THE MOON ISN'T RENEWING HER VIRGINITY

THE MOON ISN’T RENEWING HER VIRGINITY

The moon isn’t renewing her virginity

in the snakepits of the hypocrites

faking the wavelengths of their radiance

like the black dwarf of an imploding commune

that flared out like graverobbers in the dark

desecrating a cemetery of rainbows.

I’ve watched the silver shovel of your tongue

go through all phases of the moon, from full

to new, as if you were laying your Tarot cards

out on the table for an autopsy on the Hanged Man.

This one’s suspended by one leg with a real rope

around his neck. You’re decked out in dreamcatchers

and spider silk like the butterfly bling of a pimp.

What are you selling? Peace, love, and happiness

at the expense of all else? You chirp you love everyone

but you’ve never loved people enough to learn

how to hate them honestly. There heretics burn

but you’re attuned to harmony like a snaketongue

of black lightning is to a tuning fork or a lyre

to the laryngeal cords of a cheesecutter.

You’re a wedding cake full of worms. You’re

a wishbone with one hip lower than the other

like the short end of the stick, a black capped chickadee

on the lowest rung of the crutch. You emanate.

You radiate. You resonate. You alert

your sleeping brother like a fire alarm

to the god waking up within him, but you exclude,

you forget, you reject the real shamans

dancing in the shadows of their solitude with a limp.

If you cram any more beauty into your eyes

soon you’ll be able to open a jewellery store.

God knows how you can love the silver

and hate the ore that poured itself out

like wine for you as if it were bleeding to death

like wild grapes going sour in your mouth.

There’s more salvation in drinking

from your own skull, than sipping

like a hummingbird from someone else’s grail.

You’re just baling a moonboat with a black sail

and a bucket the bottom hasn’t fallen out of yet.

Dew blooming on the tips of the tongues

of the stargrass, yes, but you can’t conceive

of the watershed of the abyss it was drawn from.

Your moondogs don’t snarl enough to guard

the farmyard from the predators that surround you.

You’re water gilding Dachau with a silver lining

whenever you look at a black cloud pluming

into the night sky like a fumarole

of mystically unique people going up in smoke

and white wash the dark side of things

desecrating their suffering by remarking

how wonderful it is their ashes kiss your eyelids

like gentle snowflakes of human flesh and bone.

Your third eye’s got a cinder in it like a stake

driven into the iris of a Cyclops. You denigrate

the black ops that rescued the rest of the flock

from the cave, like a shepherd moon

that’s never known an eclipse it didn’t resent.

The blood and dirt under the fingernails of the moon

aren’t the terraced gardens of an Incan ruin.

If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack

of sunbeams make sure you don’t stick it in the eye

of that voodoo doll you carry around with you

like the strawdog of a scarecrow at a harvest ritual

that’s eventually going to go up in heretical flames

like Joan of Arc, the witch, not the saint,

once her white magic grew irrationally ineffectual.

Most people look for the light to see in the dark.

Rinse the night from your mirroring consciousness

and you throw the stars out with the womb water

of Aquarius. In the urn of what’s left, not

the translucency of self-cleaning jewels

as if your eyes were constantly buffing

their own windows with vinegar

and yesterday’s newspaper full of atrocities

that wipe the filth like sunspots off your shining

like a patina of print on the faces of the chimney sweepers

scraping the creosote and shovelling the ashes

of the fireflies out of the furnace. Not enlightenment.

But the putrefied residue in the alembic of a bad alchemist,

trying to mine gold from lead like a thief of honey

from an ant heap of spectacles, and gleaming ingots of teeth.

PATRICK WHITE