ONCE POETRY HAD SEWN YOUR MOUTH SHUT

ONCE POETRY HAD SEWN YOUR MOUTH SHUT

Once poetry had sewn your mouth shut

with a spinal cord of the silence

I never expected to hear from you again.

My heart used to hemorrhage like a rose

whenever you unquivered one of your nightbirds

like an arrow that sang its way to the mark.

What notes perch on your guitar strings now

like multiple event horizons over the black hole

that used to dilate like the pupil of a stoned guitar

with a night vision of the way you become a star?

Some of us shine. Some of us beam. Some of us twinkle.

When did the dark energy of your mythic inflation

go supernova, or did you just drop

another cosmic egg on the queasy floor

of your stagefright? I remember that night

in the burning doorway when you finally

became cruel enough to ignore with impunity.

No blame. I won’t whip you with the chains

that once held me like vows I meant to keep.

Nightfalls came and passed and the sleeper in me

woke eventually to the Venus fly trap

that flaunted your radiance in a false dawn

like a bad high school play in a small town.

And yet, and yet, I’ve never been so petty

that I regret what I had to leave of myself

like roadkill at the side of the road, and walk on

any way I could after I’d shed you

like the skin of the snake that swallowed the moon

to be reborn on the dark side of a dragon with wings.

And I like the way this fire deep inside of me

sings to me alone at night when I’m down by the river

the willows are trying to carry like the lifeline

of the melody that makes me weep in the wake of its beauty

for how the themes of life weave and unweave us

like wavelengths of the membranes of M-theory

with the wingspan of flying carpets that came to rest

under the gravestones in a local cemetery of windows

that cry themselves to sleep every night

like black voice boxes less honest thieves than we were

broke into looking for the catastrophic gifts

we offered up to death like the eyes

we pryed out of our crystal skulls

as a way of placating what we’ve lived so long

in the name of, we forgot we were only acting.

So I bid you go in peace like the smoke of a firestorm

over the faraway hills of a distant mindscape.

You’re a ghost of the lightning that mesmerized my fireflies

into believing they shone like jewels of insight,

the medium of a porchlight that summoned

the spiders and moths out of the night to join

in the rapture of feasting upon one another like addicts

in a frenzy of celestial hormones in a pandemonium

of panicked dreamcatchers veiling an eyeless sorceress

with an hourglass tattoo of time on her back

embittered by the fact it was running out on you

like the power of a mandala painted in sand

just the same as I did when the wind picked up enough

to blow us both out like the candles of unsuccessful sacrament.

PATRICK WHITE