CINDER IN THE SUN'S EYE

CINDER IN THE SUN’S EYE

Cinder in the sun’s eye, there’s fire in your tears.

You plunge into the light like a moth on a mission

and it’s the sun that disappears to shine at midnight

in the black mirrors of your eyes. Dark light, intense,

starling, charred swan, you know as well as I do,

the occult approach to the optimism of an eclipse

is to act radically in the name of things you can

only unattainably conceive of. Love on your wrist

like a hawk whose wing you healed, dwelling

in your homelessness without a fear of eviction.

No truth in the mouth of the snake that’s pulled

the fangs of its conviction out of the sky

like crescent moons, pins from the eye

of a voodoo doll you’ve nursed for light years

on the nightshift of a morgue that’s aroused by death.

Milk of your left breast kills. The other practices compassion.

Whole snakepits in the shrines of the wavelengths

mourning the death of Medusa, as if snakes too

had something to mourn that makes them shine within you.

Ten thousand photos from an orbiting satellite

with X ray vision and a spectrographic trajectory

couldn’t improve upon the license of your beauty

like a black pearl at the magmatic core of planet

trying to make herself as habitable as she can to visitors.

And for those who aren’t used to your kind of light,

you hand out sun-visors and starmaps

and black candles to show them the way home

through the same old doorway they came in by.

You’re an ambassadorial firefly from the third eye

of dark matter where the roots of the light are embedded

and you’ve got a message for the blossom

that looks like a love letter. The moon

budding on a dead branch like a crack in the door

you left ajar like an orchard in waiting on a cold spring night.

And who but you could stand eye to eye with the bravery

you practise like a World War II canary

in an underground armaments factory that isn’t bomb proof?

There’s nothing yellow about the skin of your ammunition.

You confront cosmic dangers in the intimate details.

You ignite and defuse the supernovas and black holes

that endanger the lives of those who follow you like a cult

and though you like their company, you’d much rather be

maculately alone with someone who can see for themselves

that those who were driven out, exiled

into the emptiness of the unknown extremes of the mind

often return with their hands full of the strangest gifts

that time and distance have ever offered anyone

to prove how off course the shore-huggers are

in assessing the course of a life as far out

and comprehensive as the sea. Deeper than stars.

Emotionally more expansive than the immensity

of any shining that can be palmed off cheaply

in the pawn shops of the retinal tidal pools clutching

to the relics and icons of disembodied crab claws.

You don’t live like the collateral damage of the sun

and the sea. You don’t ask amputees to show you

a way out of the labyrinth by the light of spent candles.

Cinder in the sun’s eye, there’s fire in your tears.

A luminosity that flows unceasingly

from the watersheds of broken mirrors.

You just have to cry. And dragons as immutable

as diamond cutters take up flower arranging

in a Zen teahouse enlightened by the rain.

PATRICK WHITE