FEEL LIKE THERE’S A BEAST

Feel like there’s a beast in the darkness

eating my eyes.

I’m a moon-bull

at a crossroads of solar swords

down on it knees

hemorrhaging like a poppy.

And there are constellations

I’ve never heard before

playing the harp of my horns

with pensive fingertips.

How strange this rag of life

soaked in tears and blood is.

Everything dies like a snowflake on a furnace,

a rock on an autumn mountain,

no two the same.

There are nights, there are

vigils of darkness

when the mirror can no longer bear

the weight of this feather of fire,

this vision of life

that estranges the spirit

of those who love it most

like a funeral bell

that once drank to the folly of love.

I am a snakepit of lightning

knotted in a glacier of ice

and every emotion

is the undertow of the tide in a sea of eyes

on the cold skull of the moon,

every thought, a stone lifeboat

inundated by the waves

it’s convinced it’s saving from drowning.

Once I was the dupe

of my own ideals,

now I am the master of none.

This far into the abyss

you forget the name of the god

you died in the name of;

you have squandered your certainty

on greater and greater risks,

the enciphered lotteries of mythic necessity,

only to discover,

though you traversed eras like deserts

that made a skull of your faith,

the donkeys have eaten all the mangers,

and there is as much radiance in the eye

of the dead serpent on the road

as there is the eyelash of a star.

A tear is not a fountain of seeing,

nor a drop of blood, a rose.

How rare the sword in its silence

among all these chatty scissors at war

trying to cut along the dotted lines

of their border highways

crammed with refugees

they once called lovers,

the horizon slashed

and bleeding like a letter.

I want to calculate the half-life of pain;

the pillar of ore it calls home;

the elemental devolution of its atomic evictions

into the leaden passion of a base metal.

I want to know what I’ve turned into.

I want to know what’s making the stars

throw down their spears of light at my feet

though my heart’s out in the open

like a voodoo doll

waiting for a donor transplant.

I want to see myself

opening a door in the mirror

to someone with absolute eyes

irrevocable as yesterday’s rain.

Let the star know

the flower it engenders;

let the rose

taste its own honey.

Blind in a dream; blind,

what light roots in the darkness

that I should want to

throw off this robe of blood like a sky

to slip through the eye of the needle

that binds the seams of this world

like a bird

with the single thread of a life in its beak,

washed out of God’s eye

like a firefly snuffed

in a torrential downpour of stars?

Why am I

always one heart too many

over the threshold of the truth

I had to leave home to discover?

Am I a hoax in tears

or a tear away from a gate and a rafter?

Let the wave know the sea

that packs its caravan on the moon,

let the silence of the waking abyss

write indelible preludes

with a last kiss

that goes on forever

like the white autumn wind

in a turmoil of seeds

that demonically exceed

the life they’re after,

flower by flower,

death by death

like the pulse of a bell

setting the doves free

in the towers of farewell.

It’s the eloquence of a tree

to say what life is

when the full moon ripens

in its leafless branches

and the heart beats

like a windfall of silver apples,

though I have tried,

but love is a bridge

on a finger of water

that not even the moon

can slip off like a ring

when the wind rises

like a gaping fish

to swallow the chimes and eyehooks

of its matriculate ripples.

And with each breath of the night

I took and returned,

I have aspired to succeed

at every failure I was ever inspired by.

I raised every sail,

crossed every wave,

every eyelid, every petal

of the sea of life

in the heart of the rose

only to drop the first crescent of the moon

like an anchor

in the furnace of a dream.

PATRICK WHITE