SO MANY THINGS I'VE EXPOSED MYSELF TO

SO MANY THINGS I’VE EXPOSED MYSELF TO

So many things I’ve exposed myself to

I had to integrate in order to overcome and survive.

And things I didn’t choose to see and wish

I hadn’t. It’s a flurry of a day and the sky

is almost industrial for a small, country town.

Slush and slurry of above ground emotions

that haven’t mastered their medium enough

to stop wallowing in the slop bucket of the heart

and throw everything out that isn’t a vital organ.

Diesel two track snow ploughs rattle the windows

out of their winter torpor, fogged in by the patinas

of grimy memories and the sidewalks are salted

like Carthage. Traffic lights blink and sharp corners

rear up into equestrian eyelids of brown water.

And then I fall through the earth as if I’d said

no worse, there is none, and the elevator plunges

another dozen floors to the thirteenth precipice

I’ve teetered on today in a kind of existential ballet

that feels like two swans mud wrestling

for the same dumpster. The air oppressively damp

with athletic ashes. All the women packed like astronauts.

Lean, homeless dogs shivering for affection

with their heads bowed down and their eyes turned up

pathetically pleading for hand-outs from the heart

as if they’d been beaten into a false humility

by their tormentors. If life were a blues band,

they’d play harp. They’d wail at the meanness of the world.

The day passes like a loveletter from an anti-muse.

I’m fumbling for the G-spot on enlightenment.

Something beautiful and sincere to slash me open

like an envelope full of nothing if echoes don’t count.

I don’t want to be stuck here forever

like a shepherd of wolves in a sheep pen,

every second thought shedding me like a snakeskin

in a civil war between solitude and commotion.

I don’t want to huddle under a red canoe

I wear like Napoleon’s hat or a courier de bois

with a scarlet sense of life trying to keep a poppy alight,

the smoke of a small, smouldering fire

making love to the ghosts of old paramours.

Except for you who stayed that winter

like a summer constellation camping out

in the Arctic, bushing it out in the rough

like a sex kitten with tigress claws blooded on the moon.

That was sweeter than pears and sacred strawberries

in a still life with the shadow of a knife

balanced like a partial eclipse on the edge of the table

that always held my attention like a compass needle

looking for true north like a hermit thrush in an ice-storm.

God what I wouldn’t give to see you again,

not as a consolation for all the pain we avoided,

but a flame that cherried the chimney pipes with lust

and burned all the embedded bubbles of lunar creosote

out of our oceanic emotional lives for a while.

Recess in the cemetery without a school bell.

Shipwrecks at the bottom of a wishing well

with only the fireflies and reflections of the stars

trying to warn us to stay away from the lighthouses

swinging their semaphoric lanterns on shore for salvage.

I remember as vividly as tomorrow shape-shifting

in the soporific drift of two galaxies passing through

each other in the commingling of a calling

summoned to a seance even the living couldn’t ignore

when we made love on the floor in the heat

of a Napoleon airtight and you were Poland.

Did you ever get free? Did you ever establish

your independence? And that feline body of yours,

does its passive resistance still know how

to turn a fist into the caress of a wildflower

with an open palm and impossible longings?

I’ve been a root fire in an incense burner

of apostate cedars ever since my worst desire for you

and every once and awhile I still smudge

the bats from the attic at the very thought of you.

I can’t look at a salmon rose without seeing you

like Venus in the sunset above a highway parking lot.

It was winter and on a moonless night

when the lightbulb had burned out in the housewell

you still cast shadows on the snow hot enough

to keep things from absolute zero freezing

like glacially slow tears weeping in the mirrors

of my third eye, knowing it would have been an insult

to love you spiritually when I could embrace

death in the flesh as if you were the succubus of my dreams,

Lilith who made it back to the garden, childless,

or Meridiana who got Pope Sylvester into the Vatican.

I’ve never repented, recanted, or reinvented you.

I’ve always been grateful you wanted more than a muse

from me, and what I had to give I’d give trebly

as any trinity just to stand here in these flames

a fully enlightened heretic with incendiary names

for the wind that swept like a hand in blessing

over the flammable firepits of my human divinity

as I catch you out of the corner of my eye sometimes

like the waxing moon in a waning window, undressing.

PATRICK WHITE