EVEN WHEN LIFE SOMETIMES SEEMS LIKE A BLACK HOLE

EVEN WHEN LIFE SOMETIMES SEEMS LIKE A BLACK HOLE

for Rebekah Genevieve-Dolorese Garland

Even when life sometimes seems like a black hole,

a dark furnace full of the ashes of burnt roses,

it shapes the galaxies into sunflowers and starfish

and it’s whirling with stars like a Sufi in rapture.

All my life I’ve tried so hard not to be afraid of my joy

and at home with my grief like a comfortable chair

that was beginning to take on the same airs as my body.

A holy war of one, carrying the true cross of the sixties

I thought was worth fighting for even long after

I realized I was doomed to dancing to the music

for the rest of the duration. And it’s been as true

as Jim Morrison living the afterlife of Arthur Rimbaud

in deserts so desolate even the stars were shy of the darkness.

And I have wept bitterly as the moon went down

like a toxic goat skull into the only wishing well

for light years around, and it seemed, and it’s

still dangerous to remember because time doesn’t blunt all knives,

I was witnessing an ideological madness, that had

mineralized all the best ideals into fossils, froth

like rabies at its own hydrophobic reflection.

Biting at its own wounds in vengeance upon itself

for the way the water tasted polluted and there was acid rain

in the wavelengths of its tears more venomous than a recluse spider.

I saw how people brought armfuls of poppies and wheat

to lay down on the stairs of the temple in tribute and love

like a sacrifice from the heart they gentled down

upon the grave of a loved one that had died too young

and hoped would return the blood they were missing

as a sign that the roses were mending their severed petals

like eyelids being stitched back by the very thorn

that had made them bleed in the first place.

In a schizzy world, whatever you sacrifice like a lapwing

sooner or later, because everything tends toward its opposite

like twins that weren’t anymore separated at birth

than the first and last crescents of the moon,

engenders in the nest of cosmic eggs it’s dying to protect

farce and desecration that tar and feather it like an eclipse.

But every once in awhile that comes as often as now,

you meet someone inconceivably shining

in her solitude like light through a mysterious jewel

into one of the sacred weeping pools of the mindstream

and the moon silvers your heart like a sword

you were about to fall upon to save your face the trouble

and you take the hilt and the blade in both your hands

like an autumn equinox that’s just bumped into spring

wandering off the beaten path to tend her lunar garden

and you lay it on the waters because choice isn’t an option

like the flightfeather of the other wing of the bird

that can’t take the measure of the immeasurable wingspan

of these event horizons, transits, zeniths and thresholds

I’m crossing with you like Leo and Virgo

across a heartscape of enlightened taboos

that have been singing to me all these years from a dark wood

like a lucid wavelength hidden in the ore of a particle

that only seemed so when you looked at it from afar,

that drew the sword out of the stone, the star

out of the darkness, the waterlily out of the marsh,

the heart of someone like you out of the nightsky

like a meteor with a panspermic rosary of life at its core

falling on the Fertile Crescent of a habitable planet,

or a whole new universe, with a punk version

of the Garden of Eden where the birds are all listening

to the Ramones, and Eve is raving with Adam in a mosh pit

teeming with infinite permutations and combinations

of love and life, of colour, poetry, light, energy, joy and devotion,

as if we’d both disembarked from these empty lifeboats of the heart

on the shores of this thriving island of stars

where the Milky Way meets the ocean

and all the constellations that travelled this Road of Ghosts

like the long, dark, strange radiant trip it’s been

wash the deathmasks off their faces like old myths of origin

from the starcharts of our comets and scars

that have me smiling at you in wonder like this

as if my third eye had just shed its last telescope like a cataract

and I were the mesmerized gaping witness

to the first moonrise of an avatar of dark bliss

studded with the eyes of Isis raising new pyramids

in a desert of stars, as light as feathers, as light

as the crucibles, chrysales and cocoons of the nebulae giving birth

to these poems that break into butterflies of light,

fireflies and dragons that roar like supernovas

across the firmament, waking the valley up

to the morning of a whole new creation

as I firewalk along these oceanic shores with you

like two constellations when their myriad plinths and petals open

and one flower blooms like a bird with two wings

and sings because this universe isn’t the shape of an hourglass

with dry oases and creekbeds dreaming

of solar flares behind the mystic veils

of flashfloods of the heart long over overdue,

but in every illuminated detail of the form you’ve taken

to enter my life, my love, my art, is a perfect likeness of you

that I am created again and again in the image of,

standing in the doorway of this stargate to love

without your metaphors on, so that after all these light years

of looking for you like a star through the eye of a needle

that felt it had seen enough to know when to turn around and go

a firefly like you out of the midnight blue

suddenly comes into view and ignites the air around me like the aura

of a inflammable passion without a fire extinquisher

to put it out because, at long last, as it is above so it is below.

And whether you drink it long and slow, or deep and fast,

or sip like a humming bird from your own skull

there’s an oasis at the bottom of the hourglass

that’s greening the sands like the grail of a woman

passing it to you like the love potion

of a water sylph of practising astronomical witchcraft,

standing by her well like Circe on her island on the moon

turning a man like a vapour of longing in a desiccated wasteland

into the full-blooded ocean of the black rose she holds

like the sidereal high tide of my life and my love in her hand

as the birds are singing in the roots of dark matter

like the loveletters of a punk band to the psychedelic sixties

and all the trippy, heavy metal flying fish

are swimming like cults of urgent stars

through the thorns and the crowns of the blossoming locust trees.

PATRICK WHITE