PURE INTENSITY

PURE INTENSITY

Pure intensity. The point of a star. Blue acetylene

to burn out the slag of the soul and burnish the gold

that pours from the ore like the full moon out of the new

without any fear of ever growing old.

Give up it all up like nothing less

than everything all the time

until there’s nothing left for death

to get its hands on. Nothing to curse. Nothing to bless.

But you can’t always tell which is which

as the witchdoctor minimalist

at the back of the wax museum

steps out of the shadows of his spider-web

and says less is more and more is less, more or less

as the crow flys. But there’s deceit in his eyes

and you haven’t got time to consider all that

when your hair is on fire like a tie-dyed comet

and everyone’s mistaking you as a sign

of their second coming, when all you want to do

is plunge your coma in the sun that shines at midnight

in every third eye of dew on the enlightened stargrass.

Everything passes, it’s true. But if you pass

fast enough, time stops, and that grave in the closet

you’ve been hauling around with you for light years

becomes as huge as a sky burial

at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, or the pyre

of your own skeleton stoking the fire

that’s boiling the marrow out your bones.

Stay inflammable like orchids and carnations,

waterlilies imported from your

igneous passion for the moon.

Don’t ever let the gods chain you to a rock

in the Caucasus for a theft of fire

they didn’t even bother to prove

before they put your liver on the daily menu

and sent vultures to peck your eyes out

like hors d’oeuvres. It’s ok to be a wildflower

and bloom in fire once every seven thousand years

like the return of a Buddha in an urn of ashes.

But never lend your third eye out to an arsonist

who says he’s having trouble focusing

and uses it as a lens to burn a black hole

in the middle of a poem that’s been taken

out of context like a table of contents.

We’ve got the stars for that, and who needs

another epilogue to keep the fire going

long enough to be the third man on the match

for a bullet you didn’t see coming like a space craft

because you were blinded by your own blazing?

Climbing the stairs to Joan of Arc’s place,

she was conditioning her hair with a fire extinguisher

and getting ready to pull up stakes

and move back to the country where you can see

six thousand stars with the naked eye

or you can jump through the fire

like a witch without being burned

by the Burgundians for reigniting France

without a permit in a month of unbearable heat.

Even though hagiographers prefer

the fragrance of their saints in urns.

PATRICK WHITE