NOT AGAIN, TONIGHT, THESE FIN DE SIECLE BLUES

NOT AGAIN, TONIGHT, THESE FIN DE SIECLE BLUES

Not again, tonight, these fin de siecle blues

that subsume all my blossoming overviews

into the mystic specificity of concrete things

I stub my heart against as if I’d just had

a head on collision with the moon. Impact.

Emotional meteor showers, the Virginids, perhaps,

I’m being stoned by my own congenital radiants

as if I were being driven out of somewhere

like an extinct species. Bad memories, lifeboats

that didn’t make it back to shore, things I’ve tried

to mythologize like a shipwreck in coral on the moon.

Subtle childhood fears that run my tongue along

the shadows of their blades, when I was scared and young,

and the words would come out like drops of blood

sliding down the length of the stargrass I grazed upon

alone as now in my high wide starfields.

The same ones that are seeking me out tonight

like a rogue planet that’s never quite known

where it’s belonged, or with whom, if anyone

or where at all. Looking for an exit sign

in the infinite labyrinth of the nightmare

that’s walked me like a shadow through all these years.

Most of the past, a waste of good innocence,

and the people and things I loved about it

I cherish more now than I did back then,

usually wounded irreparably in a way

I would have suffered for them if I could have

in order to have my love of them hurt me less,

given I always thought I was more worthy of the pain,

because more deserving of what they endured

than they were. Maledictions of draconian experience.

Miracle of miracles, I transcended everything so savagely,

it’s hard to forgive myself now for ever being a child,

but I try. I put my arms around people when they cry

even frivolously, and offer them a few blue ribbons of wisdom

in exchange for their butter-fingered nooses

and the occasional smile at the antics of a sacred clown

who left his tears painted on a dressing room mirror

as if it had been raining for years without anyone

but himself, a circus of one on tour, getting wet.

I’ve fallen through more cracks in the earth

than most earthquake zones, whenever the continental plates

of my tectonic skull put their hands together in despair

but couldn’t manage prayer as I jumped in on horseback

to save someone’s cornerstone, like Rome, whether

I was delusional or not. A few people lit candles in remembrance,

but just as often as the fireflies light their lamps

they blow them out to return to the darkness

as the closest thing to home. I’m inured to the intemperance

of selfishness as well as gratitude. People approach me

with their secret charade, and I cancel myself out

like a circus parade I’m sure is never going to come,

a kid kicked to the curb who’s been waiting too long,

and we’re both a little estranged by our mutual equilibrium.

Wild parsnip in the drainage ditch boils the flesh and leaves

permanent scars. And when I don’t see them as arsonists

and flammable gypsies, I see the poppies as

the blood-soaked rags of solar flares that have staunched

and cauterized the bleeding awhile. Hot knives

applied to the heart’s excruciations like a brutal code of mercy

to distract me from the agony of my indifference

to the end of an era of unacknowledged supremacy

as the occult master of mirages on the nightshifts

of intensive care, the terminal ward, desolation row,

a fencing master of scalpels who knew more ways

of cutting the heart out of himself and offering it up

to someone who needed it more for the moment,

thinking they had a better use for it than I ever did.

A poultice of water applied like an oasis to a desert’s forehead

until even a corpse could rise up out of the glass-blowing heat

like the inexhaustible amphora of an Aquarian among the stars.

One of the dark jewels of my childhood

in the ashes of a dragon that left me its eyes

by eclipsing mine so I could see

where the black holes were ahead of time

and warn the well-meaning lighthouses that clung to the coast

not to trust their starmaps to get their bearings

or ask for directions from the mentors of the lost and the blind,

but to turn the wheel of life and death loose in a storm

of demonically dispassionate clarities intense enough

to weld diamonds by staring through them

with the ironic compassion of an empty lifeboat

lowered from the deck of an enlightened shipwreck

on the lunar bottom of the Sea of Tranquility

I can weave like a flying carpet of real water

out of the wavelengths of high frequency mirages

like a homoeopathic wolf shaman in shepherd’s clothing.

PATRICK WHITE