Saturday, July 7, 2012

O NO WITNESS TO ME YOU CAN'T GO


O NO WITNESS TO ME YOU CAN’T GO

O no witness to me you can’t go,
though I long for it, you don’t follow,
my shadow stops leaving itself behind as a sign.
I have been ungrammatized by the madness of scientific magic,
a waterclock of life boats I kept bailing out of
until I threw the baby out with the bathwater, mushy as soap.
I tore down the shrines of chaos as an act of irreverent devotion
and the dead thanked me for stealing what they couldn’t give away.
Divine solace without earthly consolation,
I wanted to be crucified diagonally as a random act
of symbolic defiance, but I was buried
under an avalanche of skulls on the moon
and all these voices in my head that swear they’re prophetic
keep baffling me with alternative universes
that have no interest in cultivating me as a way of life.

But you my heart, dark star, dying insurgent of my solitude,
homeless door into the open, your eyes more beautiful
than reflecting telescopes on a cold mountain
far from the city, I am a casualty of space, what hands
do I have to hold you with? Time has ripped out my tongue
like an autumn leaf, and the clouds gather, sweetness,
the clouds, hushed like a book-signing at a mortuary.

Whatever value I had once as a man has turned
against the mirror of miracles, the chthonic excellence
of elegizing the teen age suicides and untactical drunks
that curled up in a coma on the train tracks
as the inevitable came into view with a warning whistle.
I poured libations of poetry to beseech the poppy gods below
among their immortal bees, to explain something to them
gentle and soothing, cool honey on a burn. Delusional
but compassionate in a useless kind of way. A gesture
of ineptitude that swept me away in tears for how much
has yet be lost in the abyss of human affairs
that doesn’t even taste of us after all these years.

At the window of wonder, if you don’t throw
the moon through it, you’re going to drop like a fly.
No more questions to pin down like the head of a snake
to keep it from turning on you like the lethal insight
of a gamma ray burst into the nature of nothingness
across the great divide of the razorwire
that twinkles like stars that are deaf and dumb
to the wishes we make upon them. I wish I may,
I wish I might be seen by you as the missing wing
of your cosmic symmetry, and you, the dark matter of mine.
Could we fly? Could we shine? Could we go mad together
under your bedroom window in a connubium of moonlight
and even the insincere candles from the dollar store seem sublime?
This far out at sea, would you be my island galaxy,
would you let me be washed up on your coasts
among the drowned, my whole life flashing before your eyes
as I reached out for you ingenuously as the tide
leaves things at your door like nomadic starfish
and my fingers, almost touching your face,
as I have so many times imagined
an enlightened savage might your talismanic sorrows,
feathers of joy and sacred dirt in a sexual medicine bag?

PATRICK WHITE

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