WHAT CHAINS WE RATTLE

WHAT CHAINS WE RATTLE

What chains we rattle in our own emptiness.

The void gnashes its teeth to dust. Is there love

Anywhere that I’m worthy of?

I want to scream in this straitjacket of anti-matter

but you are not here; your person is absent;

so I scream into this paper ear;

I abandon my own blood, turn red white

in my fear of losing you, witnessing your anger,

the small glaciers that inch through my heart

like ice-ages. Maybe I’m crazy, maybe I’m old,

maybe I’m burnt out, maybe all these words

I throw at you mean absolutely nothing to you

or to anyone else, or even me, but there you have it.

I’m sloughing my old skin like a star-riddled universe

and I don’t know what I’m turning into.

When I want to know who I am I look at your face.

Lately I’ve felt like some kind of eclipse, some darkness

growing like fungus on the light. A leper in sunshine.

Am I broken glass; the black mirror, shattered? I mistake you

often; looking for you in every shard and splinter of my being

but the shadows are too young to give birth to stars

and you can’t seem to give me the reassurance I need

to return the moon to the goblet it fell from.

It’s not so much that I doubt you but that

the affirmations that should be anvils under the burning swords

crumble under the hammer-blows of the heart.

There is no fire in the answers; only the hiss

of metal cooling in black water. Now maybe I’m gone forever

and maybe you’re some bridge collapsing under its own weight

and we’re both acting too indignant to be honest,

but I feel a hole in me the size of darkness

and a silence that dreams like God. Are you still there; am I?

Have I woken up without you?

Burn for me, baby; fire all these love-crossed stars up

and let me see you shining and naked on the nightwatch.

I’m tired of issuing all these secret passwords

to an army of spies scrambling clarity in a coding machine.

Perhaps I’m not clear myself or haven’t done or said it right,

or there are lies standing-by like unfueled flights to nowhere,

but I feel like my heart’s been through a paper-shredder

and there are foreign troops entering the office with orders

to exterminate anyone not already in pieces

or out dancing around the fire at a book-burning. I know you’re young;

I know your eyes would have to turn into skies

and your heart, the Hubble telescope,

for you to see me as I am to myself, an infinitely remote galaxy,

the faint smudge of a billion stars and planets

evaporating like breath on a cold windowpane into the void.

A match blown out. Forgive me. I am the light, unmoored, an empty boat

drifting through my own wreckage,

looking for survivors among a feeding frenzy of fins,

all my useless modifiers dangling in shark-infested waters.

I can’t even remember what I died in the name of

if anything at all

or who among all these bodies I’ve hauled into my heart

brought me back to life

if it wasn’t you.

But how ridiculous. Two hours to make love;

five and a half until you call

or don’t call after our exchange with healing or hurt.

Why am I always the one who is waiting?

You always the one who seems to be labouring

under some onerous imposition?

You’re little boxes of wind, back-alley gusts of being,

lifting me up a moment like a leaf

and then off to something else with a gust of indifference.

No sooner do I crawl out from under

these heavy Himalayas of heart-mud

that avalanche down upon me

with every telling remark you don’t make, the opening for tenderness

missed again and again by your smouldering silence

then I find myself washed clean of myself

in one of your dry wells of emotion. Do you truly love me

or have I become some fading mirage in this black Sahara

that bares its teeth like pyramids?

And yes, and yes, and yes; I know I am not perfect. I do not think I’m god

unless you and him and her and the daylilies are too.

And if it’s a revolution, a coup d’etat you seek

in the secret cells of your mind; remember, it’s your own palace

you’re overthrowing, your own window you smash.

There is nothing in me or my life

that is not already yours by an immaculate contract of stars.

I feel like a bottle of aged whiskey must feel

when it’s been drained to the last drop

and the drinker isn’t even tipsy. Have I failed with you

in some essential way that keeps the drunken dancers out of the garden,

the mystic lovers like wildflowers

who have eluded the conforming vases enduring on the mantlepiece?

I love you so much every bit of your seeming unhappiness,

your frustrated, frustrating petulance

is a wound I stitch up with my spinal cord, the ashes of an eye

that falls into the dense atmosphere of my planetary heart like a meteor.

When I’m angry, be certain; it’s only a wave

in a measureless sea of devotion, weather squalling the surface of the mirror,

but in the depths, my love of you is law,

however the wind blows open the pages of the book of the moon,

however my name is erased from the water it’s written on

even by your hand warping my reflection on the midnight lakes

of your tempestuous seeing.

I shape my body for you. I cajole my hair.

I scrape worlds from under my fingernails

and liberate the life that has lain dormant therein for aeons

in your honour, dedicating each first dawn of creation to your smile.

The golden marrow of my genius is worthless to me

except that it nourishes you in a market of one.

And I am happy to be the nothing that is added to you

so that it amplifies you over and over again by ten. Zero

was ever in love with one since before the beginning of time.

As I love you in this endless succession of an unmoving infinitely finite now.

I want to be your white voice, your green heart,

your black blood, the sky that catches you like a bird when you fall.

Do you see me? I’m standing here rooted to the earth

like a tree that’s been gutted by your slow lightning

and yet still puts out leaves like eloquent tongues,

each one whispering you into the song of the other. My heart

is unquenchably yours like a star that turns its light inward

so that it can’t be detected by anyone else.

Maybe we’re doomed by circumstance and disposition, age

and essence, and maybe we’re not, but even in the denying of love

you are the hidden harmony that affirms it.

PATRICK WHITE