I HAVE RUN MY HEART AGROUND

I HAVE RUN MY HEART AGROUND

I have run my heart aground

like the keel of the moon on the coral

and the memory of women I once loved

hurts me today

like blowback from the furnaces of autumn

that went out years ago.

It’s easier to train a dove than a crow

and I was a reluctant dragon

trying not to roil the water in my wake.

Doubting that forgiveness is ever real,

I give it and ask it

and discharge us all

from the degenerating orbits

of all the radiant photons that reversed their spin

to take one long last look at us

as we unspooled like glaciers

at each others’ feet.

Eventually we’re all just flavours of space.

And you have to open your hand to hang on,

and learn to live with a heart that tolls

like a bell or an oyster

after its pearl has been plundered

and look upon dark, intimate things without a voice.

I have dug deeper than my own bones to get at the truth

as if I were an abandoned civilization

with nothing left standing

but a succession of meaningless gates

that no one waits by anymore to meet me.

I have added my skull like the moon to the darkness

to appeal more deeply to the nightside of life

that she might reveal

why she always hides me under the bed

when I knock on her door from the outside,

hoping she’ll unlock herself like a coffin

and raise the dead.

I may be a starmap blowing down a road on the moon,

but there’s no wind, no one to walk it,

no arrival, no departure

no threshold before me, and none behind.

In the light of the silent ferocity

of a black star longing in the distance for contact,

I have intensely held certain, lethal questions

up to my throat like a phase of the moon

and held myself hostage to the answers

until I fell in love with my torment

and all these ransom notes turned into poems.

It’s a quaint myth of origin,

and even a delusion is some kind of direction,

and who’s to say the stars

aren’t in need of correction themselves?

And it isn’t as if one mirage

were more sufficient than another,

it’s just that we long for the unattainable through them

like kites that have run out of atmosphere,

and the lie that heals is truer than the one that doesn’t.

So we insisted on being in love

as wave after wave

we tried to bridge continents

to keep our hearts from flatlining.

What a riot of sorrow and sex and poetry

swung us like bells when we walked

out of our bomb-proof cathedrals

into the intimate dangers of our own lyrical intensities,

gouging the eyes out of the constellations we rolled like dice

against the writing on the wall.

Love’s a big, sloppy sky

that smothers you like fog on the ocean

when it collapses like a parachute

at the end of a sustained fall.

Everyone lets go of their demons

like kites in a hurricane,

like blossoms from an orchard,

like flakes of ancient flint

as the heart naps its arrowhead of ice

in the shadows of the sacred night fire

that exhumes the phoenix from the flesh.

Looking back, I am humbled by the memory

of how much I couldn’t see

through a painted window

while the moon waited for rain among the willows,

but sooner or later you make peace

with everyone you can’t be

and sign a truce with everyone you are

and drown your sword in your own blood

like a holy war you can’t win

and keep trying to embody wisdom until you disappear

like a homeless bird in the clarity,

so perfectly isolated by everything you’ve ever loved

even the sky you fly through

can’t fit itself like skin

around the enormity of the tear

that hordes its most intimate fire

like a flame thrust into the darkness of an afterlife

where the eras and the headstones,

the faces under the bedstones,

thaw like lockets of ice.

PATRICK WHITE