THE IRONIC SMILE OF A SWORD THAT'S TASTED BLOOD

THE IRONIC SMILE OF A SWORD THAT’S TASTED BLOOD

The ironic smile of a sword that’s tasted blood.

Bless the slayer who wounds me. I’ve been

hemorrhaging roses ever since. And bless

the tormentors of the heretical truth, voice coaches all

who taught me to sing in the fire to no one

without feeling the pain. Bless the executioner

for dropping the double-bladed axe of the moon

on the nape of my neck. I transcended thought,

tore all the wire-mesh down from

the home-made aviaries of my voice

and released all my cages from the grasp of my doves

in a slum of rapture that pitied the landlords

who had none. I bless the manipulator who taught me

how to love the joys of spontaneous chaos without contrast

and the psychosexual sadist with the intimate private life

of an X-rated hardware store who sold me a sabre saw

that allowed me to cut my umbilical cord to the puppet masters

and fly without strings like a burning box-kite among the birds.

O, and the long erosive sorrows of an afterlife

with nothing to hope for anymore, what gifts

have they not arrayed before me like wine to a grape,

enlightenment sweetening my heart

with the fluid fruits of compassion?

Namaste, my old teachers, namaste.

I sing it from a low-hanging bough

like the new moon in the heart of a nightbird

and when I went like a wolf to dig up

where I was interred, to give myself

a decent sky burial, I discovered

a motherlode of constellations had replaced

the dusky, sad marrow of my bones

that lay all around like the clappers of bells

that had their tongues cut out by the silence.

Praise be to the assassins on top of the world mountain

and the Old Man who wheels and deals

in sex and drugs like a false prophet who casts

a shadow upon the earth like a tarpit

where the trophies of extinction sink into time

and the abattoirs are redesigned as museums of the mind.

I decultified myself like a contract killer

and rehabilitated my existence by letting a full moon

kiss your eclipse on the lips like the birthmark of a man

who’s about to die at the hands of an apprentice

he raised like an orphan as one of his own.

Ever since you died, the flowers don’t mind coming to my wake.

I shall always sing lyrics of acid rain over your grave

that sting the heart like a child choir of scorpions.

And I want to honour the pettiness of all the maggots

and leeches and tapeworms and high-minded parasites,

who pitched their love like tents in the place of excrement

as Yeats remarked, and spoke like monostomes

out of the same mouth they ate and eliminated with

for teaching me that karmic retribution is instantaneous

and reincarnation isn’t a single event of birth

but a kind of regressively transformative justice

that can swarm one lifespan with many afterlives

like a law of diminishing returns. And that a lion

can learn as much from its unlikeness to these

as it can from all its shining solar affinities.

And humans are known not only by their friends,

but the qualities or lack thereof of their enemies.

Which is why wolfpacks don’t hunt flies.

Out of the effluvium of the swamp I was born into

I broke into poems like nocturnal waterlilies

and even as the eyeless night darkened around me

my fireflies of insight deepened their radiance

into first magnitude stars. And all the lunar deaf-mutes

of my scars opened their mouths for the first time

in a long time, and my blood begin to sing

to the picture-music of songbirds returning

to a sacred grove of first violins branching out

to watch the bud of the moon blossom like a whole note

at the tips of their horse-hair pernambuco sticks.

Praise be to the krill that nemetically created the blue whale.

I’ve learned to fractalize the singularities of black holes

into radiant galaxies lavishing themselves

on billions of life forms upon as many worlds.

Out of a single atom being told it won’t amount to much

by the encroachment of the abyss, I have

elaborated myself out of a dangerous contradiction

into a creative heretic disciplined by the unconditioned

without making an orthodoxy of a lack of tradition

like a great barrier reef of dead polyps mouthing

sacred syllables to the lunar seas they’re buried in like cement.

My eyes have been guided by the shadows of sundials

toward the light. Born with nothing

but the love of a mother who taught me

even a breadcrumb can be as generous

as loaves and fishes on a compassionate hillside,

I have been squandering the riches of my poverty

like a scarecrow on the hungry ghosts of the unfulfilled

like an inexhaustible silo ever since,

growing sunflowers for the blue jays in winter

corn for the raccoons that come with their kits in the night,

and whatever they like for the white-tailed deer

who enter the garden I’ve laid out for them,

shy as moonlight, with no intention

of ever harvesting anything but the wind

that sowed it in the first place with the teeth

of a dragon with starmud in its heart and mind

that brought the rain to temper and heal

the starfields of grain that had felt

the forge and blade of an igneous heart

that knew the dark abundance that would come

from the bright vacancy of the crazy wisdom

that evolved out of adverse nothing

the sublime absurdity of its efflorescent art

of breathing in coal dust like the black lung of a mine

and exhaling diamonds as expansive as a palace of water

to house the homeless radiance of the stars

in the largesse of a mind you could only enter

like a wound through the heart you could feel

in the pain of everything else like steel through your own.

Born like a star or a dragon in a cold furnace of your own ashes,

when you come across a muse chained in a dungeon of ore,

is it not a mystic act of love and compassion to fire her up

and pour her out like gold from the crucible of a base metal

with wings like bellows to fan the flames

of your own extinction into the creative immolations

that illuminate these dragon paths out of hell

with fireflies, stars, and the deeper insights of the night

burning like enlightened serpent sages

up the spinal cords of black candles

dancing on their own funeral pyres like heretics

sacrificing themselves to their own shining

well off the beaten paths of the orthodox nightwatchmen

who make the rounds on the graveyard shift of the zodiacs?

PATRICK WHITE