I'M HAVING AN UNREQUITED LOVE AFFAIR WITH MYSELF

I’M HAVING AN UNREQUITED LOVE AFFAIR WITH MYSELF

I’m having an unrequited love affair with myself.

It’s surrealistically ironic and spiritually annihilating

at the same time, and I can say from personal experience

black holes have a profound sense of humour.

The waterlilies look up at the stars and wonder

if they could shine like that if they ever dried out.

Fire and water. The serpent fire of my electrical potential

jumps the gap like a spinal cord, a bridge is made.

Spiders weave enlightened filaments in a light bulb

like webs of neuronic wiring into dream catchers

and empowering mandalas. I have ignition.

Billions of eyes light up in the dark like fireflies.

I always thought if I really wanted to do the world some good,

I’d lead it away from myself. My alter-ego

shines like a demon in a dark light whose intelligence

is intent on ruining my life compassionately

out of a begrudging respect for sacred rodeo clowns

with red geraniums sticking out of their straw sun hats

like pathetic solar flares of blood trying to wave a red flag

to draw the bullshit off a Pacific mystic Zen cowboy

about to be gored by a horn of the moon in her crone phase.

All the women I’ve ever loved, lived, left and will live with

on these thresholds of the sublime and the ridiculous

like a seance that can see a future in calling things back from time,

have come to me in an aura of dark energy

like a poem in a dream expanding into space.

Or you could see Ophelia under her deathmask

drowning in wounded flowers. Two witches,

an apostate madonna, one ferocious priestess

from the dark side of the moon, one incubus,

one lamia, a Medusa, a delusional gold-digger

who kept working me like a motherlode

although I told her from the first all you’re going to find here

is the slag of meteoric ore that’s been mined out.

The last thing I heard her say when I left her

singing like a canary in the belly of an anaconda,

as I climbed out of the grave she was digging for both of us,

was, I thought you were rich. No, I replied,

a little taken aback at my innocence at this late date,

I just gave you everything I had

because I thought it would make you happy

if I gave you what you asked. Who else

should I have given it too if not you? Good-bye,

with blessings on your house and head,

that erotically upgraded body of yours

and all your excellent possessions.

I’m going to sleep with a bridge tonight

that knows there’s two sides to every river

holding hands secretly under the mindstream

and the bird can’t fly when it’s a lapwing

trying to lure danger away from its cosmic eggs

and all the other wing’s doing is flapping its lips.

And one Female Principle of the World

that needed me to help her incarnate in bed.

Muses all. Eclipses and full moons alike.

Eras of my life. Legends of my genome.

Each a different planet with a physics of her own.

And me the mere scaffolding of bones,

the passionate snakes and ladders

they climbed up on to paint their picture-music

on the ceiling of esoteric pantheons

where the goddess is always the pearl, black or white,

and when I know what’s best for me,

I’m the big-mouthed lunar oyster shell

gaping at the moonrise in desire and wonder

dying to say what leaves me more speechless than silence.

Never knew a woman who wasn’t a sky higher

than my wingspan, a sea deeper than my wisdom

despite the oceanic commotion on the surface.

I was always a continental ledge shy of their depths,

and even though I knew how to swim my way

through the darkest diamonds as easily as I did the night,

I’ve always considered it spiritual bad manners

and an abuse of grace, if I’ve paused to listen

to a mermaid singing to me, and I haven’t drowned

in applause for her as soon as the song is over.

If you’re not willing to die for the picture-music

you’re just another flatlining event horizon

looking for a lifeboat like a whole note with a tin ear

that can’t hear you singing like the fog horn

of a dinosaur mired in a tarpit like a keyboard of bones.

You don’t ask a goddess to be a sacrifice.

Your heart gouged out like an organ donor to the moon

you lay it while it’s still beating like a bleeding ruby

on her temple stairs and by that she’ll know

you were a real king of the waxing year

and eat it like the forbidden fruit of enlightenment

when the jewel is in the lotus like a dragonfly

in a waterlily, and she smears your blood like lipstick

on the petals of a rose that worked witchcraft

with the flavours of life and love she left in my mouth.

Most of the time there’s no interrogative scorpion

of bitterness up my sleeve of stinging nettles,

nor in her shoe when I put her crystal slipper back on,

having just removed a splinter of glass from the paw of a lion

I hope will remember my kindness if we’re ever

in the Colosseum together as audience to the act

instead of predator and prey of the fact

that the asters at the end of summer that we cherish most

are adorned by time in a romantic rite of passage

and then apotheosized as constellations of the autumn

approaching our lingering ghosts like a seance

of the fruits of the earth that all fell in their own good time

singularly, or a windfall in the night, sweetened by our ordeals

as if our hearts had always been bears in a beehive

of rapture and loss and paper wasps

getting mystically hammered on our tears

like the lightyears of life that have aged like stars in our eyes.

I can still taste the mystery of the dark mirrors

we held up to each other like synchronous swimmers,

that deepened so many insights into the strangeness of human nature,

even long after we entered the abyss of the future

like empty urns, I swear, there’s still a dragon in my ashes

that rises up like a pillar of fire or a solar flare,

an eternal flame, a sudden efflorescence of stars,

and makes a deep, sweeping bow to the women I have loved

who left me these gloves of moonlight

glowing on my windowsill when I’m alone in the dark.

And I can hear the Canada geese heading south,

and I remember how vast and eyeless the sky is

when exhausted lovers part like frayed mindstreams

trying to flow past the sacred junction where two rivers meet

without realizing the mingling of their waters is indelible

and it’s hard to find reverse in a universe

that just keeps on going the same way

in this time and place, this now and here

the same path of thorns and rose petals

that everyone walks like the wind in love,

leads everywhere like fireflies trying to read a starmap

from the past, that’s left its future far behind

trying to catch up to what it just let go of

like an almagest of prophetic zodiacs to come

longing for the Beast Mistress of the animal kingdom

to make them jump through their burning hoops again

like moondogs or the black haloes of comets

that keeping falling through the coronas of the sun,

or a dragon dancing in the ripples of the rain

after it’s just swallowed the moon like the cosmic glain.

PATRICK WHITE