LITTLE ENEMY, YOU'RE A MAGGOT TOO EARLY TO RUNT MY BLOOD

LITTLE ENEMY, YOU’RE A MAGGOT TOO EARLY TO RUNT MY BLOOD

Little enemy, you’re a maggot too early to runt my blood.

You can eat my heart when I’m dead

but the hour’s still too dangerous for you to raise your head.

False lover, I’ve planted razors and roses of lipstick

in the mirror where you used to cut the throats of the doves

for not being swans, like those wrists you’d unlatch like gates

that were always somehow shutting you out, never keeping you in.

And the poppies are thriving everywhere like ambulances

emulating your urgency like a requiem at a wedding.

Go in peace, with a crown of deadly nightshade,

to a quiet, damp place where your bruises are silent,

and you’ve settled your score with the world like a bone

by making it atone for the fact that you were ever born.

And you, my teacher, my cornerstone, my fountain, my door,

thank you for doing the best you could with what

you had to work with like a lighthouse in a storm

swinging its sword at the lightning like the hands of the clock

it was duelling with in its sleep. I’ve worked out

an uneasy truce with the gods in this country of one

I’ve surrendered to like a starmap with no boundary stones.

I burned my books, and learned to fly by the seat of my pants.

And every step I take backwards to cover my tracks

I consider a signal advance into my expansive maturity.

Now I hang out with the dead to learn about living.

And you, my children, who have forgotten how to know me,

how far from the tree you travelled to bloom.

I am in you like a space you can’t disown

and time will bring you, scar by scar, back to me

like an ocean and an atmosphere back to the moon

where the clarity of the stars will cauterize the wound

that teaches us all how to forgive our own humanity

like a death sentence that slips a loveletter through the bars.

I still delight in the dragons of my dark energy

that wheel like circumpolar constellations

and red-tailed hawks on the thermals of my blood

but I expand and retract my claws more like

phases of the moon now, than the thorns of a rose with scales.

When there’s a chance I might penumbrally eclipse the light

with the shadows of my vans, I lower them like black sails

whenever I’m close enough to shore to bury the dead in me.

I can do no more. I kick stones down the road like a glacier.

I roam like a rogue planet from star to star

to see if I can thrive in the light creatively

without turning my back on my homelessness.

I teach hitch hikers how to paint on the move,

and tour with a sacred circus of heartbroken clowns

just to keep my voice in shape when I’m called upon

to let these mercurial sibilants of light speak through me

like a grammar of fireflies addressing the sages of chaos.

I’ve buried the rage of my father who terrorized my childhood

like an urn of demons so deeply inside of me

even the dogs can’t dig it up at the full moon

when I burn another scarecrow dressed up in his clothes

and he weeps like fire extinguished in the roots

of a harvest he never sowed. Though I keep company

with one who comes and goes like an ice age,

a translucent diamond seer of the condemned

so coldly intelligent its clarities burn without smoke,

I consult like a consigliere who knows both heaven and hell

and tempers my love of the earth, when I forget

its hoofs and horns, by slashing at the absurdity

of my longing not to desecrate the table I eat at

by neglecting the protocols of gratitude for what I’ve taken.

I’ve given back everything that was within my reach.

All those thoughts, all those feelings, no longer

my personal possessions. Not readiness, not ripeness

my all, but inspiration the way I rise to the unattainable

through no means of my own, and the way I fall

not a tragic flaw, merely moonset among words,

the way space bends light into a gravitational eye

that sees things in a different way than I do

though we both agree, firefly or dragon, they’re all true.

Outside or inside, there’s no window between them,

no wave the water in the lake sucuumbs to.

No better view at zenith than in the nadir of life.

Seeing not two has a better attitude than one.

That my solitude has no identity to speak of

but it’s never empty, and it’s always charged

with the significance of love that doesn’t try to cram

its own impersonality into a locket of the heart

by prying it open before it’s ready to bloom.

And the rest I leave to the crazy wisdom of the muse

should she ever decide to take the form

of a woman again to sweeten the fruits of the abyss

I lay on the stairs of her temple like the gift of a gift

so inconceivably unsayable she never needs to ask

to know what it is.

PATRICK WHITE