out like an embroidered flying carpet

and at the far end of its boundlessness, there’s a gate

hanging on a single hinge like a killdeer or the loom

of the wild grapevines that weave them and unweave them

like the phases of the moon, and it’s not trying

to keep anything in or out, even if it could

on one wing and prayer, it’s just an entrance to a space,

the pupil of a third eye, where you’re not asked

to scrape the starmud off your shoes when you enter

because even though you feel your roots are homeless

and everywhere you go you’re

walking on quicksand in an hourglass

the trees won’t ever let you forget

you still need somewhere to stand and bloom

and come to fruition like a ripe koan

of compassion and insight into the creative fact

that every beginning is the last step of the return journey home.

Whether anyone’s there to believe it or not.

Or even give it a second thought.

PATRICK WHITE