TIME TO MYSELF

TIME TO MYSELF

Time to myself.

The first half hour feels

as if I’m sitting at a bus-stop

waiting for something that’s never going to come.

Thoughts like stray threads of hair on my shoulder.

Old love affairs that have gone grey in my absence.

After the last flashflood I scuttled the ark of my heart

on the moon, like a dog far enough into the country

it couldn’t find its way home again.

Love’s always a mystically unique reality

but the cosmic urgencies of the pain

I endured demonically in the name

of things that were too feeble to believe in,

eventually came to hum like white noise

in the background of a boring curse

where all you could do was dogpaddle

in the flotsam and jetsam of incredible trivia

that floats up to the surface of a shipwreck on the bottom

waiting for the next lifeboat.

No one locks their doors in the country

unless they’re living a field away

from a hobby-farm, hillbilly crackhouse

that’s been handed down like the story

of a body in a lost housewell somewhere on the property,

so if someone were to step in out of the night,

I wouldn’t stand my ground like a ten point, white-tailed buck

on a hill that’s been posted against hunting

with grenades, and feel too sure of myself,

but just the same, I’d watch from a distance for awhile.

Like a wolf made shy by intelligence,

I wouldn’t come down from the timberline

until I was convinced by the probable concourse of events

there was no bounty on my head

and no judas-goat was pleading in a leg-hold trap.

Sounds brutal when I say it, but not to those

who’ve been shot at by shepherd moons

trying to cull the pack like asteroids into extinction

whenever it tried to snatch the golden calf by the throat

and bleed it like a rose of transubstantiation in the snow.

The most insane things I’ve ever done

in a world that specializes in absurdity

I’ve done for the beauty of the madness

that overtook me like the acids of a Venus fly-trap.

Sometimes love can be a lighthouse on the moon

with no one to give a warning to, it may be a mermaid

but it’s been singing the same old song on the rocks too long

and I’m poet enough to go down with the ship

but not as a creature of habit. The scratched guitar

with a warped neck in the corner

that made a benign hobby out of a way of life

that was once the death call of the music

that only endangered species could hear and dance to.

Love needs a wide screen to feature

the wingspans of its emotions so any sky

you might find yourself flying in fits you like skin.

But me? I can see a masterpiece in the paint rag of a parrot.

And there are worlds within worlds within worlds

so unanimously unconcerned with us

they have to read ancient history just to prove

that we exist as an unexplained anomaly

of the cosmic background hiss of radiant annihilation

deconstructing into the echoes of its original inspiration

like birds crying in the throat of a valley

that holds its notes too long

to keep time with the pace and passage of life.

Love’s a melodic state of mind with a percussive heartbeat

and no one’s ever really missing from the band

on the road like religious icons of democracy,

even when they get homesick for their girlfriends

and the drummer is moved in his heart of hearts

more by paranoia and lust than he is love and music

to end his calling in a bus station with a broken phone,

trying to make sure his girlfriend’s there

when he gets home at two in the morning.

Not especially bitter, and only occasionally longing,

but I remember the happy day my Greek chef friend announced

he no longer worshipped at the feet of the great goddess sex,

and died of cancer five months later, and how

even Mahatma Gandhi couldn’t pacify the hydra

of his sexual desires by lighting little fires

all around him when he slept on a pyre of women.

Worse than celibacy is abstracting the flesh into a hungry ghost.

To damn the body with the faint praise

of a sin of omission that denigrates its earthly excellence

as an instrument of God in the hands of rank amateurs

trying to weave flying carpets on the loom of a guitar

to add their wavelength of lament to the disappointed stars.

Where the bullet comes to rest

in a cosmic game of Russian roulette

is forensically irrelevant. Who

got it through the heart and who

got it through their head can go on arguing forever

who suffered the deepest death

when the daffodils began behaving like periscopes

intent on torpedoing the love boat

zigzaging through the sealanes of a wolfpack.

Open-armed as the bay of a seaworthy sailor,

I embrace love these days lightly with a kiss

like a ticket in a lottery I’m not expecting to win

but revel in like a Zen poet dancing with the moon

as if he were water, and it was taking its sail down

over the treetops, to stay awhile on his enchanted island

where delusion is not an obstruction to bliss,

and enlightenment isn’t anymore of a seer

than the scars of the star that stripmined your eyes are.

PATRICK WHITE