BLUE COMET OF A PEACOCK DRAGGING ITS TAIL

BLUE COMET OF A PEACOCK DRAGGING ITS TAIL

Blue comet of a peacock dragging its tail

like the dowdy hen of a resplendent female

walking in your coronation like the Queen of Heaven

in a new wardrobe across my inner sky

like a broom down in the dumps of its middens

sweeping the stars off the stairs, open your eyes

like the Pleiades and see how even the dust can shine

when there’s light in your seeing, and fire

in your starmud. Don’t post your loveletter

in a hateful envelope. Smile. Like a kid with a sparkler.

Or as I did in my childhood whenever a new starmap

fell out of the National Geographic like a message

from God as if she’d just dropped one of her veils.

The way I’ve felt about women ever since.

Don’t live like a mop when you were meant for splendour.

Even a matchbook can flare for a moment of two

like the stamens and pistils of a Chinese star gazer lily

with indelible ginger pollen. This might risk

being nauseously sententious, but don’t be

the kind of explosion that keeps letting its fuse down.

Let your serpent fire run all the way up your spinal cord

through a gauntlet of planetesimal chakras

and explode like Roman candles in the firmament

of your mind mesmerized by the fireworks of your spirit.

There are sunsets, dawns and moonrises, night skies,

the grey pearls of cloudy noons you’ve never seen

waiting for you to claim them as the children

of your own eyes, artistic children impatient

to show you the pictures they drew in rainbow crayons

about the way they feel about you. Do you know

how hard dusk tries to be beautiful for you?

How Venus lingers like a blossom of larkspur

long after dark, though the sun has given up,

trying to catch your eye above the shopping mall?

You got it. Flaunt it. Like poppies in the wheat,

like the apple bloom of the moon strewn

like the wavelength of a particle when you look away

and something deep inside of you says follow me

I’ve laid out a flightpath of feathers for you.

Why keep the pages of your book uncut

like a fan in the hand of a poetess in Tokugawa Japan?

Let five petals open and one flower bloom

like a fleet of origami waterlilies raising their sails

on the Fall River in the summer just past Maberly.

When was beauty ever not a jewel looked upon as vain

by the ore of the houseflies in residence who

can’t see their own smeared like the aurora borealis

on the stained-glass windows of their wings

in the indiscriminate sunlight? Let it shine, let it shine,

let it shine, and what it will be let it be to the blind.

Not all flowers open at the same time. The crowbars

of the dragonflies don’t pry the eggcups

of the waterlilies open like grave-robbers

in the manger of some stranger’s belated afterlife.

There’s an hour that comes like insight to a fist

that tenderly unfolds each finger gently

and opens the soft palms of the wild cosmos

swaying like stars and butterflies at the end

of their aerials, to give freely of themselves

a generous answer to the stingy questions

about what we’re all doing walking around on the earth.

PATRICK WHITE